Exclusive: Special rapporteur Olivier De Schutter to urge ministers to increase welfare spending on visit to country this week
Does Olivier De Schutter not know what a Tory is?
What if, and hear me out here, we were to turn the executives into a fine, nutritious powder (with many uses!) and distribute it to the poor?
£85 is insane to live on, is that part of a separate payment? The jobseeker’s, dole, disability in Ireland is over twice that. Is social insurance a separate provision?
You can also get Council Tax benefit, and Housing Benefit (more of a Landlord Benefit, really).
Council tax benefit saves you either some or all of the local council tax payment (~£1000 - £2500 per year in most places). Amusingly, it tends to be cheaper in wealthy areas.
Landlord benefit pays a percentage of what the Landlord asks for rent, generally compared to average rents in the area you live - so that might be £2000 - £3000 per year where I live in the North, but £10000 per year down South somewhere. You don’t see any of that money personally, but it helps to make good headlines for angry “newspapers” and government policies.
There’s additional bits of payment for caring for children under a particular age, disability etc, but generally, yeah, that’s your lot.
How much you pay is proportional to how much your property is worth (see Wikipedia for deets)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, cited research showing universal credit payments of £85 a week for single adults over 25 were “grossly insufficient” and described the UK’s main welfare system as “a leaking bucket”.
In an interview with the Guardian five years after his predecessor, Philip Alston, angered the Conservative government by accusing it of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”, the Belgian lawyer risked a fresh confrontation by saying: “Things have got worse.”
De Schutter said the UK had signed an international covenant that created a duty to provide a level of social protection which ensured an adequate standard of living but that it was being broken, with welfare payments falling behind costs for the poorest people.
“If you look at the price of housing, electricity, the very high levels of inflation for food items over the past couple of years, I believe that the £85 a week for adults is too low to protect people from poverty, and that is in violation of article nine of the international covenant on economic, social [aand cultural] rights.
According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in 2022 3.8 million people experienced destitution (struggling to afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed).
Alston, an internationally respected human rights lawyer, said “much of the glue that has held British society together since the second world war has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos”.
The original article contains 788 words, the summary contains 255 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
If you ever feel useless, remember the UN exists.
If you ever feel uninformed about history, remember the comment above exists.
I really don’t know what people expect of the UN. It’s far from perfect, but it’s still a means of getting countries to engage in some sort of dialogue and for countries to scrutinize each others actions. Granted, the original attempt (the League of Nations) failed to prevent WW2 but that was no reason not to try again. We might not gain much from the existence of the UN, but we stand to lose a heck of a lot without it.
The only people that really stand to benefit from losing the UN are fascists and other malignant autocrats. Aye it’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.
Anyone that doesn’t agree with that is either also malignant or uninformed enough to fall for fascist propaganda.
It’s just a load of people saying we don’t like what you’re doing, this thing is bad, don’t do that. That’s it. For something that was setup to prevent atrocities like we’re seeing in Palestine, and have been seeing for 75 years, historically, it’s done, and continues to do, a pretty terrible job.
The UN wasn’t set up to prevent atrocities like Palestine/Israel.
It was set up to prevent large multi-nation conflicts like WW1 and WW2 by providing a platform for dialogue & diplomacy between multiple countries WITH a standing army acting as a peacekeeping force.
Unfortunately, proxy conflicts like Israel/Palestine still occur.
