In Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything

[DonViejo]

After eight years of budget cutting, Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the United States, with a shrinking welfare state and spreading poverty.

By Peter S. Goodman
May 28, 2018

PRESCOT, England — A walk through this modest town in the northwest of England amounts to a tour of the casualties of Britain’s age of austerity.

The old library building has been sold and refashioned into a glass-fronted luxury home. The leisure center has been razed, eliminating the public swimming pool. The local museum has receded into town history. The police station has been shuttered.

Now, as the local government desperately seeks to turn assets into cash, Browns Field, a lush park in the center of town, may be doomed, too. At a meeting in November, the council included it on a list of 17 parks to sell to developers.

“Everybody uses this park,” says Jackie Lewis, who raised two children in a red brick house a block away. “This is probably our last piece of community space. It’s been one after the other. You just end up despondent.”

more
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/world/europe/uk-austerity-poverty.html

[peabody]

1. Good article.

Thanks for sharing it. Once again, the people are mad but they’re mad about the wrong people.

[dhol82]

2. Totally feels like what we have to forward to if the 'conservatives '

are not voted out of power.
We might actually be too late.

And makes me grateful that Obama was able to somewhat mitigate the destruction that had been wrought by them in 2008.

[msongs]

3. oddly enough they have millions to spend on weddings of famous people nt

[CrispyQ]

4. This:

“The government has created destitution,” says Barry Kushner, a Labour Party councilman in Liverpool and the cabinet member for children’s services. “Austerity has had nothing to do with economics. It was about getting out from under welfare. It’s about politics abandoning vulnerable people.”

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. That's a good summary; I think this is why Labour has had a revival

because so many people have just seen the Tories pushing austerity ever further, and not caring about those left behind. There was only so much that could have been put down to "economic necessity". Recent stories:

A million more UK children in poverty than in 2010 – study

Research for the TUC estimates that 3.1 million children with working parents will be below the official breadline this year.

About 600,000 children with working parents have been pushed into poverty because of the government’s benefit cuts and public sector pay restrictions, according to the report by the consultancy Landman Economics. The east Midlands will have the biggest increase in child poverty among working families, followed by the West Midlands and Northern Ireland, the research found.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/07/million-more-uk-children-in-poverty-than-in-2010

Benefit sanctions increasing poverty and pushing people into 'survival crime,' finds report

Benefit sanctions are largely ineffective and in some cases push people into poverty and crime, our major study has found.

The research found little evidence that benefit sanctions enhance people’s motivation to prepare for or enter paid work and, by contrast, routinely trigger profoundly negative personal, financial and health outcomes.

The findings, conducted by the WelCond project and led by led by the University of York, show that some people are pushed into destitution, survival crime and ill health as a result of welfare conditionality.
...
But the study reveals that the mandatory training and support is often too generic, of poor quality and largely ineffective in enabling people to enter and sustain paid work.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/benefit-sanctions-increasing-poverty-and-pushing-people-into-survival-crime-finds-report-a8363831.html

And, not mentioned in these articles, but still starting to make life more miserable for millions, is the social care crisis - help for the elderly who aren't ill enough to be in hospital (and the NHS is at full capacity anyway), but who need some care in their homes. It's provided through local councils, and the cuts have hit it badly, and it'll get worse as teh population ages unless something major is done. But austerity still rules Tory thinking:

Social care funding plans branded costly and unfair

The government’s plans for reforming social care in England – at the heart of a planned green paper – have been criticised as costly and unfair in a report on the future of funding care for older people.

The report from two highly respected thinktanks, the Kings Fund and the Health Foundation, finds that the idea of increasing the number of people paying for care, and how much they pay, put forward in the Tory manifesto last year, would be almost as costly as making all care free.
...
Even to maintain the current system, which steadily squeezes the criteria for eligibility for support in order to keep it affordable, faces a £1.5bn shortfall by 2020. If standards and availability were raised to the level the coalition government inherited in 2010, an extra £8bn would have to be found.

The cap and floor system would need an extra £5bn over the same period, while providing free personal care would cost an extra £7bn. Free personal care has been introduced in Scotland, where it is very popular. But one of the main justifications for such a policy, that it would ease the pressure on the health service by helping people stay at home, has not been fully realised.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/16/social-care-funding-plans-branded-costly-and-unfair

There are still a depressing number of people who voted UKIP or Conservative (now just Conservative) who think the poor are undeserving, and cheer on cuts.

[suffragette]

6. Excellent post. Watched I, Daniel Blake recently

on the recommendation of a friend in the UK and found it a moving depiction of the cruelty of benefit sanctions.