Former PM Gordon Brown slams ‘obscene’ levels of destitution in the UK, criticises ministers for ‘moral outrage’ of ‘systematically shredding’ social security system (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 9 months ago by 0x815@feddit.de to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk

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“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.

He described the poverty he had witnessed in his home town of Kirkcaldy, where 70% of children were in poverty in some neighbourhoods, as the worst he had seen in his lifetime.

“In 2010, we were helping 100 children at Christmas [through charity schemes]. Last Christmas, it was 1,800,” he said.

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[-] 0x815@feddit.de 18 points 9 months ago

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.

this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024

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