And if there’s child poverty, there’s family poverty.
The scandal of child poverty
While our government busies itself with the Brexit hokey-cokey, we find out today from one of its own departments that 4.1 million children (yes, you read it right) in the fifth richest county in the world is living in relative poverty. More than two million of these children are under five years old (53 per cent compared to 51 per cent a year earlier) and 700,000 of them are in what’s described as severe poverty (this figure was 600,000 a year earlier). The number of children in what’s described as absolutely poverty, another way of measuring poverty, rose by 200,000 to 3.7m this year. When one person is poor in a community where everyone else isn’t you might say that’s down to the individual, but when over four million children are classed as poor in our country then you have to accept that something is very wrong with the system. The government says its tackling this. But how can a government, whose Prime Minister is so out of touch that she recently described anyone earning less than £35,000 as unskilled, possibly think they have any strategies to tackle it. In fact, if you didn’t know better you might say they created it; austerity, stripping funds from local authorities (starting with the North East local authorities), allowing zero-hours contracts, transport cuts, education cuts, leisure cuts, universal credit, PIP payments, the bedroom tax. I could go on. This national picture is reflected in our area. Druridge Bay, which I represent, has the highest level of child poverty in the Berwick on Tweed constituency. And if there’s child poverty, there’s family poverty. In 2019 the safety net is food banks. The safety net used to be the welfare state. That was why it was created. While food banks do some amazing work, we should not need them in 2019 in the fifth richest country in the world. Child poverty is a political choice. This government has utter contempt for the people it is supposed to serve. So, while they fiddle while Rome burns, a child goes to bed hungry tonight. Actually millions of children go to bed hungry tonight. This is nothing less than a scandal.
