Because ‘poverty’ is a moving waterline generally pretty divorced from material circumstance in developed countries.
> Around one-third of Britain’s children – about 4.5 million – now live in relative poverty, often measured as living in a household that earns below 60% of the national median income after housing costs, a government report published in April found.
It makes no sense for poverty to be a fully relative measure, it should be against a basket of goods.
Children are in poverty because some people grab vastly more than their share of the world's wealth, and then they buy legislation and elections, to take even more.
A challenge is that usually, within an attempt at a fair and equitable society, some TPOS will try to be a king or billionaire, or to ride the coattails of one. The society needs to tell those people no, and get them mental health care, to heal whatever makes them act like a TPOS.
Its a misnomer to say British kids live in poverty. Poverty is living without access to food and education. these are guaranteed for them. If they are worried of going under dressed to school then that is not poverty.
Because resources are finite, and already divided amongst older generations. It's a basic flaw in economy that the older folks don't want to talk about.
You could ask the same question, why are the kings/emperors/despots and their rich oligarch friends of any given country XYZ wealthy and living luxurious lavish lives in palaces and private yachts etc while the common folks live in slums?
You can debate the exact statistics all you want, but to anyone not well off right now, both in the US and the UK, it's pretty clear there's a growing cost of living crisis and governments are failing to address it. Frankly a lot of people here have no idea what living in poverty means.
"Richest" means nothing in 2025, given the UK has a great track record of not understanding what they have and selling off their prized companies and assets overseas. This decline has only accelerated since then, beyond poverty.
It's gotten to the point where this Labour government is considering an IMF loan given the dire state of the countries finances.
I predict that the UK will become a third world country by the end of 2038 if they don't reverse this urgently.
The advancement of AI, the UK is again behind and "AGI" or "ASI" will make their decline 1000x even worse before at least 2030.
I find it interesting to read the threads on this topic. There is little discussion of how to fix the problem, mostly conservatives trying to disengenuously argue that the problem is somehow exagerated. This is absurd of course. What's the point of living in a developed nation if we still have large numbers of people living in poverty? The ideal outcome is that there aren't any.
After 2008, others pressed Keynesian stimulus. The UK chose Hayek. Austerity. Councils took the hit. Services vanished. Early-years centres. Youth work. Local welfare. The safety net thinned, then tore. Families slipped through.
Then Covid. Then Ukraine. Prices surged. Wages didn’t. A decade of inflation stacked up while pay stood still. For many, that was a silent pay cut.
Truss turned strain into crisis. Unfunded tax cuts. Markets panicked. Gilt yields spiked. Mortgage costs jumped overnight. Another blow to households already on the edge.
So we end up where CNN reports: record child poverty, even among full-time workers; parents unable to cover the basics as the social architecture collapses.
Into that anger steps Reform UK. They offer a protest vote. But their plan is the same old mix: deep cuts, a smaller state, and migration as the scapegoat. The very recipe that helped bring us here.
20 comments
[ 175 ms ] story [ 1424 ms ] threadhttps://lite.cnn.com/2025/11/24/uk/britain-child-poverty-int...
> Around one-third of Britain’s children – about 4.5 million – now live in relative poverty, often measured as living in a household that earns below 60% of the national median income after housing costs, a government report published in April found.
It makes no sense for poverty to be a fully relative measure, it should be against a basket of goods.
A challenge is that usually, within an attempt at a fair and equitable society, some TPOS will try to be a king or billionaire, or to ride the coattails of one. The society needs to tell those people no, and get them mental health care, to heal whatever makes them act like a TPOS.
You could ask the same question, why are the kings/emperors/despots and their rich oligarch friends of any given country XYZ wealthy and living luxurious lavish lives in palaces and private yachts etc while the common folks live in slums?
It's gotten to the point where this Labour government is considering an IMF loan given the dire state of the countries finances.
I predict that the UK will become a third world country by the end of 2038 if they don't reverse this urgently.
The advancement of AI, the UK is again behind and "AGI" or "ASI" will make their decline 1000x even worse before at least 2030.
Then Covid. Then Ukraine. Prices surged. Wages didn’t. A decade of inflation stacked up while pay stood still. For many, that was a silent pay cut.
Truss turned strain into crisis. Unfunded tax cuts. Markets panicked. Gilt yields spiked. Mortgage costs jumped overnight. Another blow to households already on the edge.
So we end up where CNN reports: record child poverty, even among full-time workers; parents unable to cover the basics as the social architecture collapses.
Into that anger steps Reform UK. They offer a protest vote. But their plan is the same old mix: deep cuts, a smaller state, and migration as the scapegoat. The very recipe that helped bring us here.
Send help :-(
The UK chose both. Vast amounts of QE and correlated ZIRP. Additionally austerity.