Does Olivier De Schutter not know what a Tory is?
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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What if, and hear me out here, we were to turn the executives into a fine, nutritious powder (with many uses!) and distribute it to the poor?
I'm in! 
AHH, that cools the fire
£85 is insane to live on, is that part of a separate payment? The jobseeker's, dole, disability in Ireland is over twice that. Is social insurance a separate provision?
You can also get Council Tax benefit, and Housing Benefit (more of a Landlord Benefit, really).
Council tax benefit saves you either some or all of the local council tax payment (~£1000 - £2500 per year in most places). Amusingly, it tends to be cheaper in wealthy areas.
Landlord benefit pays a percentage of what the Landlord asks for rent, generally compared to average rents in the area you live - so that might be £2000 - £3000 per year where I live in the North, but £10000 per year down South somewhere. You don't see any of that money personally, but it helps to make good headlines for angry "newspapers" and government policies.
There's additional bits of payment for caring for children under a particular age, disability etc, but generally, yeah, that's your lot.
You guys have to pay over 1k pounds to your local towns?
How much you pay is proportional to how much your property is worth (see Wikipedia for deets)
Okay, so like property taxes here. Gotcha. I was just interested in different methods of collecting funds there are.
I wish we had a proper property tax here that was based on house and land value that was the same nationally. With the way council tax works richer areas, which almost always have more expensive houses and land, pay less annually than the same property in the cheaper area and yet their local council is better funded. A national system is the only way to reverse this.
I don't know where your property tax goes, but that might overlap with our Stamp Duty, which is basically our tax on buying a house and is a nationwide government thing. Council Tax I think goes to your local council and is used for things like bin collection, buses, potholes, and local community events (and it keeps going up because the Tories keep cutting the amount that councils get from the government).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, cited research showing universal credit payments of £85 a week for single adults over 25 were “grossly insufficient” and described the UK’s main welfare system as “a leaking bucket”.
In an interview with the Guardian five years after his predecessor, Philip Alston, angered the Conservative government by accusing it of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”, the Belgian lawyer risked a fresh confrontation by saying: “Things have got worse.”
De Schutter said the UK had signed an international covenant that created a duty to provide a level of social protection which ensured an adequate standard of living but that it was being broken, with welfare payments falling behind costs for the poorest people.
“If you look at the price of housing, electricity, the very high levels of inflation for food items over the past couple of years, I believe that the £85 a week for adults is too low to protect people from poverty, and that is in violation of article nine of the international covenant on economic, social [aand cultural] rights.
According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in 2022 3.8 million people experienced destitution (struggling to afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed).
Alston, an internationally respected human rights lawyer, said “much of the glue that has held British society together since the second world war has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos”.
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