United Kingdom

Tables without food, bedrooms without beds. Grinding child poverty in Britain calls for anger – and a plan (Opinion by Gordon Brown)

Even if the government issued newspaper editors with D-notices banning any public mention of the word “poverty”, it could hardly do more to create a wall of silence around Britain’s biggest social crisis. By eliminating any ministerial admission of our deepening poverty epidemic from public discourse, it has left Britain with a hidden emergency whose forgotten and voiceless victims are the hundreds of thousands of children behind closed doors, in bedrooms without beds, homes without heating and kitchen tables without food, and whose suffering is worsening by the day.

Well, at least he slammed them. I'm sure the slammees are very slammed right now and are hoping not to receive any more slammings.

“In years to come, I believe people will be asking how it was that government walked by on the other side when thousands of children were suffering abject deprivation, and failed to support them in their hours of need,” he said.

Millions of people have spent the last 25 years wondering how on earth New Labour managed to do so little when they had the chance. Blair's first Commons rebellion was over reducing benefits for single parents. Good intentions and caring words are not enough, you need a fucking spine. The current situation owes as much to New Labour's failure to meaningfully reverse any aspect of Thatcherism, and both New and current Labour's terror of the right-wing media, as it does to the Tory psychopaths.

It needs saying but Brown needs to 'fess up to his failings when in power if he wants to say it with any credibility.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Britain is in the throes of a hidden poverty “epidemic”, with the worst-affected households living in squalor and going without food, heating and everyday basics such as clean clothes and toothpaste, the former UK prime minister Gordon Brown has said.

Brown accused the government of creating a wall of silence around “obscene” levels of destitution in the UK and criticised ministers for “systematically shredding” a social security system that had once provided a safety net for the poorest.

He said it was a “moral outrage” that the government was unwilling to tackle a social emergency that had created millions of forgotten and voiceless victims, one he compared in an article for the Guardian with the Post Office scandal in terms of the scale of ministerial neglect.

He called on Hunt to undertake a root-and-branch review of universal credit, and extend the government’s £900m cost of living crisis household support fund, currently at risk of being axed from April.

As a chancellor and then prime minister in Labour governments between 1997 and 2010, Brown oversaw ambitious plans that significantly reduced levels of UK poverty through spending on tax credits and social programmes such as the minimum wage and Sure Start.

It was currently inadequate to meet basic living costs and, for many families, was further weakened by cash deductions made through the two-child limit, benefit cap and bedroom tax.

The original article contains 790 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!