Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has followed up his scorching condemnation of US poverty
with an even more damning report on poverty in the UK, which he calls a
“political choice” brought on by a decade of austerity at the hands of
the Conservative Party.
Alston characterised the findings from his two-week fact-finding tour as
“a disgrace…a social calamity and an economic disaster.” He described
the country’s policies as so bad for women that “if you got a group of
misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men
and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that
are not already in place.”
He predicted further declines in the lives of middle class people, who
will “find themselves living in an increasingly hostile and unwelcoming
society because community roots are being broken.”
He condemned homelessness, child poverty, the rise of food banks, the
sell-off of public assets, the closure of youth centres, the rise of
sex-work and gang affiliation among the most vulnerable people, and said
that the sole bright spot – communities pitching in to help their
neighbours – “resembled the sort of activity you might expect for a
natural disaster or health epidemic.”
Conservative politicians insisted that Alston didn’t understand how
austerity worked and that everyone was much better off due to a decade
of cuts.
