A Long Decade of 'Short-Term Pain'
“14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials. The widely respected Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts a 7% rise in child poverty between 2015 and 2022, and various sources predict child poverty rates of as high as 40%.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking this is a quote from a charity telethon or one of those appeals that’s shown during the ad breaks of your favourite soap. But it’s not. No, this is the damning statement from Professor Philip Aston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, following his trip around Britain in which he examined the effects of austerity on its people. The preliminary findings are an excoriating indictment of the government’s austerity program, described by Aston as “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous.” He describes the situation in Britain, caused by dramatic cuts across the board by the Conservatives, as a “social calamity.”
More than two years after the divisive referendum in which Britain voted to leave the European Union, we are faced with the possibility of a calamitous exit from the bloc without any form of deal at the end of March next year. Many Remain-supporters at the time warned of such chaos, but they were dismissed as ‘Project Fear.’ They were ignored and even mocked. Now that they’ve been proven right, though, their Leave-campaigning counterparts are scrambling to play catch up. They are rushing to tell us that they always knew we would go through some temporary suffering to get to the greener grass yonder. Some, even, are telling us that a no-deal Brexit, and the disastrous consequences that would have on our economy, would be worth it in the end.
Short-term pain for long-term gain, they tell us. Second former-Brexit secretary Dominic Raab believes it’s better for us to “tolerate short-term pain” rather than agree to the deal he was paid to negotiate for us. What he, and his esteemed colleagues, are less clear on, though, is how long exactly that short-term pain will last.
Tory peer Simon Wolfson thinks it will take around five years. Boris Johnson, promoting a Canada-style trade deal with the EU that took six years to complete, presumably agrees. Jacob Rees-Mogg dithers between claiming we’ll start to profit at some point in the mid-2020s and saying that the “opportunity for Brexit is over the next 50 years.” Andrew Lilico, executive director at Europe Economics, says “by 2030 we should come out about even” – although that ‘should’ is doing all the heavy lifting there. So, we should start benefiting from leaving the biggest trading bloc on the planet at some point in the next five, ten, or fifty years. I’m glad we cleared that up.
What these people don’t realise, though, is that many in this country can’t take much more pain, however long it might last. Millions more are only a few months or even weeks of short-term economic pain away from a financial abyss.
Research by the charity Shelter recently revealed that there are 320,000 homeless people in Britain, but they concede that this is likely a vast underestimate. 295,000 of these are people in temporary accommodation after being accepted as homeless by their local council. They are, perhaps, the lucky ones. According to Crisis, there were almost 5,000 people sleeping on the streets on any given night in 2017. Professor Aston’s statement claims that homelessness has increased by 60% and rough-sleeping by 134% since 2010.
Many of those still in their own homes are never far from homelessness. According to a 2017 Shelter report, one in three low-earning renters in Britain are borrowing money to keep up to date on their rent payments and 70% are struggling to keep up or even falling behind. The same report says that 800,000 low-earning renters can’t even save £10 a month. These people are just one small stress, one emergency – one period of short-term pain – from crisis.
The people of Britain are already making difficult choices. Heating my home or feeding my family? According to Aston, there are now 2,000 food banks around the country – up from just 29 a decade ago. In the year before March 2018, the Trussel Trust reports 1.3 million people were forced to use a food bank to ensure they had enough to eat. That same charity is bracing for its busiest ever month as Christmas approaches: they anticipate giving out one and a half million meals in December alone. In the fifth richest country on the planet, there are hundreds of thousands of people who don’t even have enough to eat. Remember that when Leave-supporters say that the short-term pain will be worth it. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s children certainly aren’t going to bed hungry.
Professor Aston says, “the costs of austerity have fallen disproportionately upon the poor, women, racial and ethnic minorities, children, single mothers, and people with disabilities.” When those very same communities hear Brexiteers claim that “short-term pain” will be worth it in the end, how can they think anything but ‘how much longer?’
The short-term pain of Brexit is not disparate from the existing pain inflicted by Conservative austerity. Nor, either, is it the shared burden of a great country making its way as an independent state in a new world. The short-term pain of Brexit, with or without a deal, will not be faced by the politicians and businessmen who have spent their careers decrying the European Union and becoming incredibly wealthy in the process. It will be faced by those who have already suffered through a decade of austerity.
In 2009, David Cameron made his now infamous Age of Austerity speech. He claimed that without the cost-cutting measures his government planned to implement, the nation’s children would be “weighed down by a millstone of debt.” Those children will not be weighed down by debt, but by an economy stacked against them. This is not the Age of Austerity. This is the Age of Pain, endured by those who are least equipped to deal with it for the benefit of those most equipped to profit from it.
You’d be forgiven for thinking this is a quote from a charity telethon or one of those appeals that’s shown during the ad breaks of your favourite soap. But it’s not. No, this is the damning statement from Professor Philip Aston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, following his trip around Britain in which he examined the effects of austerity on its people. The preliminary findings are an excoriating indictment of the government’s austerity program, described by Aston as “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous.” He describes the situation in Britain, caused by dramatic cuts across the board by the Conservatives, as a “social calamity.”
More than two years after the divisive referendum in which Britain voted to leave the European Union, we are faced with the possibility of a calamitous exit from the bloc without any form of deal at the end of March next year. Many Remain-supporters at the time warned of such chaos, but they were dismissed as ‘Project Fear.’ They were ignored and even mocked. Now that they’ve been proven right, though, their Leave-campaigning counterparts are scrambling to play catch up. They are rushing to tell us that they always knew we would go through some temporary suffering to get to the greener grass yonder. Some, even, are telling us that a no-deal Brexit, and the disastrous consequences that would have on our economy, would be worth it in the end.
Short-term pain for long-term gain, they tell us. Second former-Brexit secretary Dominic Raab believes it’s better for us to “tolerate short-term pain” rather than agree to the deal he was paid to negotiate for us. What he, and his esteemed colleagues, are less clear on, though, is how long exactly that short-term pain will last.
Tory peer Simon Wolfson thinks it will take around five years. Boris Johnson, promoting a Canada-style trade deal with the EU that took six years to complete, presumably agrees. Jacob Rees-Mogg dithers between claiming we’ll start to profit at some point in the mid-2020s and saying that the “opportunity for Brexit is over the next 50 years.” Andrew Lilico, executive director at Europe Economics, says “by 2030 we should come out about even” – although that ‘should’ is doing all the heavy lifting there. So, we should start benefiting from leaving the biggest trading bloc on the planet at some point in the next five, ten, or fifty years. I’m glad we cleared that up.
What these people don’t realise, though, is that many in this country can’t take much more pain, however long it might last. Millions more are only a few months or even weeks of short-term economic pain away from a financial abyss.
Research by the charity Shelter recently revealed that there are 320,000 homeless people in Britain, but they concede that this is likely a vast underestimate. 295,000 of these are people in temporary accommodation after being accepted as homeless by their local council. They are, perhaps, the lucky ones. According to Crisis, there were almost 5,000 people sleeping on the streets on any given night in 2017. Professor Aston’s statement claims that homelessness has increased by 60% and rough-sleeping by 134% since 2010.
Many of those still in their own homes are never far from homelessness. According to a 2017 Shelter report, one in three low-earning renters in Britain are borrowing money to keep up to date on their rent payments and 70% are struggling to keep up or even falling behind. The same report says that 800,000 low-earning renters can’t even save £10 a month. These people are just one small stress, one emergency – one period of short-term pain – from crisis.
The people of Britain are already making difficult choices. Heating my home or feeding my family? According to Aston, there are now 2,000 food banks around the country – up from just 29 a decade ago. In the year before March 2018, the Trussel Trust reports 1.3 million people were forced to use a food bank to ensure they had enough to eat. That same charity is bracing for its busiest ever month as Christmas approaches: they anticipate giving out one and a half million meals in December alone. In the fifth richest country on the planet, there are hundreds of thousands of people who don’t even have enough to eat. Remember that when Leave-supporters say that the short-term pain will be worth it. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s children certainly aren’t going to bed hungry.
Professor Aston says, “the costs of austerity have fallen disproportionately upon the poor, women, racial and ethnic minorities, children, single mothers, and people with disabilities.” When those very same communities hear Brexiteers claim that “short-term pain” will be worth it in the end, how can they think anything but ‘how much longer?’
The short-term pain of Brexit is not disparate from the existing pain inflicted by Conservative austerity. Nor, either, is it the shared burden of a great country making its way as an independent state in a new world. The short-term pain of Brexit, with or without a deal, will not be faced by the politicians and businessmen who have spent their careers decrying the European Union and becoming incredibly wealthy in the process. It will be faced by those who have already suffered through a decade of austerity.
In 2009, David Cameron made his now infamous Age of Austerity speech. He claimed that without the cost-cutting measures his government planned to implement, the nation’s children would be “weighed down by a millstone of debt.” Those children will not be weighed down by debt, but by an economy stacked against them. This is not the Age of Austerity. This is the Age of Pain, endured by those who are least equipped to deal with it for the benefit of those most equipped to profit from it.
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