To be worried that this news will be buried?

[WhoWants2Know]

What with it being CIN and May having to replace cabinet ministers again, I'm worried that this isn't being more widely reported.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/16/uk-austerity-has-inflicted-great-misery-on-citizens-un-says

For all the government say that Universal Credit is working to get people back into work, the UN reporter on extreme poverty and human rights finds that a fifth of the UK population is living in poverty now.

There are people living in tents in the middle of the roundabout where I live.

That might be me soon . We're being evicted from our flat as the owner wants to sell, and the council said they're extremely unlikely to be able to help us. This is me and my two young DDs, one with SN.

I'm in the group of people the government loves most - single mother .

*The poverty so many live in and Brexit have the same roots - an ideology dedicated to advantaging the rich and their mates before anything else. MPs used to be a mixture of people from well-off families and various others who had had a variety of jobs so some idea of how most people live. Now the route to Parliament is: private school, PPE degree, and one of Dad's mates gets you an internship with the right connections, and your parents can support you working for free for a couple of years...

The mindset of some of these fuckers is literally feudal: they want indentured service to come back*

Well said.

The Conservatives have wrecked this country.
David Cameron got us into this Brexit mess so he should come back & bloody well sort it out! Idiot!

Why didn't it bold?

@BirthdayCakes - you need an asterisk at the beginning and end of each paragraph.

Channel 4 news are leading with this story now.

What is Germany doing that we aren’t? If it is purely money then surely all the systems would have been in place at the end of the Labour Government? However I don’t think that was the case.
This is the lead article on Channel 4 news. THis is a totally damning report, what a shame this came out today, when it has had to compete with the Brexit debacle.

I was saying about three years ago how poor and dirty and uncared for the UK looks, potholes in the road, public buildings looking shabby, parks untended, similar to when I first visited where my husband is from which is a much poorer country. I was roundly told on MN that it really wasn't that bad, that it was just fine where most people lived, that there really wasn't an issue- and now everyone has woken up and noticed! Hard to access services, constant talk of how we mustn't use NHS because it's not ok unless your leg has fallen off, poor upkeep of the fabric of society, increase in people on the streets, increase in poorer people- it was all under everyone's noses. Living standards for lots in the UK are really quite low unless you are very rich and can bypass the NHS/driving on the potholed roads. Now someone from outside has come along and confirmed this I feel slightly less mad!

Unless it effects them personally many people don't really care about the poor, and this Government cares far less than them. Look at the taxation policy versus the benefits policy. A country is only as good as the way it treats the least privileged in society.

1/5th! Wow. I know it was bad but thats worse than I thought.
I can believe it though. A relative left teaching 7 years ago, they said they found a therapy suitable for ds, a mere £50 an hour. They then explained where I should go to get it funded. The therapy would be good but it isn’t life changing or essential not a flaming chance. They were pretty incredulous until they spoke to their colleagues and found out times have changed.

It's not just the poor though. Everyone now has to drive on shitty roads, look at the rubbish at the sides of roads, walks round unkempt public places, go to a GP who is overloaded, use dirty and late trains. These aren't only things that poorer people do- so it's surprising that it has taken quite a long time for the austerity effects to impact on the imagination of the middle-classes. Perhaps if you live in a nice village you rarely leave and have no health conditions it might be ok, but the place just looks shabby now!

YANBU. Disgusting that this is being buried.

YANBU

What I want to know is where the hell has all the money gone.

Debt has gone up - we don’t even have a lower debt to show for it.

The Tories have well and truly fucked this country. Again

Massively underfunded public services and reinvestment will be needed - which will be more expensive because things have got so much worse.

And this was a political choice, let’s just be clear.

Running a country’s economy is not like a fucking household budget, despite what George Osborne may have you believe. First of all, obviously, the income of the country depends on a healthy vibrant economy, not on one or two earners.

But then again not surprising he took that analogy given he has no clue about economics.

Sorry my point was that the changes are happening hard and fast. So fast once people notice it will be way worse.

uni, don’t the council have a duty towards you if you have children?

I do think a lot of this relates to the last recession. I will feel the people who caused that shambles skipped off and the poor have paid for it and that is extending to all sectors of the U.K.

I don’t think that lack of money plus high levels of immigration helps to be honest. There is simply less to go round

I don’t know what Germany is doing that Britain hasn’t managed, but as an example, I earn a reasonably good salary (in excess of 60k) and I am still entitled to just under 600 a month child benefit. There are no food banks. Doctors offices are excellent. My kids go to fantastic schools. The buses run well. The list goes on. It’s heartbre for a Brit to see the difference.

Immigrants make a net contribution to the economy. Let’s stop peddling that nonsense please.

"The Conservatives have wrecked this country"

They certainly haven't helped in the past 3 since coalition but house prices rocketed between 1999 and 2008 under a combination of Labour's economic policies and allowing EU and non EU migration to spiral into the UK from the millennium onwards. Fair enough to blame the Tories for certain things but I believe that when the Tories were booted out in 1997, there wasn't a significant problem with house prices, rents and supply (which is backed up by house price data). National debt in 1997 was just over £300bn and migration wasn't out of control.

Blair and Brown are the architects of our country's problems, particularly housing, over population and over spending. The Tories haven't improved things but they didn't create the fundamental problems that are being referred to either.

Immigrants make a net contribution financially but there is a huge impact on essential infrastructure which isn’t being put in place.

We have full to busting schools, GP surgeries overloaded, trains rammed, building on every scrap of field and it utterly foolish to think that the levels of immigration in the last decade hasn’t impacted this problem.

Blair and Brown are the architects of our country's problems, particularly housing, over population and over spending. The Tories haven't improved things but they didn't create the fundamental problems that are being referred to either

The right to buy and dismantling of social housing has caused a massive issue in this country.

Started by the Tories. Carried on by New Labour.

Immigrants are net contributors.

And national debt has continued to escalate under the coalition and Tory government despite austerity.

New Labour’s problem was trying to be Tory-lite on one hand and socially responsible on the other.

So the rich get richer at the expense of the poor, but why would they want to live in a shit hole of a country. Surely they’d rather live in a place where it’s more prosperous and people more content. It doesn’t make sense, how much bloody money do they want.

It should be on the news every hour of the day, every day of the week and every week of the year. What this country has done to people is far beyond fuckung disgraceful.

I'm tired of posting info on fb about this and the only people that engage are the ones with the same mindset as me.

We have full to busting schools, GP surgeries overloaded, trains rammed, building on every scrap of field and it utterly foolish to think that the levels of immigration in the last decade hasn’t impacted this problem

Spending on infrastructure has been cut so how can that be the fault of immigration? And actually schools aren’t rammed - there’s been over provision of places in many areas. GPs are suffering because they cannot recruit GPS...

FWIW, to correct a misconception, there are food banks (or similar called Tafeln) in Germany, even in affluent towns. There is poverty and deprivation here. It's not paradise. But inequality is less extreme, and there are various ways in which children and young people are supported to participate in society (incl with money/benefits), and there is a benefit system which, while not perfect, is fundamentally based on a degree of common sense and does not show anything like the aggressive fuck-you attitude to the poor which the UK system does.