'We’ve been hearing a lot over the last year-and-a-half now about the cost of living crisis, as though it’s fallen out of a clear blue sky.'
Anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe has perfectly summed up why the cost of living crisis is in actual fact a cost of Conservatives crisis, as she set out on BBC Question Time why the government is to blame as millions struggle to make ends meet.
Monroe argued that the reason why people were struggling and why levels of poverty are increasing is because of the problems stemming from Conservative austerity and 13 years of ‘pulverizing’ public services that ‘propped up the fundamentals of a decent society’.
Monroe said: “We’ve been hearing a lot over the last year-and-a-half now about the cost of living crisis, as though it’s fallen out of a clear blue sky.
“It’s not a cost of living crisis – let’s be absolutely clear – although it is for everybody at the sharp end of it and that’s millions and millions of people … it’s a cost of Conservatives crisis. It’s a cost of austerity crisis. It’s a cost of 13 years of pulverizing all social support and all of those safety nets we used to have in place that propped up the fundamentals of a decent society.
“It’s the cost of stripping out the NHS and social care and refuges and welfare and all the support that many, many people and voters might have thought they never would have needed … they didn’t think that they were going to ever be one of those people who would have to dip into those parts.
“And now that it’s affecting the chattering classes, the middle classes, the media classes, it’s been given a fancy title: the cost-of-living crisis. And it’s affecting almost everybody.”
Monroe went on to add that she had ‘never known anything like the sheer scale of desperation and crisis that we’re facing at the moment as a country’ and the only thing that is going to change it is ‘investment back into all of those services that have been stripped away and making sure that when people find themselves in a desperate situation that there’s some help and some support out there for them’.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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