The UN has condemned Tory welfare policies. Labour must end this shame | Owen Jones http://bit.ly/2HKH04p Owen Jones Like Margaret Thatcher, this government thinks poverty is a personality defect rather than a result of its policies How did Britain in 2019 – one of the wealthiest societies that has ever existed – end up being damned by a United Nations report for condemning the poor to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”? These are the words of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes; another British literary great conjured up by Prof Philip Alston – the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and a bete noir of our crumbling government – is Charles Dickens and his vivid description of the 19th-century workhouse now being brought back in “a digital and sanitised version”. The government, he contended, was guilty of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”, and that “much of the glue that has held British society together since the second world war has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos”. Continue reading... https://ift.tt/eA8V8J May 22, 2019 at 06:50PM

Like Margaret Thatcher, this government thinks poverty is a personality defect rather than a result of its policies

How did Britain in 2019 – one of the wealthiest societies that has ever existed – end up being damned by a United Nations report for condemning the poor to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”? These are the words of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes; another British literary great conjured up by Prof Philip Alston – the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and a bete noir of our crumbling government – is Charles Dickens and his vivid description of the 19th-century workhouse now being brought back in “a digital and sanitised version”.

The government, he contended, was guilty of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”, and that “much of the glue that has held British society together since the second world war has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos”.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HKH04p