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The poor in Britain are among worst-off in Western Europe

Daily Mirror front pageOsborne’s austerity is not only unnecessary and gratuitously cruel in punishing the poor for the sins of ultra-rich bankers, but it has now emerged has hit the poorest in Britain far harder than in any comparable state in the European Union.

hat has now been revealed from OECD data is that poor people in the UK are now suffering enforced deprivation not only harsher than in Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark but, shockingly, on a par with poverty in the former eastern bloc. The truth is life is much worse here than it is for the poorest fifth in virtually every other north-western European country.

These facts put into perspective not only the experience in Britain of Osborne’s austerity, but the unique imposition of the bedroom tax, the near-million persons who have been deprived of all benefits in the last year as a result of DWP sanctioning, and the further million persons who have been shamefully taken off incapacity benefit and put on JSA at £71 a week on the utterly spurious pretence that they are able to work.

The OECD calculates the average income of the bottom fifth of UK households at £5,639 a year, or just £108 a week. This is the average applying to no less than 13 million people currently living in the UK. These are much lower figures than for the equivalent group in Germany (£7,918), France (£7,486), Belgium (£7,308), Denmark (£7,209), and Netherlands (£6,671). Moreover, according to Eurostat, GDP per person is lower in west Wales than it is in Poland. Similarly GDP per person in Tees Valley and Durham is lower than in the Czech Republic. By contrast, London is the richest region in the EU. In fact with average household incomes in Britain today of about £31,700 a year, the richest 20% in the UK were the third richest in their bracket of all EU countries except Germany and France. Thus the rich are richer in the UK than in almost all other EU countries, but at the same time the poor in the UK are significantly poorer than in all other comparable EU countries.

2 Comments

  1. Mr jeffrey l davies says:

    look at the mps yesterday at dwp hearing at that great house you could count the mps present on one hand you ask its like this we in it together the mpds aint just pure greed by all but the poor paying for your mistakes in allowing the banksters to rob jeff3

  2. Robert says:

    The issue is poverty how to solve it well Ed the Sun lover will of course do everything he can to copy the Tories, for example stick to the spending plans and then he will not up wages for the people at the bottom the working class the council workers school workers the teachers the ok the public sector those who get the min wage.

    And yet labour would do anything to get the beloved middle class going.

    The issue is blame the Tories they deserve it but hell Labour would do the same, the fact is today we have the Tories and the Tory lite party, and if the grinning sandwich eating beer drinking pool playing copy of Farage get his act together the Tories will win and again and again.

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