Alston slammed UK government in 2018 and his final report is no less damning
In 2018, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty Philip Alston travelled around the UK to examine reports of poverty and abuse of human rights in one of the world’s richest countries. His findings were utterly damning.
In his withering report, whose publication the SKWAWKBOX attended, Alston found that policies of the Tory government were:
- abandoning the vulnerable to extreme hardship with next to no support
- so massively disadvantaged women that they might have been ‘designed by misogynists‘
- were entirely ideological, in breach of human rights and created hardship that could have been fixed ‘overnight‘ if the Tories wanted
Now, as he bows out and hands over his UN role to his successor Olivier de Schutter, Alston has issued his final report on global poverty – one which he says reveals ‘a decade of misplaced triumphalism’ and self-congratulation by elites ignoring awful poverty and hunger and sleepwalking into a disaster that will only be worsened by the coronavirus pandemic:
The full report, which was delivered by de Schutter, can be read here – and de Schutter’s presentation viewed below:
But the UK government, as Alston noted in 2018, is not merely ‘sleepwalking’ ignorantly into disaster. Instead it is marching with political intent and full knowledge of the misery the Tories’ policies will create – especially as Johnson and Sunak are deliberately shifting the burden of the impact of the coronavirus onto the shoulders of those least able to bear it.
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