Tower Hamlets Socialist Party member
The opening lines of the response to the 15 March budget by one of the UK’s leading children’s charities, Barnardo’s, reads: “The cost-of-living crisis is getting worse and more frightening every day. We know that families who once had to choose between heating or eating are now worried about providing warm beds for their children or losing their homes altogether.”
They’re not wrong. The Tory government has plunged us deep into a cost-of-living crisis which is having a seriously negative effect on children and increasing poverty. The figures below from a Barnardo’s report – ‘A crisis on our doorstep’ – highlight the deepening impact of the cost-of-living crisis on children and young people in the UK:
- 1 in 4 of all children in the UK now live in poverty, up 3% from October 2022.
- As of February 2023, 1 in 4 parents are struggling to provide food
- 1 in 7 parents said they had fallen into arrears with payments or gone into their bank overdraft, an increase of 2% from October 2022
These figures are staggering. They are an unacceptable and cruel symptom of this government’s cutbacks and the accumulation of wealth at the very top of society.
I want to give a small snippet of just how bad things are from a recent example. I live in Tower Hamlets and just a few weeks ago in early March 2023, when on a Socialist Party campaign stall in Bethnal Green, I witnessed a queue of families just over the road snaking all the way around the block. Local families of up to six members were lining up for hours to claim a £1 kebab on promotion. These were not young students looking for a good one-off deal, they were all grown adults with a number of kids, desperately looking for a cheap dinner.
I go home, and the next day see a similar problem in my local Bow supermarket. Kids and their parents having to form a long orderly queue, snaking around aisles on a Sunday afternoon. They’re waiting for the supermarket worker to put the fourth round of yellow labels on products for people to buy cheap before the food becomes unsellable and is thrown out.
Because of the disgrace we’re seeing around child poverty, we’re calling for:
- Free school meals for all children, including during holidays
- Real living benefits that increase in line with the rising cost of living
- A minimum wage of at least £15 an hour
- Councils must stop cuts. For mass campaigns involving trade unions and local communities to demand from the Tories the money needed to fund local services
