Dickens Wouldn’t Recognise This ‘Poverty’

It’s the totality of the conditions in which so many of the generation I call austerity’s children – young people born into poverty in the Tory years – are living: homes without heating, bedrooms without beds, kitchens without kitchen utensils, floors without coverings and even toilets without toilet rolls.For many it is much worse: damp mouldy rooms, outside toilets and no kitchen table to eat at or write up their school work on, only a cold floor.

Lacking toilet rolls and kiychen utensils  is now an indication of 'poverty'? Not an indication the parents are incompetent? 

As the Trussell Trust has just shown, the inequities of the two-child benefit cap mean a family with three or more children is twice as likely to call on food banks for emergency help.

Because they bred more children than they could support and expected the taxpayer to pick up the slack. Well the Tories did a few things right, and this is one of them! 

Children themselves do not talk about “poverty” as such, the commissioner reported. Instead, they talk about living without food and furnishings in insecure, crowded, even unsafe houses, like the eight-year-old boy who reported “there’s stuff like robbing and sometimes there’s drunk people and stabbing”.

 The consequences of living with other 'poor' (in spirit, not in cash) people?

It is time to do more than chronicle this pain as Dickens and Orwell did. The next few weeks are decisive. Today, actor David Tennant will launch an appeal to end the suffering of millions of Britain’s children. Hope for our poorest children lies in the child poverty review’s recommendations and November’s budget: to fairly tax the excess profits of gambling, and if more money is needed to remove some of the interest rate subsidy enjoyed by commercial banks when they deposit money at the Bank of England.

Oh, if only someome hadn't sold off half of the country's gold reserves... 

The party conference season and the Labour deputy leadership hustings must now become platforms for an urgent discussion on how we end the biggest cause of social division in Britain today.

Well, for a start, we could stop listening to a has-been, never-was washed-up old socialist who caused more poverty tthan he ever solved in her term of office.