The UN says the UK government has immiserated its people with “austerity” policies.

Philip Alston, the UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, ended a two-week fact-finding mission to the UK with a stinging declaration that levels of child poverty were “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster”, even though the UK is the world’s fifth largest economy,

About 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty and 1.5 million are destitute, being unable to afford basic essentials, he said, citing figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. He highlighted predictions that child poverty could rise by 7% between 2015 and 2022, possibly up to a rate of 40%.

“It is patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty,” he said, adding that compassion had been abandoned during almost a decade of austerity policies that had been so profound that key elements of the postwar social contract, devised by William Beveridge more than 70 years ago, had been swept away.

He pointed out that it’s a political choice. Of course it is. The rich and powerful want a huge supply of cheap compliant labor, and you can’t get that if there are no poor people.

He told a press conference in London:

• Austerity Britain was in breach of four UN human rights agreements relating to women, children, disabled people and economic and social rights. “If you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place,” he said.
• The limit on benefits payments to only the first two children in a family was “in the same ballpark” as China’s one-child policy because it punished people who had a third child.
• Cuts of 50% to council budgets were slashing at Britain’s “culture of local concern” and “damaging the fabric” of society.
• The middle classes would “find themselves living in an increasingly hostile and unwelcoming society because community roots are being broken”.

It’s not just the UK.

Alston’s report follows similar audits of extreme poverty in China, Saudi Arabia, Ghana, Mauritania and the US. Donald Trump’s White House administration launched a furious response after the US was accused of pursuing policies that deliberately forced millions of Americans into financial ruin while lavishing vast riches on the super-wealthy.

Well of course he was furious.