The Poverty Crisis: Who is to Blame? | Make no mistake about it: the cost of fuel, food, energy and electricity can all be placed on this government and their inability to address the failures of our current system, capitalism
The Poverty Crisis: Who is to Blame? | Make no mistake about it: the cost of fuel, food, energy and electricity can all be placed on this government and their inability to address the failures of our current system, capitalism
26 comments
Does no one remember the last two years when everyone was cheering staying home and getting paid for it?
The mint was working 24/7. You can hardly say that we didn’t have this coming.
Is it inability or is it unwillingness? Their cronies, donors and selves are all doing brilliantly out of the various crises they’ve inflicted on us. I don’t think that’s an accident of incompetence – I think that’s carefully engineered to appear that way.
There’s a lot of questionable claims in this piece.
Firstly, while living costs have been rising over the years, we haven’t seen a consistent decline in real wages (source: [Economics Help with Data from ONS](https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6994/economics/uk-wage-growth/)), and while it’s been volatile year on year, real household disposable income has been consistently growing since the 1980’s (source: [ONS](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/crxw/ukea)).
The claim made in the article: “*whilst food bank usage rose 25 times in the last 10 years from 100,000 users to 2.5m.*” is somewhat misleading. The only data I can find on that approaches the 2.5m figure refers to this article by the [Trussell Trust](https://www.trusselltrust.org/2022/04/27/food-banks-provide-more-than-2-1-million-food-parcels-to-people-across-the-uk-in-past-year-according-to-new-figures-released-by-the-trussell-trust/); which states: “*Food banks provide more than 2.1 million food parcels to people across the UK in past year, according to new figures released by the Trussell Trust.*” That is not saying that 2.1million people were using a foodbank over the last year, that’s saying that 2.1million food parcels *were given out* in a year. So I would think that this article is overstating the reality (deliberately or otherwise) to support its narrative.
The final claim I’ll cover for the moment is this: “*The root cause behind all this is simple, and not at all to do with international events we cannot control. Rather capitalism itself is in crisis, as the bosses and the rich are squeezing as much profit out of working class people as they can.*” There seems to be no evidence to support this claim, and seems to against all the inflationary decompositions published by the ONS ([Chart 3](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/consumerpriceinflation/may2022)), and the data published in the May 2022 Monetary Policy Report ([BoE](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy-report/2022/may-2022)).
the government dont care of you replace one ism with another beyond figuring out how to hold their election majorities. they will just change their semantics and justifications to fit any other ism you want. they have been doing the same damn thing since feudalism.
swapping one corrupt 150yo economic ideology for another corrupt 150yo economic ideology isnt fixing the commonality. westminster is culturally irredeemable and insidiously corrupt at a meta level.
you make westminster communist and all you will get is the same old faces rebranded as firsts among equals and the poor rebranded from lazy and workshy to selfish and greedy, with the same poverty issues at the end.
this whole article is trying to be serious while coming across more like tim curry’s performance in red alert 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM
Oh the government have the ability to deal with it, but to them the system is working perfectly: their they and their mates are getting rich, government is shrinking, sod the rest of us.
Why do people expect them to do anything when, from their perspective, capitalism is working?
Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think the primary purpose of your life, of my life and the entirety of the human race’s is just to blindingly consume to support a failing economy and a faulty system. forever and ever until we run out of every resource and have to resort to blowing each other up to ensure our own survival. I don’t think we’re supposed to sit by idle while we continue to use a long outdated system that produces war, poverty, collusion, corruption, ruins our environment and threatens every aspect of our health and does nothing but divide and segregate us. I don’t think how much military equipment we are selling to other countries, how many hydrocarbons we’re burning, how much money is being printed and exchanged, is a good measure of how healthy our society is but I do think I can speak for everyone when I say, we’re sick of this shit.
the prize is money… while that is the ultimate measure of success.. it means for some to have it, some will have not..
Absolute nonsense. The fuel/energy crisis has been caused by the war in Ukraine and giants of the oil world refusal to produce more oil. Both of these facts are completely out of the UK’s control
The people responsible for poverty is easy to blame because poverty is a political choice, so the people to blame are anyone who want to hoard resources and hand them out when people pay.
It’s nice to see this message getting more and more widespread. It’s not a cost of living crisis, it’s a late stage capitalist greed crisis.
The only thing I would change here, as suggested elsewhere in the thread, is to replace “inability” with “unwillingness.”
This situation is exactly what this government wants. Every decision they make has been to slowly transform the UK into an economic powerhouse modelled on China. Top tories have literally written a manifesto about it. They want to strip away as many rights from workers as possible so we can all work 60 hour weeks for small amounts of money. Brexit was the first major step.
Landlords keep hoaridng up wealth and making it harder to purchase properties. Do you know how many Tories are landlords? A shit ton of them. So yes , govt is to blame
What a load of tosh
The war, the pandemic and an incompetent and uncaring government. A triple whammy.
How many times did the tories state they were going to build affordable housing? Long before the finance minister was married to a billionaire and doesn’t know how to use a card to pay for petrol…..
>Err yes it does, your attempt at a rebuttal doesn’t actually constitute a rebuttal. You’ve asserted that pensioners will skew the sample enough to render my conclusions false. However you haven’t provided any evidence that the pensioners who have seen an increase in their living standard are so statistically significant that my conclusions are false…
Not OP and not a statistician but 19% of the population are of pensionable age, is that not statistically significant?
We all know who is to blame, the answer is no different to the last few financial crises. The question should be ‘How do we stop this happening again?’ or ‘How do we make them fix the damage they have caused?’ When living standards are still below pre-2008 levels, the time has come to stop asking rhetorical questions and to start demanding answers.
The countries with the highest HDI and consistently highest standards of living all operate under capitalist economies…
Governments have very little ability to effect these things. I don’t know why people think governments are all powerful.
Eh, I don’t think capitalism is the problem.
Corporate socialism is the problem. *Which is not capitalism.* Capitalism is a model wherein services and industries are privately owned for profit. And it works when the government, as the elected institution in this equation, advocates for the people, or the consumers in this case, and as such should act as the governing body between these companies to ensure fair practice, competition, regulation, and help the companies out should their interests align with national interests. So if corporations are in a bubble, competing, producing, innovating, government is the one that sets the rules and collects the tithe for participating.
Tories, *do not do this.* They prop up a select few corporations because their mates run it, they stifle competition in the market, they allow corporations to take massive profits while cutting wages and staff, cut regulations endangering consumers and our interests, and don’t secure resources of vital national importance because they’re too focused on lining their own pockets with some of the kickback from the corporations they’re propping up, and not only that they relinquish their own attempts at participating in this market by privatising any government owned business to make a quick buck, and make the buyer of said company… Drum roll please… *One of their mates,* Making them stupidly rich off the back of a company that was built by taxpayers money. Their focus is making sure corporations succeed year on year, not the people of the UK.
The reap massive profits for doing so, and the result of these bumper profits year on year thanks to the help of their Tory pals, is that *maybe* some of it trickles down to say, the NHS. The UK is currently backwards in their approach. Socialism should be for the people. People are the ones who benefit most from socialism, providing them the services and the necessities they need. And it should be funded with the taxes levied from the corporations. But instead, what we currently have is that a corporation can just sit there and receive bailouts, investments, contracts, all paid for by the tax payer. Meaning money from people currently in a cost of living crisis are going straight to a gas company currently enjoying massively inflated profits. Like, *BRUH.* That’s not fucking right.
When you don’t regulate a business, whose m.o is to make money, they will take liquid form and explore every single crack and crevasse to boost their profit margin. Naturally. It’s their prerogative to do so. One of these cracks is to just pay or support politicians to give them a better deal. And Tories are the worst for doing this. This means that the people get the worst possible deal, wealth is unfairly extracted from the poorest and middle class, and is transferred to the richest, and corporations, purely because the government is anti-socialism when it comes to supporting their people, but wholly pro-socialism when it comes to helping corporations.
When you have a government, that help their mates, fund people and are funded by people who further their interests, that isn’t capitalism, that’s feudalism without the titles. And capitalism is just the medium in which wealth is exchanged. And to be honest, I say it’s feudalism without the titles, but in the UK, that’s probably not even true… Lots of Tory corporate shills become Lords or Knights lmao.
There is a cost of living crisis all across the developed world, the idea that this government (or any one government) is the cause of it is absurd. The root cause of our current woes track back to the 2008 financial crisis and everything since then has just been exacerbating an already disastrous situation.
What this and other governments could have done I suppose is invested more in nuclear energy over the last few decades, but then people are crying out for cash for everything else under the sun so it’s a bit hard to really fun this stuff.
People who blame capitalism are deluded.
I don’t believe government is to blame, as if it exists somehow external to capitalism, an unattached gatekeeper. They are bedfellows. In the US they are unabashedly one in the same. US government is driven by corporate interests. End of story. I think the UK and more so the continent have at least some political mechanisms in place and drawn from their histories to challenge the monster. But as long as the dollar is unfortunately the lingua franca, US economic morals spread like a disease across the Atlantic.
The Greed Crisis, and guess what – it’s going to be a long one.
The only solution to a bad guy with excessive government spending is a good guy with excessive government spending amiright.
The UK has a lack of backbone industrial capacity, especially in agriculture & energy (ironically, despite being one of the larger & by far one of the most innovative energy producers in the region).
The corrupt rich cunts are to blame. It’s not just this government, all right wing piece of trash need to be held account. Fascists and right wingers running an unholy alliance now for some time with the goal of reinstating serfdorm via capitalism. People need to be educated about this stuff but more than half are thicker than pig shit on a winter’s day. The rich slavedrivers are robbing us, and have been robbing us for 40 years now. They will continue to transfer our wealth to them because people are too fucking stupid to resist them as they have trash information-diet of BBC, Sky, tabloids, GB news. If someone’s is a fat cunt you know he didn’t eat a salad. Likewise you talk to someone on the street about a complicated subject guarenteed dick head more than half the time because of said trash information diet. Real sick of being trapped on stupid dumb cunt island.