Shame of child poverty

BRITAIN is one of the most prosperous nations on earth,yet the number of children living in poverty is cause for national embarrassment (Our child poverty “shame” – Gazette 13.07.22).

The child poverty capitals have now been revealed, with Middlesbrough and Redcar and Cleveland topping the list. No surprise there.

Over the passage of time, child poverty on Teesside has not improved.

Like a warped version of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, former PM Margaret Thatcher promised that wealth would trickle down to the North East as long as the rich prospered.

The rich did prosper, but there was no trickle down.

Another garbage slogan came from the mouth of another Tory PM, David Cameron.

His Big Society was just a cruel exercise in eliminating the welfare state and replacing it with food banks and soup kitchens.

Two further claptrap slogans were born in The Northern Powerhouse and Levelling Up, the latter being a rather tacky slogan used to fob off any angry peasants.

On child poverty the Tees Valley Conservatives are forever silent – apart from Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland MP Simon Clarke, who really should have stayed silent.

His answer to child poverty was jam-packed with the usual rip-roaring rhetoric bigging up the so-called economic powerhouse that is Teesworks.

But failed to mention that the children of today will be old and grey before any of those jobs even see the light of day. STEPHEN DIXON,

Redcar

‘The Conservatives broke the economy’

IAN Threadgill bemoans the state of his beloved Conservative Party (Leadership contest “is a sham vote” – The Gazette 14.07.22) as reflected by the quality on offer in the Tory leadership election, but the reality is that successive Conservative Governments since 2010 have been disastrous for the UK. We were inflicted with unnecessary Tory austerity under Cameron and Osborne. “We were clearly nowhere near bankrupt. We could have borrowed more. Government debt was cheap as chips,” said Paul Johnson, head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies).

“He delayed the recovery. Osbourne cut down the green shoots of growth, and by 2013 he had lost the AAA credit rating he had warned was vital to survival; it wasn’t,” said Professor Jonathan Portes, Kings College London.

In other words, the Conservatives broke the UK economy and don’t know how to fix it.

Following the global financial crisis of 2008, real wages suffered their longest sustained decline on record.

The Bank of England warned that households are now facing the “biggest fall in living standards since comparable records began”.

Stagnant wage growth has been compounded by the ideologically driven erosion of the welfare state. Real incomes for the lowest-income households before Covid-19 were no higher than in 2001-02. This has resulted in the number of emergency food parcels distributed by food banks going up from 40,000 in 2010 to 2.5 million in 2019-20.

Ian says: “Things can only get worse with Labour in charge.”

That will take some doing, with the bar being set this low.

TONY JOHNSTONE, Eston