Jeremy Hunt has left UK to rot in poverty. So we must take matters into our own hands

theguardian.com:

P overty will last until doomsday if this Conservative government is all that confronts it. The so-called “budget for growth”, more accurately titled the “budget for growth in poverty”, has done nothing for our271,000 homeless people, the 400,000 children who tonight will sleep without a bed of their own, the 14 million condemned to damp or substandard housing. Nor will it prevent suffering for the 7.5m UK households who are in fuel poverty.

The threat posed by rising destitution is now so serious that hard-pressed, under-resourced charities will have to give up on helping the hungry so they can focus on the starving, opt out of helping the inadequately housed so they can help the homeless and turn their attention from supporting the down-at-heel to rescuing the down and out.

Food prices in the shops have risen 18% in a year, with many basic items shooting up by twice as much – baked beans up 35%, ketchup up 39%, tomato soup up 73% – creating middle-class poverty in its wake, with 9.7 million adults already skipping or cutting back on meals and six in 10 adults unable to afford other basic essentials.

I have always thought of budgets as more than just a catalogue of figures and headline announcements: budgets are moral documents which tell us what kind of country we are and aspire to be. In the chancellor’s accompanying budget documentation, the Office for Budget Responsibility conceded that British families are now facing a two-year long 6% squeeze on standards of living – which are expected to be lower in 2026 than in 2019. So his first and central priority should have been the relief of this growing poverty. Instead, Jeremy Hunt gave an astonishing £4bn over the next five years to the richest few. Yes, he trumpeted the