THE number of children living in poverty in the UK remains 2.3 million, government figures show.
This situation has seen thousands of families depending on food banks to feed themselves, while teachers’ trade unions have said that many of their members are now bringing clothing and food to school with them, to feed and clothe hungry children who are not dressed to face the rigours of cold, wind, or rain, and are unable to concentrate during lessons.
The Department for Work and Pensions said the proportion of children living in poverty was unchanged from 2011-12 to 2013-14.
Charities say poverty levels have gone up in the last five years and welfare changes will leave families worse off.
They are talking about the projected additional £12bn of cuts that the Cameron-Osborne axis is set to impose, with massive attacks on child benefits and tax credits that will plunge many more families over the edge of the abyss.
The Tories are now undoing all of the work of the 1945 Labour government that promised security from the cradle to the grave, in fact, under capitalism a pale imitation of the kind of security that the rich and their children enjoy.
Britain is now two nations. It is made up, as the Sunday Times Rich List showed, of a tiny minority of 1,000 wealthy families, the rich nation, who are now worth £547bn, not counting what’s in their bank accounts.
The collective wealth of Britain’s richest people has more than doubled in the last 10 years, when under £250bn was recorded in 2005, despite the world economy crashing since 2007. In the same period the living standards of the working class have been shattered!
A fortune of £100m is now required to make it into the top 1,000. That is £15m higher than last year’s minimum.
On the other side of the tracks, food bank-use topped the one million mark in the past year.
Now with £12bn cuts on hand, the poor will be getting immeasurably poorer, while the rich will get richer still, as Karl Marx predicted, to the mirth of the allegedly educated elite of capitalism.
This is the cue for the Tory workhouse element to come forward, in the shape of Ian Duncan Smith and Cameron to demand that the definition of poverty be remodelled.
When Gordon Brown’s Labour government passed a law legally binding the government to eradicate child poverty by 2020, Conservatives argued for targets that did not relate to family income.
They wanted assessments of the number of households with parents in long-term relationships and households where parents were addicted to drugs, alcohol or gambling, for example, to define poverty.
So families that live off food banks are expected to maintain a perfect moral order while of course ‘lopsided’ one parent families are beyond the pale.
Duncan Smith is looking for poor people, who will not only accept their lot, but will show their virtue by working tirelessly for a pittance.
He wants a Charles Dickens society where the poor are terrified of the workhouse, or of having their ‘out of control children’ adopted away from them.
On the other hand, we will be asked to accept that the children of the super rich, some of whom are allegedly floating in cocaine, and whose family lives are zero, are to be classified as ‘poor’ and living in poverty circumstances.
The redefinition is worthy of Alice in Wonderland!
There is only one way to get rid of the social ills of capitalism – whether it is mass unemployment, food banks, or criminal bankers and their corrupted relationships – and that is to replace bankrupted and demoralised capitalism with a socialist society, via the organisation of the working class by a revolutionary party to carry out the socialist revolution.
This will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in a planned socialist economy working on the basis of the satisfaction of people’s needs to lay the basis for the new socialist and communist order.
Marx defined it as a society whose morality would be based on the rational use of the most advanced productive forces and whose basic rule would be ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’.