THE NUMBER of people living in poverty in the UK has shot up to 16 million – the highest level since records began in the year 2000. This represents nearly one-in-four of the entire UK population.
The working class are already fully aware that poverty levels in the UK have reached a massive high and are relentlessly increasing under the Starmer Labour government, but the latest figures released this week show that previous official levels of poverty completely underestimate the true state of the crisis.
These figures are the result of a broadening definition of poverty that takes into account the reality of the everyday costs faced by people, and reveals the true numbers living in poverty in the UK.
These latest estimates have come from findings by the independent Social Metrics Commission (SMC) and are based on the resources available to households rather than the previous estimates that only took account of average income and household costs in measuring poverty levels.
In addition to average income and household costs, the new method taken by the SMC includes ‘inescapable costs’ such as child care, the costs associated with disabilities and the value of items that can be exchanged for cash.
The result of this new approach, which more accurately reflects the everyday struggle of workers and their families, is to expose the reality that millions more people than previously identified have less money to spend when these costs are included.
An increase of four million, including 1.6 million children, are now defined as living in poverty over and above the 12 million officially defined as facing destitution.
Child poverty has seen the biggest increase with an extra 260,000 going short of food since 2020, with a record 5.2 million children, 36%, officially suffering deprivation. More than half of these 5.2 million are in families with three or more children, meaning they are hit by the inhumane two child benefit cap introduced by the Tories and which the Starmer Labour government has refused to lift.
Starmer has refused to lift this benefit cap that is driving millions of children into poverty and hunger on the grounds that his Labour government would not adopt an ‘unfunded pledge’ that would cost an estimated £3 billion a year.
Starmer, however, has committed to handing out £3 billion a year ‘for as long as it takes’ to the fascist-supported Ukrainian regime fighting imperialism’s losing war against Russia.
Starving the kids of working class families is the price Starmer is willing to pay for keeping war going. The number of people with disabilities also experienced a massive increase in poverty since 2020, up from 1.8 million to 8.7 million in 2023.
The record level of inflation has driven those in employment into poverty with the study reporting that almost five million of those in poverty were in households in full or part-time work.
The only proposal advanced by Starmer’s government is to ‘grow the economy’ by forcing the ‘economically inactive’ – that is the disabled, sick and unemployed – back to work and off benefits.
Benefits have already been slashed to the bone while inflation has driven millions of workers into absolute poverty, even those with full-time jobs.
Millions of children going hungry and their families living in destitution is the future under a bankrupt British capitalist system and a Labour government determined to rescue it by forcing the working class back to conditions of the 19th century.
The time has come for the working class to use its power by forcing the TUC leaders to end their cowardly support for the Labour government.
Workers must demand an emergency conference of the TUC to sack leaders who refuse to fight, replacing them with a leadership that will call an immediate general strike to bring down the Starmer government and bring in a workers’ government that will nationalise the banks and major industries, placing them under the management of and for the benefit of the working class under a planned socialist economy.
Putting an end to capitalism with the victory of the British socialist revolution is the only way to secure a future for the working class free from poverty and destitution.