Joe Woolfall, South Liverpool Socialist Party
Britain is facing a child poverty emergency. The Trussell Trust’s latest ‘Hunger in the UK’ report notes that over 14 million people, including 3.8 million children, went hungry last year. One in six households missed meals, and food banks are now the ‘new normal’.
This scandal is not just confined to those unable to find work from an increasingly limited job market. In fact, three in ten food bank users are in working households. Bus drivers, carers and other workers are being driven into hunger because bosses pay poverty wages while prices soar.
At the sharpest end of this crisis are families hit by the two-child benefit cap, a vicious policy that rips thousands of pounds a year from many working-class households. Scrapping it would immediately lift 470,000 children out of poverty. Yet Keir Starmer’s Labour has kept this Tory attack in place.
Starmer, in his 2025 manifesto, promised to end the “moral scar” of food banks. Instead, he has prepared and is preparing more austerity policies in the upcoming budget that will punish working-class people. Necessary steps to end child poverty, such as scrapping the two-child cap, using the wealth of the super-rich to fund it and other benefits and public services, are off the table.
Low pay no way!
The other scandal that forces people to use food banks is poverty pay. Socialist Party members fight for the minimum wage to be raised to at least £15 an hour, with no exceptions as a step towards a real living wage that rises with the cost of living. With Universal Credit payments, the government is subsidising companies paying workers wages that aren’t enough to live on. The Labour government hasn’t even carried out manifesto pledges to stop bosses paying young workers less than others for the same jobs.
The money is there to tackle poverty and inequality. Look at the sheer amount of wealth accrued by billionaires in Britain since the Covid-19 pandemic, and the record profits being recorded by the super-rich while millions are food insecure and face a housing crisis. But the wealth and resources are in the wrong hands. Inherent to the capitalist system is vast riches for a tiny few and poverty for the rest of us. By running the economy ourselves, with the working class democratically making the decisions about what we want and need, we could eliminate poverty and the need for food banks.
