Fast-track rising poverty in the UK is expected to worsen due to economy-crippling policies peddled by politicians and corporate media as necessary to stop the spread of Covid-19, a new study has found. 

Two million families will soon lack essentials. Unable to feed or warm themselves, hundreds of thousands will add to the funeral-cortège of mortgage defaulters.

More than a million households totalling 2.4 million people were destitute in the UK at some point over the course of 2019, the research, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), concluded.

The dismal data marks a 35 per cent rise in impoverished households compared with 2017. Some 550,000 children were deprived of basic necessities in 2019, a shocking increase of 54 per cent when compared to figures from 2017. 

While economic hardship has become more pronounced over the past several years, the organisation, which fights to improve living standards among the country’s poor, said that destitution levels are projected to double in the coming months as a result of ‘the pandemic and associated economic lockdown.’ The grim forecast takes into account all relevant policy measures such as bolstered welfare programmes. 

The study defines destitution as lacking two or more lifeline essentials, including shelter, food, heating, lighting, clothing, and toiletries. The term is also used to describe households with incomes that are so low that they are unable to purchase these items for themselves.

According to the JRF, more than half of the destitute individuals in the UK struggle to get enough food, while 49 per cent said they lacked suitable clothing, and 43 per cent said they didn’t have basic toiletries. One-third of destitute households said they had no income. 

The findings come as the UK struggles to navigate what has been described as the worst recession in over 300 years, on this occasion a deliberately contrived recession to reduce the nation’s stock to bargain-basement prices.

Michael Walsh, author and journalist: ‘As 2021 unfolds venture capitalists and banking house vultures will swoop to pick over the carcasses of dozens of deliberately suicided nations.

This is a repeat of Russia and Germany (1919) and the Soviet Union (1990). Poverty is a slippery slope into poverty-related deaths. Population reduction is a bonus for vulture industrialists and corporations. Large low-income populations are surplus to requirements. The unemployed unproductive working classes are expensive to keep.’

In August, researchers from the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) and the Church of England surveyed 285 low-income households and found that eight in 10 had taken a sizable financial hit since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The same month, the UK officially entered recession after its GDP plummeted by 20 per cent. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) cited the UK’s protracted lockdown measures, which shuttered all ‘non-essential’ (small privately-owned) businesses, as a major factor behind the severe economic slump. Source