Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown Predicts U.K. Is Facing a Winter of ‘Dire Poverty’

Aug. 10, 2022 (EIRNS)—On Aug. 6 former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned in the Guardian that the U.K. is facing a winter of “dire poverty” and skyrocketing energy costs. Although a former Labour Party Prime Minister, Brown urged outgoing Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson and leading Tory candidates Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and former Chancellor of Exchequer Rishi Sunak to come together to establish an emergency budget to deal with the situation. Johnson turned this down.

Brown forecast that the continued rise in fuel prices will place 35 million people in 13 million households—constituting 49.6% of the U.K.’s population—at risk of poverty in October. This, he said, is a “financial timebomb.... There is nothing moral about indifferent leaders condemning millions of vulnerable and blameless children and pensioners to a winter of dire poverty.” He said that if the trio he named don’t act, Parliament should be recalled to force them to do so.

He recounted scenes from his own Fife County in Scotland, which he said remind him of scenes he read about from the 1930s: undernourished children, “pensioners choosing whether to feed their electricity meters or themselves,” and nurses having “to queue up at their food bank.” Even charities are having difficulty meeting the needs of people, he declared. “Britain is creating a left-out generation of young boys and girls” whose childhoods “are starting to resemble shameful scenes from a Dickens novel,” he said. The expected fuel price rise in January, will leave 54% of the population in fuel poverty, he warned.