For a decent standard of living, we all need security and stability in our lives — secure housing, a reliable income, and support when things get difficult. For too many of us, there is no such security. Millions of people in the UK are struggling to get by, leading insecure and precarious lives, held back from improving their living standards. It’s time to take action on poverty and put this right.
One-fifth of the UK population, equivalent to 14 million people, are living in poverty, yet in the latest budget, as dictated by Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt (one of the richest politicians in the UK, worth around £14million), the struggle that working people are facing to even be able to afford the basics, has been ignored…
A 2p reduction in tax (which helps the richest), VS. a £20 billion reduction in public spending (which harms the poorest).
2p tax cuts do little to relieve the burden that working people are facing. Public spending cuts, however, do everything to make the burden 100 times worse.
When public services exist to ensure that we can all have our most basic needs met, regardless of our income bracket, millions of people are being let down under Tory leadership when those public services are severely lacking…
One of the most worrying impacts of the public spending cuts relates to the NHS.
Under constant pressure, and a constant threat of privatisation, last year saw NHS waiting lists reaching record levels.
92% of appointments required waits of up to 46.2 weeks…
Now, for people who are ‘well off’, the richest people in society, this has no impact on their life (or death), because they can afford to pay for private healthcare, therefore cutting the extortionate, and quite frankly, dangerous, waiting times.
For people who don’t have the luxury of being able to go private though, their life, in some cases, is literally being put at risk where, in Jeremy Hunt’s budget, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer…
From 2018 to 2020, life expectancy in the most deprived areas of the UK was 52.3 years for men, and 51.9 years for women, compared with 70.5 years for men, and 70.7 years for women, in the least deprived areas.
Owing to this discrepancy is the fact that people with more money are not reliant on severely underfunded public services as poor people are.
Rich people are not reliant on food banks to feed themselves, or charity shops to clothe themselves, or the extremely overwhelmed NHS to keep them alive…
The working class, however…
In October 2023, around 4.2 million households (72%) were going without essentials, with 3.4 million households (58%) reportedly not having enough money to even buy food…
Chaos feeding off decline, decline feeding off chaos, working people are left to pay the price.
Working people have to choose between heating their homes and feeding their families, something which is made even harder for marginalised groups whereby:
- 44% of children in lone-parent families are living in poverty
- 47% of children from Black and minority ethnic groups are in poverty, compared to 24% of white children (to break the figures down further: 67% of Bangladeshi and 58% of Pakistani children live below the poverty line, as do 51% of Black children)…
- 31% of disabled people are in poverty.
An unprecedented hit to the living standards of working people.
The national credit card is maxed out where local councils are going bankrupt (a fifth of local authorities believe they are likely to go bust over the next year), rent is up by 10%, the NHS is crippling under mounting pressure, food prices are 25% higher than they were two years ago, and young families are having to rely on food banks to account for the 4.3 million children who are growing up in poverty today.
Just remind me what century we’re in again…
We should not be experiencing such austerity in 2024.
Yet we are [experiencing such austerity], and it’s unconscionable, a blatant miscarriage of justice if ever there was one, that the Government persists in prioritising tax cuts over public investment (which, by the way, are also to benefit the richest people in society)…
Tory scum (scam): The Tories are fraudsters when they present themselves as cutting taxes for ‘ordinary’ working people…
Giving with one hand, taking even more with the other, it’s daylight robbery, the personification of ‘pinching from Peter to pay Paul’, while working people pay the price.
The defence budget is protected though, (in fact, it has been increased by £11 billion)! And so, we can all breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that the UK is doing its bit to support Israel in the genocide against Palestinians.
The magic money tree always exists for British imperialism, but never for public services.
When Britain already spends £50 billion a year on its military, (since 2008, the UK has licensed arms worth over £574m to Israel), as always, our ruling class can find money for war.
As always, our ruling class can find enough money to uphold systems of oppression, but they can never find enough money to release the burden from the oppressed…
Proof that it’s ‘Party first, country second’, time and time (until the end of time, I fear) again…
Proof that those who break our economy cannot be trusted to repair it.
ANARKISS 