St Margaret the Queen in the Financial Times
On January 12th 2021, the Financial Times published an article about the new food boxes supplied via the UK government, intended to feed children from families affected by poverty.
To many Britons Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United striker, will for ever be associated with the impact of the pandemic on the country’s most vulnerable citizens. The footballer’s campaign to ensure deprived children continue to receive state-financed meals during school lockdowns has repeatedly shamed Boris Johnson’s Conservative government into belated action. The latest scandal he has drawn attention to — photos of food packages that seem to fall short of their supposed value and inadequate to feed children — highlights one of the government’s main failures through the pandemic: an apparent ignorance of how the poorest live and constant need to play catch-up when the reality is pointed out.
Even before the pandemic the UK provided less support for those out of work than comparable countries. After a year of joblessness, Britons receive an average of 17 per cent of their pre-unemployment income compared to 59 per cent in Germany, 54 per cent in Spain or 34 per cent in New Zealand, according to statistics from the OECD. The long wait for benefit payments to arrive was already driving destitution. Those who receive universal credit for the first time have to wait five weeks or more for their first payment.
This forces many claimants into rent arrears or to rely on food banks. Now the pandemic has exposed many more to the threadbare nature of Britain’s welfare state, often for the first time. The number of people on universal credit, a welfare scheme that consolidated different benefits aimed at the low paid, has more than doubled from 2.7m in November 2019 to 5.8m a year later. Many of these new claimants will never have anticipated relying on the welfare system.
