UN'ALTRO PRIMATO INGLESE: IL PREMIERATO ALL'ARCORETANA, BIONDO O SENZA PELI NON FA DIFFERENZA

 

Britain’s slide into authoritarianism: How the Tories are building a one-party state

They say “it can’t happen here,” but over the years the Conservatives have been undermining democracy.

by T.J. Coles

March 22, 2021

in Opinion

Share to WhatsApp

Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to EmailShare to LinkedInShare to Flipboard

Britons now need ID to vote. Police can arrest demonstrators they deem “annoying.” Boundary changes will give the Tories more Parliamentary seats. The state broadcaster and regulator are falling under right-wing control. Combined, these elements set an anti-democratic precedent.

But where did it begin?

Origins

Britain has always had elements of authoritarianism. It is a constitutional monarchy before it is a parliamentary democracy. The Royal Prerogative means that the monarch can and sometimes does override Parliament.

The Parliament is not wholly representative. For instance, in 1951 Labour got 0.8 percent more votes than the Tories, but the Tories got more seats. Lack of proportional representation means that in 2017, for instance, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn had just two percent fewer votes than Theresa May’s Tories, yet ended up with 56 fewer seats.

RelatedPosts

Elevenses: My G-g-g-generation

Elevenses: A Year of Keir

Race report: I feel like my experiences have been erased and my hardships minimised

Elite school ‘rape culture’ scandal: What about sexual assaults in state education?

It is tempting to point the finger at PM Johnson alone, but building on this history Theresa May tried to take executive control of Brexit and subsequently handled the Parliamentary deadlock by addressing the public in a manner that pitted them against their elected representatives. May’s was the first government in history to be held in contempt of Parliament over its refusal to publish legal advice.

By 2019, more than half of Britons supported “a strong leader … willing to break the rules.” Against this background of growing public support for autocracy, Brexiteers turned their agenda into a religion, with gods who cannot be seen or touched replaced with vague notions of “sovereignty” and “freedom.” As far-right groups flocked to join the Tories, member polls suggested that a majority would rather see the end of both their party and the UK as a whole than sacrifice Brexit.

In this milieu of extreme irrationality, Tory authoritarianism solidified under Johnson.

Making it harder to vote

The Tory manifesto 2019 pledged to impose voter ID, despite there being three fraud convictions in 2019 and one in 2017-18. But voter ID is a crude weapon against elements of the public that usually vote Labour.

Around 3.5 million Britons do not have photo ID. The Equality Trust points out that, as with travel and passports, drivers’ licenses are only relevant for people who can afford or are able to drive. Most of the un-documented are eligible to vote and are disproportionately poor, working class, and/or from minority backgrounds, including elderly, young, and people with disabilities.

Pilot schemes at local elections launched under Theresa May saw hundreds of voters not only turned away for lacking ID, but not returning again to vote. In the US, which has a long history of voter suppression, several groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Commons Cause, spoke out against the Tory government’s plans. Labour MP David Lammy said at the time that it was “a blatant attempt to rig the system and disempower poor and marginalised groups.”

In addition, boundary changes are expected to boost Conservative numbers. The Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 is based on Tory-Liberal coalition plans from 2011 and failed efforts by Theresa May’s government to artificially boost the number of Tory seats in Parliament. The anticipated changes will hand them an extra 1 percent of the vote. But, as noted above, due to the unjust structure of the system, this is likely to result in 10 extra Tory seats.

Propaganda

Democracy requires a free media that challenges power. Yet, the BBC’s anti-Corbyn, pro-Johnson bias was transparent.

In 2017, the BBC Trust said that its political editor Laura Kuenssberg breached journalistic rules by inaccurately reporting Corbyn’s views on shoot-to-kill two years’ earlier. In 2019, Kuenssberg was accused (she and the BBC deny it) of breaking electoral law by announcing results early. Newsnight had previously portrayed Corbyn as a Soviet against a Kremlin backdrop. Controversy over the photoshop was diverted to the less important question of whether the BBC had altered an image of Corbyn’s hat. The BBC also framed Corbyn’s plan for free WiFi as “Broadband communism” and presenter Emma Barnett later asked Shadow Education Secretary, Angela Rayner:  “Would [Labour] nationalise sausages?”

Contrast this with the BBC editing out the Question Time audience’s laughter at Boris Johnson when the programme was repeated, as well as the broadcasting of old footage of Johnson laying a wreath on Remembrance Sunday because in 2019 he had laid it upside down.

BBC Director-General Tim Davie is an ex-Tory councillor and former deputy chair of a local group.  The new chair, Richard Sharp, has donated £416k to the Tories since 2001, directed the right-wing Center for Policy Studies, and spent two decades with the US banking giant, Goldman Sachs, reportedly working with Rishi Sunak. Already, Nish Kumar’s comedy show, Mash Report, has been cancelled. Anonymous source say the cancellation is due to the show’s alleged left-wing bias.

Johnson requested and is reportedly set to appoint long-time Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre, to run the media regulator, Ofcom. In this context, it is even more disturbing that foreign hedge funds are backing a new Fox News-style channel, GB News, designed in part to appeal to northerners by framing the left as the cultural enemy of the working classes.

Cops and props

Under austerity, the Tories have long-defunded the police. Theresa May famously accused the Federation of “crying wolf” over spending cuts. Yet, the Tories have also used the police as props to send out a “law and order” message.

In July 2019, Johnson appointed as Home Secretary Priti Patel, who has expressed support for the death penalty. Two months later, the Tories sent a chilling signal to the public by getting PM Johnson to speak in front several rows of newly graduated police cadets, one of whom fainted in the heat after Johnson kept them waiting an hour. West Yorkshire Police Chief, Constable John Robins, expressed “disappointment to see my police officers as a backdrop to the part of the speech that was not related to recruitment.”

In addition to using children as spies, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 permits agents to break the law in unspecified ways. Amnesty International describes the Act (then a bill) as “deeply dangerous.” The cross-party group JUSTICE quotes former CPS director, Ken Macdonald: “[u]nder this bill it will be easier for a police officer to commit a serious crime than to tap a phone or search a shed.”

In addition to outlawing serious disruption, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act will outlaw demonstrations that cause “annoyance” as well as single-person protests that create “noise.”

The Act comes as the Ministry of Justice pilots a scheme to make violent offenders where GPS tracking devices for 12 months after release from prison. The Tories’ authoritarian posturing is extending into politics. As emergency powers under COVID law are set to be extended by another six months, the government is threatening to take control of Liverpool’s Labour-majority City Council, following the arrest of Mayor Joe Anderson, apparently on spurious corruption charges.

Why now?

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The first couple of years of Corbynism (2015-17) terrified the establishment, because working people nearly had a voice in government. Against the backdrop of progressive populism, the state has weakened itself by turbo-charging neoliberalism and fracturing the United Kingdom with Brexit. To regain control, the Tories have chosen the authoritarian route.

L'UIGURISTAN DI BOJO: IN CINA NON SE POLE, IN INGHILTERRA SINE

 

Uighur abuse: MPs criticise companies over China forced labour

Published

17 March

image copyrightGetty Images

image captionChina has faced fierce international criticism over its treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang

Some British firms could be complicit in the use of forced labour in China's Xinjiang region, an MPs' report says.

The Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee said there was a lack of transparency in firms' supply chains and failures in government.

Xinjiang, in north-west China, is home to the Uighur Muslim population.

China has been accused of committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its repression of the Uighurs - allegations it denies.

• China's tainted cotton
• Who are the Uighurs?

MPs said UK firms in fashion, retail, media and technology could all be implicated in the use of forced labour, and it was time to fine and blacklist those that failed to change.

The BEIS committee said it was appalled companies still cannot guarantee that their supply chains are free from forced labour. Those that cannot prove they don't have links with Xinjiang should face sanctions, the MPs said.

The report recommends the government accelerates proposals to amend and strengthen the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

It also recommends the government develops a policy framework for creating a whitelist and blacklist of companies which do and do not meet their obligations to uphold human rights throughout their supply chains.

The findings come as some senior Conservative MPs attacked Boris Johnson for failing to adopt a tougher stance on Beijing in his integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy published on Tuesday.

For the inquiry, the BEIS committee heard from a variety of companies including Boohoo, H&M, TikTok, The North Face and Nike.

image copyrightEPA

image captionProtests against China's alleged abuse of the Muslim Uighur community

The report found it "clearly unacceptable" that fashion retailer Boohoo had only minimal data about the different tiers in its supply chain.

A Boohoo spokeswoman said the company "has made extensive improvements to its supply chain practices", and that the "group looks forward to publishing the details of its UK supply chain next week".

While the report had widespread concerns about retailers and suppliers using cotton from Xinjiang, other companies were also in the committee's sights.

• Chinese study reveals Uighur 'assimilation' goal
• China says Uighur genocide claims 'absurd'

MPs were particularly critical of Disney which, they said, had refused to appear before it to give oral evidence on the making of the film Mulan - parts of which were shot in China's Xinjiang province.

"The Walt Disney Company has a responsibility to demonstrate that none of their actions supported oppression or undermined human rights during the production of Mulan," it said.

"The Walt Disney Company still has many questions to answer, particularly in relation to concerns about whether it completed adequate risk assessments and put in place sufficient safeguarding measures during the production of Mulan in Xinjiang, and why it refused to answer questions before our committee."

'Deeply concerning'

A Disney spokeswoman responded: "We respect the role and views of the select committee and when approached by the committee we provided relevant background and robust written testimony to them."

Nusrat Ghani, Conservative MP and lead BEIS Committee member looking at forced labour in UK, said: "It is deeply concerning that companies selling to millions of British customers cannot guarantee that their supply chains are free from forced labour.

media caption"China's leaders are responsible for a Uighur genocide"

"Modern slavery legislation and BEIS Department policy are not fit for purpose in tackling this grave situation. Amid compelling evidence of abuses, there has been a sorry absence of significant new Government measures to prohibit UK businesses from profiting from the forced labour of Uighurs in Xinjiang and other parts of China."

But a government spokesperson said: "Forced labour is one of the world's most despicable practices and the government will not stand for it, whether this exploitation takes place in the UK or abroad.

"The UK is the first country in the world to require businesses to report on how they are tackling modern slavery and forced labour in their operations and supply chains, and we are taking forward plans to extend that to certain public bodies and introduce financial penalties for organisations that don't comply."

As evidence of Uighur Muslims being abused and compelled to work in fields and factories in Xinjiang has mounted, so too has unease about the hidden cost of some clothes.

A fifth of the world's cotton comes from the region, and a lack of transparency in supply chains may mean some British firms are unwittingly complicit in the abuse.

The government says financial penalties will be introduced for firms found to be breaching an updated version of the Modern Slavery Act - but has yet to reveal full details or a timescale.

The industry too is keen to be seen to be acting. The Better Cotton Initiative, which focuses on sustainable production and supplies some big high street names, has ceased sourcing from Xinjiang.

Retailers know any reputational stain may be hard for customers to wear. But with so many steps in the production process, it isn't always easy to know the provenance of the shirt on your back.

UN'ALTRO PRIMATO INGLESE: IL TOTALITARISMO RISPETTABILE DI BOJO

 

(Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)

Our very British brand of totalitarianism

While sales of “1984” went through the roof this past year, Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision is much more likely to come true than George Orwell’s

Artillery Row

By

James Jeffrey

19 March, 2021

• 
  

Having the jackboot of George Orwell’s 1984 stamping on one’s face would be preferable in a way. At least it would involve a sort of honesty from the oppressor about the oppression. Unlike the current pervasive underhand attrition that is sapping our democratic life blood, taking with it individual liberty, energy, creativity and love, steering us closer toward Aldous Huxley’s very un-brave “Brave New World”.

Orwell’s brutal dystopian depiction published in 1949 can be seen as a reply and an update, as Orwell saw it, to the warnings of Huxley’s earlier dystopian vision published in 1932. Huxley depicted a scientific dictatorship in which a passive population was subdued through scientific and psychological engineering while kept consistently useful to the ruling class.

Orwell saw the risk of dictatorial rule with a much more violent face, and who could blame him in the wake of the slaughter of World War II and the rise of brutal ideologies and practices of fascism and communism.

But when Huxley came to write Brave New World Revisited in 1957, in which he compares the modernising world of the time with his prophetic fantasy—and also with that offered by Orwell, of whom Huxley was an ardent admirer—he made the point, with sound reason based on the evidence, that it was his supine model of totalitarianism that the world appeared to be more in danger from and moving toward.

“In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing”, Huxley wrote.

But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change … recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell’s book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody’s predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were more in favour of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984.

British totalitarianism has a particularly polite and inconspicuous feel to it

Given recent events on Clapham Common, some might argue we are not free of the threat suggested by Orwell yet. But as Emma Webb argues in “Stop exploiting the debate on women’s rights“, the scenes of women being wrestled to the ground and flowers brought in remembrance of murdered Sarah Everard being trampled underfoot were less to do with malign Orwellian oppression and more the result of another spectacular police mishandling influenced by “shoddy leadership”. Admittedly, that such a response could transpire at the a vigil for a woman allegedly murdered by a policeman suggests a vortex of leadership and scale of short sightedness within the police hierarchy that in its own way takes us into a terrifying realm on par with Orwell.

In arguing for the greater likelihood of non-violent manipulation, Huxley makes a great point regarding how authoritarianism and dictatorial rule can be applied in quite divergent ways: “ruthlessly” and overtly in totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and communist Russia; “politely and inconspicuously” in democracies.

The past year and actions of the British government has been a case study in how British totalitarianism, if it comes to that, will have a particularly polite and inconspicuous feel to it: those initially reasonable-sounding entreaties to stay at home to protect a hallowed institution of the state—the NHS—to then wear masks for what seems like either a placebo effect to assuage the anxiety of some citizens or a more malign effort to erode our dignity, self-esteem and individualism.

That’s exactly what totalitarian regimes want, not surprisingly. But it’s actually what most democracies want, even need, to a degree, and in a way it’s entirely understandable. Keeping tens of millions of autonomous individuals, each with different idiosyncrasies and motivations is hard work to manage. It’s only achieved by an incredibly delicate balancing act between conformity and individual freedoms overseen by a government that answers to those it oversees.

“Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiative, and for making the immediate power of a country’s rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled,” Huxley said. “A democratic society is a society dedicated to the preposition that power is often abused and should therefore be entrusted to officials only in limited amounts and for limited periods of time.”

Before Covid-19, Western societies had been surprisingly successful in managing this balancing act and proving wrong the pessimistic predictions of old about democracies.

“Democracies were regarded in ancient times, Aristotle is the classic source on this, as inherently self-destructive ways of government, because, said Aristotle, democracies naturally turn themselves into tyranny, because the populace will always be a sucker [for] a demagogue who will turn himself into an absolute ruler”, retired Supreme Court justice Jonathan Sumption said in a recent interview.

“It is quite remarkable that Aristotle’s gloomy predictions about the fate of democracies have been falsified by the experience of the West ever since the beginning of democracy.”

As to why and how this has been managed, Lord Sumption puts it down to a “shared political culture of restraint”, for which we can all arguably give ourselves and our predecessors a pat on the back. The problem now, Lord Sumption explains, is that culture of restraint depends on the “collective mentality of society”, thereby making it “extremely fragile, quite easy to destroy and extremely difficult to re-create”.

The arrival of Covid-19 has seen the state respond by ‘organising’ society to a level not seen since the Second World War

Jaron Lanier made a very similar point in his 2018 book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now about how the engagement-driven and deleterious behavioural-modifying business model that has consumed social media platforms is contributing to the loss of a “shared political culture of restraint” within society. Among the myriad negative impacts, including increasing political polarisation, as well as, put in a somewhat different tone to that by Sumption, “attention acquisition leading to asshole supremacy”, Lanier notes how the behavioural-modifying model is being leveraged by bad actors who “wish to discredit democracy”.

In short, both Sumption and Lanier are concerned about how the model of Western democratic liberalism is under enormous strain, with the social re-engineering of society by Covid-19 coming hot on the heels of increasingly advanced technology and mass communications reshaping how people interact.

Perhaps one of the most disheartening Huxley-esque signs of the UK shifting in a totalitarian direction is how the polite crushing of individual freedoms that has resulted from Covid-19 has been entirely palatable to many Brits.

Commentators have noted  that while other European countries have had serious anti-lockdown disturbances, the British public have accepted it all without much complaint.

“The prime minister has been miles behind British public opinion in every restriction he has reluctantly imposed, out of touch with a population who, as a whole, don’t seem to especially love freedom”, wrote Ed West in his article “The fantasy of English freedom“, which suggested that “the average Englishman would happily have a microchip in his arm if it meant he could go down the pub.”

One of the reasons why Brits have long been able to scoff at others who acquiesced to the loss of their liberties was because we never had our bluff called—until now.

“The French of course have no ‘Blitz spirit’ to invoke to get them through the crisis”, wrote Patrick Bishop in his Critic article “Hurrah for small decencies” not long after the first lockdown began. “It was inevitable that as soon as the drama began we would reach for the wartime comfort blanket.” But this self-regard, Bishop notes, can go too far, as can “the assumption that if the Germans had invaded we would have behaved better than the French”.

Huxley described in his “Over-Organisation” chapter how the “progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralisation of power” under Big Business and Big Government. Indeed, the arrival of Covid-19 has seen the state respond by “organising” society to a level not seen since the Second World War, and a level of acquiescence by the public on a similar scale, with a number of big tech companies reaping glorious financial rewards as a result.

The organising principle clearly has a role when a new virus emerges, and it is even indispensable when it comes to freedom, Huxley explains, “for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals”. Furthermore, the “wish to impose order upon confusion, to bring harmony out of dissonance and unity out of multiplicity”—what Huxley calls the “Will to Order”—is a natural “intellectual instinct” and “fundamental urge of the mind”, and one that has bequeathed to us benefits such as science, art and philosophy.

But it is in the “social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous”, Huxley says. “Too much organisation transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up the mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.”

It is worth bringing Huxley’s dystopian-predicting partner George Orwell back in here, given the role language has played, and always will, in this sort of political predicament. In his essay “Politics and the English Language” George Orwell criticised the written and spoken English of his time and examined the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language.

Language is capable of sneakily smoothing out those rougher more unpleasant edges

In short, he explained that which word is used is important. This was brought home to me during my 2009 tour in Afghanistan, during which I noticed the shift in military language that had occurred. When I went to Iraq as a tank commander in 2004, the fire orders I gave the gunner for using the tank’s coaxially mounted machine gun acknowledged some legitimacy of personhood to the enemy target: “Coax man, 100 meters front.” Five years later in Afghanistan, the linguistic corruption that always attends war meant we’d refer to “hot spots”, “multiple pax on the ground” and “prosecuting a target”, or “maximising the kill chain” as real people were lit up on the computer screen being dismembered by 30mm A-10 canon fire.

Language is capable of sneakily smoothing out those rougher more unpleasant edges to the detriment of all users. The ubiquitous use of the word “lockdown” and its corollary verbal phrase of “locking down” has been telling. It implies a positive action which helps distract us from the negation it really is. In saying we are locking down—which also evokes a defiant, plucky posture of defensive solidarity—we are evading other words to describe our situation. It is rare to hear—and I realise I have almost never actually vocally articulated it myself—someone explicitly express the fallout of Covid-19 restrictions in as simple terms as “I am not free.”

This may well be a subconscious defence mechanism, because it quickly becomes painful once you start to deal with it in a less abstract way. We are no longer free. I am not, you are not, neither are your aged parents, nor your siblings, your children, all the people you love and care about are no longer free according to the defining principles of freedom we previously accepted. The only members of your circle of friends and family who maintain a similar level of freedom to that of before are your pets, who remain unmuzzled (though I have read reports about the negative psychological impacts of lockdowns on pets). It’s as simple as that. As is the disingenuous and sophistic narrative that most people have clutched to: how it’s all fine because it is “temporary” (one year and counting), for the “greater good” and because of an “unprecedented crisis”—ideas and phrases all taken out of the strong man’s play book.

The state is sacrificing more and more in the name of Covid-19

Huxley notes how totalitarianism typically emerges when the only other choice is anarchy, and in defence of Brits there probably isn’t any nationality that, given the stark choice between anarchy and totalitarian control, wouldn’t go for a totalitarianism that assured security and safety as long as you toed the line. But Covid-19 never presented anything close to anarchy. It presented the possibility of the country’s health system getting overrun, and that appeared enough, especially when the scientists rolled out the Covid-19 science—“science” being described by Huxley as “that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a given date, of Professors X, Y, and Z”—and their predictive charts, models and data.

But while the threat of anarchy was never there initially with Covid-19, perhaps it may be now. Especially because the government seems unwilling to recognise that it is creating a feedback loop which has the potential to create the sort of anarchic situations that then lead to further unrest.

“This House criminalised the freedom of protest—this House, us”, Charles Walker said in the House of Commons in the aftermath of the sorry events on Clapham Common. “Not Dame Cressida, not the Metropolitan Police, we did. We criminalised the freedom to protest collectively. We are up to our eyeballs in this.”

In other words, the state is sacrificing more and more in the name of Covid-19—maybe even eventually having to get rid of dissenting voices like Charles Walker—which has troubling form historically.

“In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship”, Huxley says.

Fortunately, as Huxley notes, “there is still some freedom left in the world.” It remains to be seen if Covid-19 is to become a fully developed scientific theory and philosophical system. The next few months of the Great Unlocking will be telling.

“To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few”, Huxley says.

UN'ALTRO PRIMATO INGLESE: POVERTA' INFANTILE ALTISSIMA TRA FAMIGLIE DI GENITORI CON POSTI DI LAVORO - DA FAME

 

Nearly three million children in poverty despite parents working

By Hannah Richardson
BBC News education and social affairs reporter

Published

28 March 2019

image copyrightGetty Images

A record 2.9 million children from working families in the UK are living in poverty after housing costs have been paid, the latest figures show.

This means 70% of all poor children were in working families last year, up from 67% on the previous year, official statistics show.

The face of child poverty is also getting younger with 53% of poor children aged under five, data shows.

The government said that tackling poverty was its priority.

Analysis of the statistics, published by the Department for Work and Pensions, shows the high cost of housing in the UK is pushing more working families over the poverty line.

'Hard working'

According to calculations by the National Housing Federation (NHF) , nearly a third more children - or 193,000 - are now living in such meagre circumstances because of spiralling rents and mortgage costs, compared with 2010.

The federation, which represents housing associations, points to a lack of social housing being built over the same period, as well as a lack of affordability of home ownership.

It is calling for the government to urgently invest more money in social housing.

NHF chief executive Kate Henderson said: "Year after year hundreds of thousands more hard-working families are falling into poverty - forced to choose between feeding and clothing their children, or providing a roof over their heads.

"We are now seeing the full effects of low pay, benefit cuts and the housing crisis. The lack of affordable homes is exacerbating in-work poverty."

'Avoidable'

Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said: "Despite high employment, today's figures reveal that 70% of children living under the poverty line have at least one parent in work.

"That is not an economy that is working for everyone.

image copyrightGetty Images

"The increase in child poverty in working families was widely anticipated and could have been avoided."

A government spokesperson said it took the numbers extremely seriously, adding: "Employment is at a record high, wages are outstripping inflation and income inequality and absolute poverty are lower than in 2010.

"But we know some families need more support, which is why we continue to spend £95bn a year on working-age benefits.

"We are looking at what more can be done to help the most vulnerable and improve their life chances."

UN ALTRO PRIMATO INGLESE - LA FAME: E' SOLO LA PARTE EMERSA DELLA POVERTA' IN INGHILTERRA

 

UK: Hunger is Visible Tip of Child Poverty Iceberg

UK’s Children’s Rights Record is Under Review

Published in: Equality and Human Rights Commission

Kartik Raj

Researcher, Western Europe

@Kartik__Raj

@Kartik__Raj

Click to expand Image

A couple and their two children leave the food bank in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, UK, after collecting a three-day emergency supply of food, April 2019. Food banks report a rise in families needing assistance during the school breaks. © 2019 Kartik Raj/Human Rights Watch

Over the past year, as the Covid-19 pandemic has set in and schools closed, I’ve spoken to some amazing people who are working to protect children’s rights in the United Kingdom.

Katie Barry, a primary school headteacher in Lincolnshire, told me in May how she and her colleagues had to stay up in front of their computers into the early hours on weekends and holidays to navigate a deeply flawed government voucher scheme which is supposed to provide meals to children from low-income families. Joyce Leggate, at Kirkcaldy foodbank, explained in April how she and other volunteers were shocked to be giving out twice as many food parcels to families as they had the previous year. And Judith Gregory, a local authority catering manager in Cardiff, told me how she devised a novel method to send cash to low-income families through an online portal parents normally use to pay for extracurricular activities, so they could afford food when school doors shut in March.

An inspiring child-led campaign, brought to public attention by England men’s footballer Marcus Rashford, highlighted shocking levels of child food poverty in the UK – a country with the world’s fifth largest economy – and forced the government into successive policy U-turns on free meals.

The work of thousands of people on the frontlines, like Katie, Joyce, and Judith, to address a fundamental human rights failure – children from poorer families being denied their right to food – has exposed the tip of the iceberg of child poverty.

The need for food parcels, meal vouchers, and cash grants, campaigns to ensure year-round access to breakfast clubs and hot lunches, and calls to remove for good the “No Recourse to Public Funds” (NRPF) immigration restriction on some children accessing free school meals, all reflect the reality of growing child poverty.

Official statistics from March 2019 showed that the number of children in absolute poverty had risen to 3.7 million, up by 200,000 in 12 months. It is sobering to contemplate what will look like in March 2021, a year after the pandemic first began to cause a devastating economic downturn. It is even more harrowing to think beyond the numbers, to consider the human toll on the lives and rights of children in low-income families.

Human Rights Watch’s analysis of government data has exposed how austerity-motivated financial decision-making between 2010 and 2018 halved state expenditure (as a proportion of GDP) on welfare support for children and families. This is no accident. It points to bad policy that is harming the country’s most socioeconomically vulnerable children.

This is why we welcomed the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) submission to the United Nations, published on World Children’s Day, for the upcoming review of the UK’s record on children’s rights, which will examine poverty and living standards alongside other children’s rights concerns.

Human Rights Watch has also today made a submission to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, highlighting several other aspects of child poverty, including the regressive “two-child limit” on welfare payments, the impact on access to education for children with disabilities, and children without reliable internet or electronic devices, and NRPF status acting as a barrier to free school meals. The Human Rights Watch submission also raises concerns about unaccompanied migrant and asylum-seeking children, weapons sales to the Saudi-led coalition, funding for refugee education, and the rights of intersex children, and commends the UK for its position on the Safe Schools Declaration.

The opportunity for a UN expert panel to examine how well the UK is really doing, based on careful analysis by the EHRC and others, is crucial. It will highlight how the day-to-day work of frontline workers and volunteers fills the gap left by flawed government policies, and its data analysis will fully expose the extent of child poverty. And those findings will require the UK government to answer questions from the UN about where it has fallen short on its international law promises and how it plans to better respect the rights of all children.

An earlier version of this text was published as a guest blog by the Equality and Human Rights Commission on World Children’s Day (November 20, 2020).

UN'ALTRO PRIMATO AMERICANO - LA FAME: COME PRIMA DELL'EPIDEMIA, DOPO L'EPIDEMIA

CHI E' ALLA FAME, NON FA CAUSA AI DATORI DI LAVORO CHE LO DEPREDANO

--- 

CRAFTED BY THE ATLANTIC'S MARKETING TEAM FOR Feeding America 

 

America Has a Hunger Problem

And its ripple effects are stronger than you think

 

 

When your stomach is empty, hunger dominates your thoughts. 

 

This is what happens when hunger takes over your community.

We’ve all experienced hunger—that gnawing reminder to eat. But for the 40 million Americans, including more than 12 million children, who live with food insecurity, the sensation isn’t temporary or easily satiated. It is persistent, pernicious, and damages everything it touches, from behavior and brain chemistry to physical health and societal infrastructure.

This is how hunger threatens our minds, our bodies, and our communities.

The boy who dozes in class, the girl who “forgot” her lunch again, the friend who loses his temper a bit too easily—the underlying causes of those issues may seem unrelated. But for Nikki Johnson-Huston, the telltale signs of hunger are hard to miss.

As a young child, Johnson-Huston worried constantly about getting enough to eat. Some of her earliest memories are of food pantries and her mom paying for groceries with food stamps. For the better part of one dismal year, soup kitchens served as her most reliable source of food. The uncertainty took a toll: She zoned out in school. She internalized her anger. She obsessed over food—even in her sleep. “I would have nightmares,” recalls Johnson-Huston, now 44. “I would be surrounded by food but every time I would reach for it, it would disappear.”

America has more than enough food to feed everyone.

But our abundance is accompanied by tremendous waste. By some estimates, nearly half of the food grown, processed and transported in the U.S. goes to waste.

FOOD WASTE BY WEIGHT

HOMES

CONSUMER-FACING BUSINESSES

FARMS

MANUFACTURERS

63M TONS

27M TONS

25M TONS

10M TONS

1M TONS

Source: ReFed

People might think of hunger as a physical sensation—a nagging feeling in the gut, a growl in the intestines—but the phenomenon, as people like Johnson-Huston can attest, is experienced just as powerfully in the mind. Specifically, there’s a small group of neurons in the brain that can detect an empty stomach and low fuel reserves. When they do, they activate a relentless motivational drive to correct it. “All [a person] really can think about is getting food, which means none of their other energy is available for any of the other things in life,” says John Butterly, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth.

Hunger is not inherently bad. On the contrary, it serves as a crucial physiological alarm, telling the body what it needs to survive. Hunger becomes problematic, however, when it can’t be diminished, as is the case for the millions of food insecure Americans—individuals we likely encounter unknowingly every day—who regularly don’t have enough healthy food for their entire household.

More than just a drive, hunger is also a psychological state, one that has a profound effect on the way a person sees the world. People joke about being “hangry”—that is, feeling irritable as a result of hunger. But according to Kristen Lindquist, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, hunger activates many of the same stress-related hormones as emotions, which is why it can change your mood for the worse. Indeed, Johnson-Huston remembers often feeling prickly around other people. “If you’re physically uncomfortable, it’s hard to be emotionally comfortable,” she says. “If you’re not emotionally comfortable, it’s hard to have positive interactions with people.”

The impact of hunger-related stress on the brain is powerful at any age. But experienced early on—especially during the first three years of life, when a child’s brain is developing rapidly and highly sensitive to chemical influences—it can actually shape the brain’s architecture. Prolonged or extreme activation of the body’s stress response systems results in toxic stress, which alters the size and structure of key areas of the brain. The result is a compromised mental foundation, which, when combined with hunger’s everyday effects, puts kids at a severe learning disadvantage that is hard to reverse.

The numbers tell a devastating story. Click to learn more

The Perils of Summer Hunger

For many food-insecure families, food-assistance programs provide a critical bulwark against immediate calamity. But that stasis can quickly be upended during the summer, when kids leave school and frequently lose access to government-subsidized meals. The numbers tell a devastating story:

During the school year, 22 million students rely on free and reduced-price meals funded by the United States Department of Agriculture.

When school is out for summer 18 million children lose access to USDA meals.

Of these 18 million, 9 million Low-income children live in communities that aren’t eligible to operate an open summer meals site, and 1.5 million low-income children live in rural communities, where operating the USDA’s summer meals program often isn’t feasible or sustainable.

As a result of reduced access to meals programs: Children gain weight three times faster during the summer versus the rest of the year, due to reliance on cheap and unhealthy food.

It’s also hard to undo hunger’s impact on a child’s relationship with food, per Hilary Seligman, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and the senior medical advisor for Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization. Studies have shown that food insecurity produces disordered eating behaviors, including binge eating, nighttime eating, and secretive eating. Engrained early on, those behaviors are hard to shake, even decades later.

Johnson-Huston was spared some of hunger’s worst long-term effects. When she turned 10, she moved in with her grandmother. She ate better and excelled in school. Today, Johnson-Huston is an attorney living in Philadelphia, and it’s been decades since she’s worried about getting her next meal. But hunger, as one food insecure woman put it, is like “a bird nesting in your head.” For Johnson-Huston, that bird has never really left.

“You can give someone a sandwich. It’s not as easy to give them their sense of security back,” she says. “I’m always aware of the fact that I could be hungry again.”

According to Robin Dickinson, a family medicine doctor based in Englewood, Colorado, a sick person is more likely to become food insecure. The opposite, she holds, is also true: a food-insecure person is more likely to suffer from poor health. It’s a dynamic she understands from both professional and personal experience.

Yet food insecurity exists in every county and congressional district in the country.

POPULATION WITH FOOD INSECURITY

• 4-14%
• 15-19%
• 20-24%
• 25-29%
• 30% +

Source: Feeding America: Map the Meal Gap

Six years ago, Dickinson was the sole breadwinner in her family of four when she suffered several small strokes within the span of a few days. Shortly thereafter, she went back to work, but felt perpetually exhausted and dizzy. This meant fewer hours at the office and, ultimately, a significantly reduced income. Soon, it wasn’t enough to pay for both healthy food and health insurance.

Benefits from a nutrition assistance program allowed Dickinson to purchase fruit and vegetables for her kids, but she skimped on her own diet. Within a few weeks, she was subsisting on rice, oatmeal, and potatoes, and feeling, quite simply, “crappy all the time.” The vicious cycle of food insecurity and deteriorating health she’d long seen in her patients had quickly become her own reality.

Dickinson wasn’t calorie deficient. But by relying on inexpensive, less nutritious food, she lacked many of the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that make up a balanced diet. On top of that, she was dealing with a newfound but persistent anxiety around feeding her family, and a degree of financial insecurity that, one month, forced her to choose between paying the heating bill or fixing the family’s only toilet. “I remember just sitting in my car sobbing, like, ‘I can’t do this,’” she says.

It often only takes one unexpected event—a health diagnosis, a layoff, a repair bill—to ensnare a household in food insecurity’s debilitating one-two punch of nutritional deficiency and psychological stress. But unlike people experiencing severe malnutrition—whose distended bellies, hollow cheeks, and sunken eyes present glaring bodily distress signals—people living with food insecurity tend to look no different from anyone else, even in the trained eyes of physicians. That means a root cause of their poor health is at risk of slipping under the radar.

But not everyone struggling with hunger qualifies for federal nutrition assistance.

US POPULATION

FOOD INSECURE POPULATION

INELIGIBLE FOR ASSISTANCE

322,762,018

41,204,000

11,125,080*

*Of the 12.9% of food insecure people in the United States, 27% are above the threshold of 185% poverty which denies them access to Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) (below 185% poverty), and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (below 130% poverty)

Source: Feeding America: Map the Meal Gap, U.S. Census Bureau

Hunger’s consequences on health—which can begin before a child is even born—are well documented. People who are food insecure are more likely to suffer some of the most costly chronic diseases—including hypertension, coronary heart disease, and diabetes, among others—and even everyday conditions like headaches, stomachaches, and common colds. Toxic stress, a common force in food insecure households, makes matters worse. When a body’s stress hormone levels are activated for long periods of time, it degrades the immune system. “If your immune system is less functional, that means you’re less likely to resist an immunological threat. And when you get it, you’re less able to fight it,” says Maureen Black, a pediatrics professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

While hunger is undoubtedly a health issue, food distribution isn’t always adequately integrated into the healthcare system. That’s changing. In 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics began recommending that doctors screen their child patients for signs of hunger and better familiarize themselves with food assistance programs. Those programs, in turn, are better integrating with health providers. In New Mexico, health clinics can refer patients experiencing hunger and chronic illness to the Healthy Food Center at Roadrunner Food Bank, which is part of Feeding America’s network of food banks. In Mississippi, the EversCare Clinic operates a food pantry in partnership with the Mississippi Urban League and the Mississippi Food Network, which is also a part of Feeding America’s network.

Today, at the safety net clinic where she primarily treats people who are uninsured or underinsured, Dickinson takes that directive seriously—not just as a professional best practice, but as a personal imperative. “When I make recommendations, or when I screen people for hunger, it’s from a place of humility,” she says, “from having been there.”

The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, is on a “radical” mission to revitalize his city by investing in “the inherent dignity of every citizen.” Of course, you can’t talk about dignity without talking about hunger.

In Hinds County, where Jackson is located, 25 percent of the population is food insecure, nearly double the national rate. Meanwhile, food deserts and food swamps dominate the landscape. In Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s strategic plan for the city—which aims to disrupt a feedback loop of poverty, underperforming schools, blighted neighborhoods, and failing infrastructure—increasing access to nutritious food, especially for children, is the first order of business. “These are cycles of humiliation that lean into one another and create a problematic environment,” says Lumumba.

That environment, he adds, impacts the whole community.

Jackson has a relatively high rate of food insecurity, but Lumumba’s assessment of his city’s challenges speaks to a fundamental truth: When some members of a population can’t achieve their full potential, it affects an entire society’s well-being. That reality is born out not only in Jackson, but across the entire country, where food insecurity exists in every county and congressional district, according to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap study. As John T. Cook and Ana Paula Poblacion wrote in their 2016 study, “Estimating the Health-Related Costs of Food Insecurity and Hunger,” “Humans are social, interdependent beings, and our health, strength, well-being, and prosperity depend on the public welfare and strong public infrastructure.”

And the need is massive.

But our abundance is accompanied by tremendous waste. By some estimates, nearly half of the food grown, processed and transported in the U.S. goes to waste.

AVERAGE MEAL COST

$3.00

ANNUAL FOOD BUDGET SHORTFALL $21,122,544,000*

*The total annualized additional dollar amount that food-insecure individuals report needing, on average, to purchase just enough food to meet their food needs. This amount is based on responses in the Current Population Survey and the USDA assumption that individuals in households that are food insecure experience food insecurity, on average, seven months out of the year. This amount has been adjusted to reflect local food prices and relevant taxes.

Source: Feeding America: Map the Meal Gap

What’s more, according to Feeding America researchers, hunger is expensive. Treating diseases and health conditions attributable to household food insecurity costs the healthcare system $77.5 billion annually. The indirect costs are no less detrimental. In workplaces, for instance, hunger contributes to absenteeism. And when hungry employees show up to work on an empty stomach, they contribute to a decrease in productivity known as presenteeism.

Food insecurity has a cost for education, too. In a handful of states, where schools are funded based on average daily attendance rather than total enrollment, schools lose money every time a student is absent. Community college students with food insecurity are more likely to drop out.

But the biggest cost of hunger may be difficult to quantify. As Poblacion and Cook put it, hunger is a social phenomenon, which “erodes basic trust in and respect for social relationships, institutions, and the people within them.” A community in which some members lack that trust and respect are likely missing some of the “glue” binding the public together.

For Lumumba, combating hunger seems to be as much about fortifying that glue as it is about improving the city’s schools and reducing poverty. “We’re not looking at the growth and development of this city from the standpoint of great, big edifices to be built in a nice, pretty city. We’re worried about the souls that reside in this city,” he says.

In Jackson, Lumumba’s plan to fight hunger hinges on two initiatives: Jackson Meals Matter, a program focused on increasing food access for the city’s children, and Fertile Ground, a campaign funded by a $1 million Bloomberg Philanthropies donation, which will create, among other things, a downtown food market where people can pay based on their ability.

In the short term, Lumumba plans for these initiatives to reduce the rate of food insecurity by 25 percent. But ultimately, he won’t be satisfied until every citizen in his city—and his country—is fed. “We’re living in a place of scarcity when we actually exist in a world which has more abundance than ever,” he says. “There’s no excuse for hunger at this point.”

A Re:think Original for

This content is made possible by our sponsor; it is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of The Atlantic’s editorial staff. See our advertising guidelines to learn more.

Terms & Conditions Privacy Policy Do Not Sell My Personal Information