Demand for UK Food Bank Up 15% Year on Year
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Ultimately this is going to correct. My preference is that it corrects by governments enforcing a fairer distribution because otherwise it's going to end violently and we're rapidly approaching a point of no return where the wealthy hold so much power and there's nothing left to steal. Basic human necessities like food, water and shelter are being eroded.
You can look at a bunch of warnings like this. Food bank usage, claims for various forms of welfare (such that it is), homelessness (and housing insecurity more generally), levels of debt, etc.
Sadly, I personally believe we're beyond the point of no return where it comes to solving these problems with electoral politics. The world is going to sink deeper into fascism and for awhile "order" will be maintained with ever-increasing police states.
In the UK in particular, Labor has predictably completely failed to address affordability issues. Keir Starmer will likely be ousted in a leadership challenge and the likely winner of the next election is Reform.
All so a handful of people can have even more wealth they just don't need.
also self entitlement, reliance on the government is at the highest, individual autonomy is at the lowest ever
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dwp-benefits-statis...
in addition to the usual free everything
free health care free roads free housing (often) free education
free riding and on top of it you get to complain about the rich!
It looks like most of those people are claiming State Pension / Pension Credit. Which doesn't make it not true, but it's maybe not what most people will think of first when you talk about benefit claimants.
there are no poor in UK, just wasted opportunities.
if you want to listen how massive inequality is created in UK, start by looking at immigration
Almost every year in almost every country will have:
- record GDP
- record government spending
- record total wages
- record stock market prices
- record asset prices
- record government debt
You need to put these values in relation to something, otherwise they don’t mean anything.
For the UK, take for instance the public sector net wealth (Ie. Everything the UK public collectively owns). It collapsed drastically, from 220bn in 2006 to -900 bn in 2025.
Absolutely off the charts. As a result of this, the government can’t provide health care and basic support for its citizens anymore.
Question: who has all this wealth now, who is the UK indebted to?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...
no, I speak in relative values to GDP
only during WW2 was spending higher.
on top of it UK does no longer spend on military or infrastructure, it goes overwhelmingly to consumption of dependent population
> Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY
It's not just nominal. You can see on the Institute for Fiscal Studies website that, as proportion of GDP, public spending has not been notably higher than since the second world war:
https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-data-item/uk-government-spe...
There's just no ability to get anything done. Whether it's big projects (HS2) or the basics (emptying bins, fixing potholes), nothing seems to work any more. And it feels like most of our tax is being converted directly into private profits while getting very little done.
That has two faces though, as it means if you are earning minimum wage or have some kind of disability and can't work it's probably a worse place to be, as the social support is a lot weaker.
On the other hand if you are earning a decent wage (think generic office worker) you can live a pretty good lifestyle. Safety, health care, education, housing, opportunties are all much better than the UK. Taxes are about the same, corruption I'd say is worse (on paper it's better), roads are worse (partially due to our climate being harsher).
"Budget 2025: how inflation and the two-child benefit cap has increased poverty"
And indeed this is an article against the 2-child benefit cap.
This is obviously full of warm feelings but ignores the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford. The article interviews a family with 4 young children and apparently no money, for example...
Regarding poverty in general, I think the main issue in the UK is that there has been no economic growth since the financial crisis and GDP per capita is decreasing, i.e. people are getting poorer, which bites those on low/no income first and most.
Consider carefully your sentences before making deep moral judgements about people and situations you might not be familiar with. That, I think, was their implied point.
This is also all on the back of people complaining about declining birth rates!
[0] being HN I know I'm running the risk of having have some contrarian edgelord arguing about parents' rights to innovate with calorie restriction and whatnot.
This sounds like a reason not to have them though. It's like saying the probability of X is high if I do Y. I do not want X to happen, but I will still do X even if I have no obligation to do so. Your decision might make sense to you but the way your comment reads it doesn't sound like a logical argument supporting your decision
In some senses having children at all isn’t that logical and is a choice lots of people aren’t making more often hence declining birth rates and worry over the impact of that in a global economy requiring growth.
I had to rely on food banks when my parents kicked me out at 16. I had to again my second year of marriage while I was still in graduate school and our car got hit, forcing us to use our food budget (and we did have a budget that we followed) for the family.
For the second time, I had kids, I had a good job, so did my wife, I was seeking higher education to advance in my career. But times were tight due to factors out of our control, and we needed help.
What should we have done differently?
> but ignores the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford.
Which seems quite relevant. The only fool-proof plan for anyone is to have zero kids, which is ridiculous.
My wife and I live beneath ours means, save as much as possible, live debt free, and we instead try to afford as much as possible for the kids.
A job loss or major accident/medical problem where we survive is terrifying from a financial PoV.
Unfortunately it almost customary here that any comments be interpreted in the most negative way possible for some reason. Perhaps to avoid discussion or, indeed, the tough, uncomfortable questions.
That’s the best interpretation, and the response still fits if less harshly worded.
Social issues can't be tackled without facing the tough questions head on.
My point is that I think that the best way to actually help families and children is to incentivise and teach not to have children you can't afford in the first place instead of infantilising people and to tell them that anything goes and the state will pick up the tab.
No-one, no-one replied to my comments on the point. Only intellectually lazy outrage.
It’s out of touch because it’s not merely a “tough” question.
It’s not a well-defined question and it may not be quantifiable.
It’s a terrible lens to view through, but financially speaking creating or extending your family is a major risk.
The easy questions: What does it even mean to say one has more children than one can afford? What standard is being used to decide when someone has gone past affordability?
The harder or impossible questions, and these are critically important: What factors play into the financial risk of having or extending a family? And can each factor be quantified?
I suspect the answer is no, because few or no private insurer is in business guaranteeing long-term employment terms.
Finally: Even if the probabilities can be accurately quantified, what risk threshold can we establish as responsible vs irresponsible?
And the burden is on the claim maker to establish that it’s possible, because as far as I know life in a market economy is a bit too messy to forecast in this manner.
If this inspires you or someone else to try, I wish you all the best and with my blessing.
Your quip implies decisions based on financial risk, which is just probabilities of a certain category.
Given that the market doesn’t insure to hedge against your “tough question”, it suggests (though doesn’t prove) it can’t really answer that question.
But if your suggestion and quip wasn’t meant to be thought through and modeled, then carry on.
Edit: tl:dr; I’m trying to understand your question beyond vagaries, which you’ve so far refused to clarify. Therefore, nobody can really answer your question.
Your thinking is entirely lazy. You don't want to do something so you need to find a "tough question" and a cheap policy.
Every country needs a next generation and if it isn't getting one it is because it is a miserly society that thinks it can poke and prod parents and still expect them to do all the work that is actually a shared responsibility.
It’s a very difficult area to navigate, politically. While it’s entirely understandable that there’s public discomfort with the idea that a family could bring in more in benefits than the average national wage (like, why the hell am I bothering with working in a system like that?! Am I the sucker here?), you also have to take into account that kids are going to need a certain amount of support, just to stand a chance in life.
So how do you ‘punish’ the parents, or even just balance the feeling of what’s ’right’, while not punishing innocent parties?
I agree though - the underlying cause is that the UK is stagnating, the average national wage is really not good anyway. And that’s the driver of a lot of the problems we see with anti-migrant sentiment, with benefits restrictions, with all sorts of stuff. If the country was thriving it wouldn’t be so much of an issue.
As others have said as well - people’s lives take all sorts of unexpected twists and turns. Jobs are lost, economies change and make whole sectors irrelevant. You can’t just assume everyone with more than two kids needing support has always been in that situation or always will be.
I think you've shown exactly how this debate and complaints against the 2-child cap is one-sided and refuses to consider the issue of family planning and living within one's means.
As I replied before, the argument that "life takes all sorts of unexpected turns" is completely disingenuous because we all know that this is not what happens in the vast majority of cases... so again an odd refusal to face reality and the key, tough questions.
Edit: why such bad faith in the replies? Most larger families that are poor and on benefits started that way, they are not victims of a sudden life accident. It is totally neutral to state this, I am not passing judgement. But apparently it is wrong to state it and wrong to suggest that people should start by living within their means. This is madness!
Edit 2: I'll leave this here (census 2021):
"In 2021, 1.2 million households contained three or more dependent children; when compared with households with one or two dependent children they were more likely to contain no employed adults" [1]
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
> we all know that this is not what happens in the vast majority of cases...
I’d love to see your evidence on that.
(Your restating it in your edit, still absent any evidence, doesn’t make it any more compelling. This is not bad faith, you are making factual assertions. Are they true? How do we know?
What is bad faith is saying that other people’s ideas are “disingenuous” or demonstrative of a failure to consider other viewpoints.
Your second edit tells us that 19.8% of families with three or more kids had no employed adult, in 2021, vs 11.9% in smaller families. It’s an interesting stat but it doesn’t give a full picture or confirm for us that the “vast majority” of those affected by the cap are long-term benefit recipients. Perhaps they are, even then it doesn’t address the root concern that the cap punishes children for their parents’ life decisions.
I don’t know what the right answer is. It may be there is no good one. As I implied before I’m not necessarily on the other side of this, I think it’s complex.)
No, we don’t know that, you’re talking from a point of pure prejudice. Unless you have some actual evidence to back up what you’re saying, I would hold back on those types of blanket statements about people in poverty.
It's not 'can't afford kids', it's 'don't prioritise having kids'. And IMHO, they've been taught to think this way. To put career and materialism above family. There's also the constant messaging about an impending climate apocalypse or the rise of new fascism/nazism - which helps justify 'I don't want to bring new life into this world' logic.
Other cultures continue to have kids even in relative poverty, they don't choose to stop having families because times are tough.
There's Africa, sure, and maybe Mongolia. But it's not clear that it will hold or that they have any secret sauce beyond just not having been yet hit with the full blown modernity.
What if reducing birth rates at this point in time is rational?
On the employment side, we have rapidly advancing automation and AI that are dramatically reducing the work force required to maintain society.
On the ecological side we have a combination of climate change, soil depletion, and many other factors that at least threaten to impose a bottleneck on us. We are smart and adaptive but adapting takes time and energy. During the transition it may be harder for us to support vastly huge populations.
Put those things together and… are we, in fact, doing the rational thing here?
Keep in mind that no trend is forever.
In the 1970s people predicted global Malthusian collapse in part by extrapolating past birth rates infinitely far into the future.
Seems to me that population collapse alarmists are doing the same thing. “If this trend continues forever there will be nobody left!”
If rational people stop reproducing, all we'll have left is irrational people.
More simple , it's not sustainable because new workers dont earn much, people live longer and % from the state budget just keeps growing.
Think of it as income growth getting slower and liabilities growing just bigger with more old people in terms of %. how can you or we fix that?
This is an idealogical argument more than a factual one. It certainly appears to be sustainable.
Step back from the gdp/debt ratio figures though. The argument is really only about whether a decreasing workforce can support an increasing population of retirees.
If government pays retirees then retirees get a direct payout, and use it to buy goods and services that younger people provide.
If (like in Australia) we make everyone invest through their life then each has a well-funded retirement account largely tied up in the stock-market. This represents part ownership of assets in the productive economy, which can be converted to funds that retired people will use ... to buy goods and services that younger people provide.
Where the money comes from seems less important to me than the fact if there is an ever increasing population of retirees, then one way or another they are supported by working people.
The mechanism is just an abstraction. The demographic problem is probably more real.
Retirement for all was an artifact of rapidly growing populations and shorter life spans. Back 50-100 years ago you had each young person supporting maybe 0.1 to 0.25 retired people, and a retirement age in the 60s meant you’d get a few years before now easily treatable heart conditions would kill you. (Everyone smoked too, which “helped” clear the retirement rolls.)
In a world with even a stable population (let alone a declining one) retirement isn’t viable. Or at the very least the age will be raised a lot. I could see 80 as a retirement age in 2050.
Honestly an institutionalized retirement age in the 60s today is unfair and exploitative toward young people. It’s generational economic cannibalism, stopping young people from establishing themselves to fund the old.
Well, lower birth rates are the perpetual excuse for more immigration. Even Trump made a U-turn on H1B and he's now OK with more immigration. Low birth rates and high immigration give credence to the various "replacement" theories and become a political force that can bring nationalists to power.
Next, lower birth rates could be "rational" if they led to higher standard of living and better quality of life, but that's not the case now, in fact we are seeing the opposite because less children make the work force cheaper thus increasing profits. Increased profits go towards increased power and influence which make the trend irreversible.
> During the transition it may be harder for us to support vastly huge populations.
Nonsensical in the current environment of birth rates below replacement level and falling.
> In the 1970s people predicted
Not people - the mass media. They are just noise and BS which should not be considered in a serious conversation - one way or the other.
Or perhaps, and I know this is a wild idea, we could attempt to address these problems instead of complaining about the "messaging" ?
If the two child benefit cap was in place then, we would have been in food poverty in one of the richest nations on earth.
Not every situation is as mind numbingly simple as you paint it. Most people don’t have additional children in an attempt to game the system. That’s a moronic point of view.
quite the juicy implication there, chief
> political willpower is not enough
That the economy is in terrible shape shouldn't get in the way of the rich getting richer. No one knows where all that money is coming from but people are also miraculously to poor to buy, build or rent a home. With all that nice scarcity in the market, whatever units are left make a lovely investment opportunity to put all that extra money into which again feeds into the scarcity. So much winning it's tiring!
It's funny that for some people, the answer of the enormous failings of Marxism is always "We need even more Marxism!"
But you are free to give us an example of a planned economy that worked properly and brought freedom and prosperity to their citizens. Just one single example will suffice.
P.S. I see the downvotes, but I don't see a single example. Just one...
This is the fact, and I would say that almost no one is immune to money offer. (You have to be very financially secured. But then, you are probably from the similar class as corporate people. -> simulate level of greed)
If you (as governmental employee) have some issue to solve, e.g. alimony or faster mortgage repayment, you are vulnerable… and you have to have very strong conscience not to accept any “services”. It is similar to be strong not to ear sugar or fat-loaded chips or drinking…
So if that's your metric, US is at par with China.
US food is affordable. To the extent that food in China is cheaper, I'm pretty sure the main reason is dramatically lower cost of labor.
But the premise of your comment is just wrong.
Money doesn't grow on trees. It's taken by the government from people.
Subsidies don't make things cheaper. They just obscure the real cost and can be used by politicians to buy votes from pickFrom([farmers,students,renters,teachers,...])
If US government didn't spend $35 billion/year subsidizing food production, food would be more expensive but an average worker would have $214 more per year to spend on food.
If you still don't have enough, it's out of sheer incompetence and greed
But as housing has been commoditized, it will be very tough fight to change it. Even people in governments can be land lords…
All other branches are commoditized as well and owned by big players who own markets.
People love saying “it’s just capital seeking returns” as if that explains anything. It doesn’t. Accumulating money isn’t the issue. Being able to buy policy outcomes is the issue. Once private interests can tilt regulation, spending, and national infrastructure in their favour, you no longer have a market problem. You have a governance problem.
Food banks didn’t explode because Jeff Bezos has too many zeroes in his account. They exploded because governments funnel public money into offshore middlemen, contractors billing ten times the real cost, multinationals avoiding scrutiny, and regulators pretending this is all fine. That’s not the “cycle of capital”. That’s a parasitic state captured by rent-seekers.
Also, removing the option to have multiple jobs?
Well, not necessarily but a cap of the number of hour before you vastly exceed the poverty threshold is obviously a must have be it by law or sheer force of lore and habits. Otherwise this is in practice driving society to tolerate slavery, just tagged differently. If all that an individual is able doing all days through is serving mercantile work, this person represent a net negative to its society.
Yes, I am not of the view that a public official should have a private career too. It creates influence.
Take MI5. Their remit explicitly includes safeguarding the democratic system. Yet when you’ve got a government holding cosy meetings with global asset managers and, like magic, Digital ID turns into a flagship national policy nobody voted for, where are they? Nowhere. They’re busy pumping out LinkedIn-based “espionage alerts” about Chinese headhunters while ignoring policy capture happening in broad daylight. They don’t even need the Prime Minister’s blessing to investigate that kind of threat. They just… don’t.
So yes, we have oligarchic corporatism. But the real failure is that the institutions meant to keep it in check have basically checked out.
To me the apparent incompetence of the SFO is better explained as a mechanism for the UK gov to double dip on bribes / campaign donations when the first one was insufficient.
I think the effective anti corruption institutional culture was built when there was competition between empires and it was in the empires interest to do so.
There is still a general perception that the UK has comparatively low levels of corruption but I attribute this to low levels of petty corruption. It is still in the interest of a corrupt state that lower level corruption is effectively policed as they are in competition. So it’s very possible that the majority of the population will not be privy to corruption while at the same time the majority of important decisions made are corrupted.
ultimately its a very politically difficult situation since you're entering the quagmire of what constitutes being poor. that's a discourse where political careers go never to return - easier to just throw your hands up in the air and just give everyone as much free food as they want.
ofcourse this then leads to the discussion of "wait... why don't we just do that anyway? arne't we a first world country?" but then you wind up with a whole enterprise of getting food for free (or steep discount) only to sell it to another community that doesn't have access to it and taking a profit. i think a similar problem (?) exists in the US, with SNAP food rations being (re?)-sold to latin americans.