Below is an extract of a post published on Metro titled "In the Brexit haze, issues killing thousands and hitting millions are being ignored"
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Via: Metro
With just under seven months to go until 29 March 2019 when Brexit will definitely be decided and we’ll hear no more about it, we’ll have Brexit filling the front pages for a while yet. There is rightly all sorts of debate about the potential of a second referendum, if the Chequers proposal – or indeed any proposal – will be ratified by the EU or Westminster, if either party’s leader will survive until next year and just what Brexit means beyond meaning Brexit. But with all the attention on what happens after every major agreement with every major economy goes in the bin – or the sideshow of ‘will Theresa May/Jeremy Corbyn survive the impending coup(s)?’ – the UK’s domestic and global policies are being overlooked. Now we’re back in September and it’s the Commons’ first day back after summer holidays, there are huge issues both at home and abroad that risk being ignored in the haze of Britain tending to Brexit and party struggles. Millions of lives risk being put on hold while we wait for the Brexit fallout. *Spoiler warning, there are lot of things with ‘crisis’ in the title* Universal Credit and poverty The so-called living wage is now £7.83. The actual living wage would be £8.75 or £10.20 in London, according to the Living Wage Foundation. This means that the slack has to be picked up with benefits and tax credits or, as it rolls out, universal credit. This is the benefits system set to replace all other benefits, everything from jobseekers’ allowance and housing benefit to working tax credit and support allowance. The rollout of Universal Credit in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, has seen people rely on foodbanks, its own council reports. More widely, foodbank referral has increased more quickly in areas where the Universal Credit scheme has rolled out, The Trussell Trust says. The government says it does not accept these finding but has not done its own research and does not intend to at this time. Mayor Of London Sadiq Khan has called on the government to halt its rollout while ‘serious issues’ are fixed. Since the living/minimum wage has been introduced, the government says that ‘the lowest paid will have seen a £2,000-boost to their income’ and this is both true and not. Those on minimum wage will earn £2,000 more but are receiving less in welfare payments and less in government help. The Child Poverty Action Group says families with two children lose £1,100, lone parent families will lose £2,380 a year on average and families with with three kids stand to lose £2,540. More people than ever are using foodbanks to get help and emergency food supplies. Universal Credit, according to charities and Conservative councils, are driving up the need for them and taking over £5bn off the benefit bill while constituents are saying they need help more than ever. The government tried to delete child poverty by removing the metrics required to calculate it but that has since been overruled The reality is that around 30% of children live in poverty – around 4.1 million – according to Child Poverty Action Group. This is all happening while homelessness has increased. ‘The number of homeless families and individuals placed in temporary accommodation [in England] jumped to 78,000 last year, an 8% rise on the year and a massive 60% rise since 2012,’ housing charity Crisis reports. ‘The number of homeless households placed in B&Bs rose particularly quickly, with a 10% rise on the year. If trends continue as they are the research reveals that 100,000 households will be living in B&Bs, hostels and other temporary accommodation.’ Deaths of those considered homeless have more than doubled in five years. That this isn’t front and centre of neither government nor opposition policy is troubling. The continuing refugee crisis This picture, as horrible as it is, was meant to change the plight of refugees (Picture: Getty Images) The haunting picture of the body of Syrian child Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach circulated exactly three years ago. His father talked a year later about how nothing had really changed and we’re another two years past that. Metro.co.uk reported back from a refugee camp at the start of 2018 that residents saw as a ‘prison’. The UNHCR estimates more than 1.8 million migrants have come to Europe since 2014 and, though numbers into Europe have dropped because of agreements in the Balkans, Turkey and Libya, the displacement of people hasn’t gone away. The Sweden Democrats, a far-right party increasing in popularity, has promised an exodus of asylum seekers and more moderate Swedish parties have promised to curb help. Germany, after being one of the few countries to welcome asylum seekers in a meaningful way, has tightened its borders after a severe backlash which threatened to unseat Chancellor Angela Merkel. France voted to tighten the rules around asylum in April (more on that below). British Red Cross chief executive Mike Adamson wrote for Metro.co.uk two weeks ago that ‘this time last year, the world looked on in horror as over half a million people escaped violence in Myanmar and fled to Bangladesh in one of the largest sudden movements of people in recent memory… [but] urgent needs remain acute and we still face huge challenges every single day.’ Of the 1.8m displaced people, the UK has promised to take 20,000 by 2020 and currently has settled around 11,000. It is argued that Britain has a big responsibility for the reasons refugees leave their home country, Even without focusing just on areas of conflict, director of Health Poverty Action Martin Drewry has argued that ‘over $1tn (£780bn) in illicit financial flows was stolen from poor countries [in a year and] the UK is at the heart of this theft’. Hunger from extreme poverty and safety from persecution and/or war are the biggest reasons for migration and seeking refugee status. Britain’s role in conflicts causing displacement is a complex topic that warrants scrutiny but difficult to distill simply. But in June alone, according to the UNHCR, ‘one person died for every seven who crossed the Central Mediterranean’. Over 1,000 refugees have died at sea for the fifth year in a row. It’s now up to around 1,600 in 2018 with the total well above 30,000 of people dying while trying to migrate in the last 25 years. While torture, arbitrary detentions, war and human rights abuses are still happening across the globe. it’s not a problem that is going to go away and one that must be addressed head on. It’s difficult, as it was was three years ago, to argue that Britain is full of foreigners or that it has played its full part in the refugee crisis. The Snooper’s Charter The law will need to be changed significantly (Picture: Metro.co.uk) The Investigatory Powers Act 2016, or the Snooper’s Charter as it became to be known, is unlawful, according to the Court Of Appeal. The Act, as it was set out, was aimed at making the dark arts of surveillance and data monitoring more transparent in the wake of the Edward Snowden scandal, the government said. This was with the aspiration of making ‘further provision about investigatory powers and national security’. Human rights campaigning group Liberty said it was to ‘give the authorities the power to collect information about everything we do and say online – on our mobiles and computers – by tapping directly into communications channels, ordering companies to hold on to our data and hacking into people’s devices’. Liberty won and the government has until 1 November to amend the legislation. What that means in practice is yet to be seen. This issue has a huge impact on the freedom of the internet, the right to privacy and the right MI5 and other police services have to look into digital properties to find evidence to solve crimes. It is seen by many as a slippery slope into making sure every piece of information about every person is collected by default and used to create a big picture of populations. The High Court found that the Act could be used even if no serious crime was suspected and could be used without independent oversight from a court or an independent body. The right to free speech online is under close scrutiny anyway because social networks are setting limits on where free speech ends, like with banning alt-right activist Alex Jones from most social networks. But what happens next needs to be watched closely because, unmonitored, it could mean we’re all then monitored without knowing. More: Donald Trump People are burning Nike trainers in protest against backing kneeling quarterback Trump baby ‘will fly again’ when the US president visits Ireland George Bush sneakily gives Michelle Obama sweets during John McCain’s memorial service Section 60 powers being granted for stop and search To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video In 2014, then Home Secretary Theresa May launched a sweeping revamp of Section 60 (or stop and search) powers. She said at the time it was because the power to stop and search was being misused to such a degree that relations between the public and police were being harmed. Section 60 orders were granted 106 times in 2017/18, or twice a week, in London. That’s quadrupled from a figures a year earlier. Police were granted special powers in Sheffield over the May bank holiday and similar provisions were in place for London’s Notting Hill Carnival. While knife crime increases, stop and search powers are disproportionately used against black and minority ethnic people and can be conducted without ‘reasonable suspicion’. There is a huge problem with the increase in knife crime, up 22% in England and Wales since last year. But blaming it on gang violence or a genre of music won’t help. Reintroducing powers seen by the now prime minister as ‘a waste of police time’, ‘unfair, especially to young, black men’ and ‘bad for public confidence in the police’ strikes critics as a backwards step. An east London gang cop might think stop and search works but his local MP Diane Abbott believes it can ‘inflame the relationship between the community and the police, which only undermines effective policing.’ The widening divisions between communities and the state, particularly with the impact of austerity and all the reaction from Grenfell, cannot be ignored. Engagement needs to be worked hard at and hope needs to be built into disenfranchised communities from the ground up, meaningful with tangible action and results in partnership with communities and not just aiming ‘initiatives’ towards them. I reported on the London Riots in 2011 and I have seen first hand what happens when people believe they are being ignored. The housing crisis A combination of rent prices and economic turmoil has increased homeless numbers (Picture: Rex Features) Alongside the sharp increase in homelessness mentioned above, the reality of housing is a surreal existence for most. While effort have been made not to talk about Brexit here, the governor of the Bank Of England has made the issue unavoidable: Mark Carney has said that house prices could drop by a third depending on what happens. House prices can’t go up any more because they’re not affordable for most people. They can’t go down because the middle-aged, middle-classes would lose financial assets. The average house now costs 7.8 times average earnings, the Office For National Statistics says. This means the average person cannot afford the average house. Building more houses won’t solve it, says UCL researcher Neil May. Building more houses is crucial, the Independent’s Nathan Akehurst says (though he does go on to quantify that). The reality is a lot more complicated than one silver bullet, with housing benefit complications as Universal Credit rolls out (as discussed above) and with foreign investors in property either doubling down or getting out of the country after next year. Housing charity Shelter says ‘there simply aren’t enough decent, affordable homes’ but the right to a room or home of one’s own is a huge issue. It was said to be one of the key issues of the 2017 election but with so much of Britain’s wealth tied up in property, and so much of the class divide tied up in it, what happens with house prices and availability have huge ramifications on the country as a whole. Mr Carney argued in 2014 that the housing market posed the biggest risk to the economy. Brexit aside, it’s difficult to argue with that same point now. And he should know, some analysts are blaming Carney for the Canadian house price ‘explosion’. More: Showbiz Why Eminem and Machine Gun Kelly are dissing each other Aretha Franklin family furious with pastor’s ‘distasteful’ political eulogy at funeral Family of Instagram star who died on luxury yacht are told 'don’t look at her body’ The rise in extremism With all the attention on Trump, further right-wing nationalism and anti-Islamic/semitic rhetoric has worked its way into governments and slipped surprisingly under the British radar: Austria has a coalition government involving the far right. The far right are ‘poised’ for big wins in Sweden Italy’s The League is a major part of the coalition government and is calling for mass deportations Germany’s third-largest party wants to close the country off from migration all together Similar in Finland with third-biggest Finns Party aspiring for the same zero migration policy Hungary’s status as a democracy is now questioned and discussion of ‘Muslim invaders’ comes from the prime minister himself Poland has a government that experts worry is trying to bring about an end to democracy and preserve its Christian ‘identity’ In Britain, the Home Office is now tracking an increase in right-wing extremist ‘people of interest’. ‘There was a 28% increase in the number of extreme right-wing referrals in 2016/17 (968) when compared with 2015/16 (759),’ a Home Office report said. ‘Islamist extremism monitoring is still higher, though the Home Office says figures ‘decreased by 26% over the same time (2015/16, 4,997; 2016/17, 3,704)’. ‘We are facing a surging threat from far-right terrorism and violent extremism,’ Hope Not Hate chief executive Nick Lowles told Time. ‘It is vitally important now that police and the government do more to crack down on the peddlers of hate and those pushing a civil war rhetoric. Combined with burgeoning online hatred, directed particularly towards Muslims, we fear further violence from the extreme right in the months to come.’ Hope Not Hate has even said that a civil war on Islam is being planned. Martin Niemoller’s poem First They Came is regularly cited around the rise of the Far Right. Critics of the movements are already saying they’re coming for them. Funding of the NHS Public sector spending could be drawn out sector by sector (education particularly) but the NHS is a good weather vane for the state of the public sector and current policy thinking around big/small state. Theresa May promised an extra £20bn of NHS funding by 2023 as a ‘birthday present’ but, while welcomed, it wasn’t without question. This will help stem further decline in the health service, but it’s simply not enough to address the fundamental challenges facing the NHS, or fund essential improvements to services that are flagging,’ Anita Charlesworth, director of research and economics at the Health Foundation, said. If funding had increased since 2010 at the average amount it had it had since records began up to that point (4%), NHS funding would be reaching £172.4bn by 2020/21, Metro.co.uk research found. Under the most optimistic interpretation of the £20bn extra ‘present’ would mean £147bn is spent. The age-old assumption is that Conservatives want to make the state smaller and Labour wants to make the state bigger but Conservatives are still spending a larger proportion of GDP on the public sector than Labour did in the first few years after 1997. But with the NHS being seen as a ‘sacred cow’ that must have big promises attached, if a big spending promise is met with ‘not enough’, the ‘squeeze’ on public spending and its wide-ranging impact has still yet to be fully felt. Everything else There is still a perceived pensions crisis, global warming isn’t going anywhere nor is the obesity crisis. There are still wars we’re involved in, complicit in or responsible for, and the never-ending saga based on the whims of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Xi Jingping or, to a lesser extent, Kim Jong-Un continue to change the world order’s agenda every day. But you’d need at least another 2,500 words to go into that. (Top picture: Dave Anderson)
