Broken Britain: UN Rightly Condemns Eight Years of Tory Austerity, But the Labour Party Is No Saviour; Try Extinction Rebellion Instead

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Britain, is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed — and also deeply divided. Philip Alston, an Australian-born human rights lawyer, and the UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has highlighted both these problems in his newly-issued report on the impact of eight years of savage austerity policies by the Tory government.

Alston pulls no punches. After spending two weeks travelling the length and breadth of the UK, and meeting people at the sharp end of austerity, as well as meeting government ministers, Alston notes how, in “the world’s fifth largest economy”, it “seems patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty. This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in foodbanks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the Government to appoint a Minister for suicide prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard of levels of loneliness and isolation.”

Alston also explains how, during his visit, “I have talked with people who depend on food banks and charities for their next meal, who are sleeping on friends’ couches because they are homeless and don’t have a safe place for their children to sleep, who have sold sex for money or shelter, children who are growing up in poverty unsure of their future, young people who feel gangs are the only way out of destitution, and people with disabilities who are being told they need to go back to work or lose support, against their doctor’s orders.” 

He adds, “In the area of poverty-related policy, the evidence points to the conclusion that the driving force has not been economic but rather a commitment to achieving radical social re-engineering … Key elements of the post-war Beveridge social contract are being overturned.”

This ideological drive is something all decent people have been appalled by over the last eight years, and Alston unerringly captures its cruelty, writing that “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instill discipline where it is least useful, to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping with today’s world, and elevating the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of those at the lowest levels of British society.”

Alston also provides compelling statistics about the broken and divided Britain he visited, stating, “14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials. The widely respected Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts a 7% rise in child poverty between 2015 and 2022, and various sources predict child poverty rates of as high as 40%. For almost one in every two children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.”

The government, however, refuses to see the truth. As Alston notes, “The country’s most respected charitable groups, its leading think tanks, its parliamentary committees, independent authorities like the National Audit Office, and many others, have all drawn attention to the dramatic decline in the fortunes of the least well off in this country. But through it all, one actor has stubbornly resisted seeing the situation for what it is. The Government has remained determinedly in a state of denial. Even while devolved authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland are frantically trying to devise ways to ‘mitigate’, or in other words counteract, at least the worst features of the Government’s benefits policy, Ministers insisted to me that all is well and running according to plan.”

At a press conference in London on Friday, Alston explained how the UK “was in breach of four UN human rights agreements relating to women, children, disabled people and economic and social rights”, as the Guardian described it. 

In a powerful comment, he stated that, “If you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place.” 

If you haven’t read the full report, I encourage you to do so. In further detailed analysis, Alston decries the implementation of Universal Credit, with its five-week delay in payments, “which actually often takes up to 12 weeks”, and which “pushes many who may already be in crisis into debt, rent arrears, and serious hardship, requiring them to sacrifice food or heat.” He also attacks the widespread use of sanctions, and the dangers of the “digital welfare state” emerging in the UK, and provides copious examples to explain how “[t]he costs of austerity have fallen disproportionately upon the poor, women, racial and ethnic minorities [including asylum seekers, who ‘are banned from working and limited to a derisory level of support that guarantees they will live in poverty’], children, single parents, and people with disabilities.”

So where’s the antidote to the horrors identified by Phillip Alston? The answer, unfortunately, seems to be that there isn’t one. Alston makes a number of recommendations that the government will ignore, and while he also identifies Brexit as a source of dangerously increased levels of poverty if it goes ahead, the entire Brexit fiasco is another reflection of the bitter divisions in Britain today, a suicidal delusion manifested in part as a reflexive response to austerity, which was then manipulated by the right-wing media into a proto-fascistic isolationism and contempt for “the other” (whether that is the EU or immigrants and the concept of immigration in general) that has savagely transformed Britain for the worse in the two years and five months since the EU referendum, and that continues to mean that — sadly, tragically — many of those most affected by austerity are unaware of how it is their own Tory government that is responsible for their misery.

Alston also identifies how “local authorities, especially in England, which perform vital roles in providing a real social safety net have been gutted by a series of government policies”, adding, “Libraries have closed in record numbers, community and youth centers have been shrunk and underfunded, public spaces and buildings including parks and recreation centers have been sold off.”

Councils’ betrayals, the Tidemill campaign and Extinction Rebellion

This is all true, but, unfortunately, councils are doing themselves no favours when it comes to their response to the Tory cuts. Instead of fighting back, they have caved in, so that, in London, for example, Labour councils in particular are leading the way in demolishing their own housing estates, working with private developers — or housing associations, former social housing providers now behaving increasingly like private developers — to tear down existing housing and to build new developments under the pretence that it is some sort of necessity when that is completely untrue. 

In fact, the councils are destroying people’s homes, instead of refurbishing them, to make big profits for building companies and developers, all the while lying and spinning about the need for new “social” or “affordable” homes, when the reality is that they are complicit in removing people from their homes and destroying them because the land they are on is worth more to cynical developers than the existing homes for which tenants have dutifully paid their rents for years or even for decades.

In the London Borough of Lewisham, where I live, this betrayal and hypocrisy is playing out over a block of flats in Deptford, Reginald House, and a community garden next door, the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, that Lewisham Council — 100% Labour-controlled — want to destroy, with the developer Peabody, for one of the many unnecessary and over-priced housing developments that are a blight on the capital. I’ve been involved in the struggle to save the garden for over a year, including playing a major role in the two-month occupation, during September and October, that only came to an end with the violent eviction of the garden three weeks ago.

The council has, since then, spent nearly £750,000 paying the bailiffs’ company that violently evicted the garden on October 29 to guard it from the local community for 24 hours a day, an endeavour that is spectacularly failing to win hearts and minds in Deptford. What we learned from our experience is that the only way to take on the self-serving elites who lord it over us — whether they work for corporations, or for central or local government — is direct action, and as Lewisham Council tries to work out how to proceed to the next step of its ill-conceived plans — destroying the 74 trees in the garden that have grown up over 20 years, and that significantly mitigate the horrendous effects of pollution on nearby Deptford Church Street — it is apparent that our aims coincide with those of a new movement, Extinction Rebellion (also see Facebook and Twitter – and here for those outside the UK).

Extinction Rebellion is dedicated to the environment, and to mass non-violent direct action to change the political status quo, largely on the basis that, unless we change our ways immediately, we have a maximum of 12 years until an environmental cataclysm is irreversible. Last week, Extinction Rebellion activists engaged in various forms of mass protest outside government buildings, leading to numerous arrests, and today they blocked five bridges in central London, also leading to arrests. If the chainsaws come for Tidemill’s trees, we’re pretty sure that Extinction Rebellion activists will also be there — and in significant numbers. 

Lewisham Council and Peabody should wake up now, and change their plans immediately, just as the Tory government should wake up to the horrendous damage their austerity policies have been causing for the last eight and a half years, and also change course.

I’m not holding my breath that either will happen, but I am happy to pledge my support to Extinction Rebellion, and their wonderfully principled resistance to the fruits of our elites’ truly hideous and suicidal greed and self-absorption.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, the resistance continues.

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