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Tag: Iain Duncan Smith

  • More than a fifth of UK’s ‘austerity children’ scarred by poverty, study says

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    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/apr/13/uk-austerity-children-scarred-poverty-study-conservatives

    Austerity policies effectively pitched hundreds of thousands more children into sustained poverty. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

    Researchers say hardship is a direct legacy of welfare benefit cuts imposed by Tory governments in recent years

    More than a fifth of all “austerity generation” British children have been scarred by poverty for at least half their childhood, a direct legacy of the welfare benefit cuts imposed by Conservative governments in recent years, research reveals.

    The proportion of children born after 2013 who spent at least six of their first 11 years of life in hardship surged after ministers froze working age benefits levels and imposed policies such as the two-child limit, it found.

    Austerity policies, which drastically shrank annual welfare spending by tens of billions a year and took thousands of pounds a year out of low-income family budgets, effectively pitched hundreds of thousands more children into sustained poverty.

    The University of Oxford study said the austerity-era growth in children exposed to poverty for most of their formative years was a “significant social problem” that would cause long-term harms to their health, education and life chances.

    The study’s co-author, Selçuk Bedük, said the post-2013 austerity cuts to welfare increased both the numbers of children experiencing poverty and the time they spent in it. As a consequence, long-term poverty was now a defining factor in the childhood of about 23% of British youngsters.

    …

    Austerity cuts masterminded by the former Tory chancellor George Osborne and the ex-welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith included the benefit cap, the bedroom tax, the two-child benefit limit, cuts to the generosity of universal credit, and years of benefit rate freezes. By 2021, they had stripped about £37bn a year from welfare spending.

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    Original article at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/apr/13/uk-austerity-children-scarred-poverty-study-conservatives

    Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves - the very poorest and most vulnerable.
    Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.

  • NEU president slams Labour’s renewed austerity

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    (left to right) Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner clap their hands during the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, September 22, 2024

    NATIONAL Education Union (NEU) president Sarah Kilpatrick slammed Labour’s renewed austerity today, telling the NEU annual conference that Tory welfare cuts had killed her disabled father.

    She accused ministers of “perpetuating and repeating the shameful pattern of punching-down and finger-pointing” by “balancing the books on the backs of the poor.”

    On the first day of the conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, she described how her father had died at the age of 56 after being stripped of his disability benefits under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

    She said that she had experienced poverty as a working-class child in Newcastle upon Tyne and was his carer for a number of years.

    “As Iain Duncan Smith gleefully applauded the welfare cuts, I represented my father in a tribunal against the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] decision to remove his disability benefits,” she told delegates.

    “He’d had his gas cut off. Couldn’t afford groceries. His elderly mother was adding tins of food to her shopping to bulk up what I was buying for him, but he isolated himself further still.

    “He lost a lot of weight during that time and never really recovered.”

    In 2013, her father became one of an estimated 120,000 people who died as a result of the Tories’ austerity programme, she said.

    “When Wes Streeting brags to the Tories across the benches that Labour have done what they never could and slashed the welfare bill, this is what they mean,” said Ms Kilpatrick.

    “Let’s be clear. Nearly two decades of economic permacrisis has not been caused by disabled people.”

    Nor has it been caused by the elderly, refugees, the trans community or children in poverty, she said.

    …

    Article continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/neu-president-slams-labours-renewed-austerity

    Keir Starmer says that his Labour Party is intensely relaxed about assaulting the very poorest and most vulnerable.
    Keir Starmer says that his Labour Party is intensely relaxed about assaulting the very poorest and most vulnerable.