Madam,

Graham Hogg rightly indicts the Tory Party for their Austerity outrage.

What the UN Rapporteur says about this policy is totally revealing: “The experience of the United Kingdom, especially since 2010, underscores the conclusion that poverty is a political choice. Austerity could easily have spared the poor, if the political will had existed to do so.”

Poverty, making people poor, is the consequence of Tory Austerity. They say it’s over, but it isn’t. Going back to what current spending should be, doesn’t make good the losses from previous cuts.

And this shortfall is added to by the appalling way that Universal Credit is being implemented. The late payments the system offers (five weeks) means the very poorest among us have to go into debt to live. That debt is one they may never get out of.

The payments system has been digitalised and something like 53 per cent of people on low incomes do not use broadband at home. Consequently 46 per cent of claimants needed help applying.

But of course, libraries, computer facilities and staff training, have been cut in the long years of austerity, and going back to paying only running costs does not restore the fully functioning services lost. Equally, school and hospital buildings, neglected by Tory Austerity, remain in permanent arrears under Tory ‘Austerity is over’, plans.

The poor need immediate help and that means redistributing income meaningfully. Per capita income in the UK (the amount for every man, woman and child if income were distributed equally) is £45,000 per year.

No-deal Brexit would cut UK growth by 9.3 per cent in total over the next 15 years. That is a 0.7 per cent reduction in per annum growth, from 1.3 per cent to 0.6 per cent, so that per capita income would ‘only’ grow to £45,207 the first year.

That equality spread across the whole UK is certainly what we need here in Gwynedd.

Tories say work is the solution. But a huge fraction of those seeking benefits are in work. Universal Credit takes its vicious toll here. Of 14.1 million working-age households with someone in work, seven million will see their entitlements reduced, by an average of about £165 a year.

The Rapporteur’s comments suggest to me that the Welsh Labour government should look to distress relief rather than employment creation to combat extreme poverty.

Wanting to change our society from top to bottom and from bottom to top was what a great deal of the so-called Brexit sympathies were about. The right wing Tory attempt to capture that sentiment has clearly failed. Our present political crisis has opened the door to complete equality, to be introduced, let us hope, by a truly socialist new UK government.

Yours etc,

Ian MacIntyre, Shelbourne Court, Barmouth.

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