[1andrew1]

UK government ministers are in a “state of denial” over the “social calamity” of deprivation in the country, a senior United Nations fact-finder has said at the end of a 12-day visit.
Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said it was “patently unjust and contrary to British values” that so many people in the UK lived in poverty.
The assessment by Prof Alston is one of the most damning yet by an outside expert of a range of policies, including the universal credit welfare reforms, which are widely blamed for widening the UK’s social divisions.
The rapporteur was also fiercely critical of the disproportionate effect on women of some recent changes. He said that if a group of misogynists had been asked to draw up their preferred policies, they would scarcely have differed from what had been implemented.
Prof Alston suggested that the UK was heading towards becoming an “alienated society” with dramatic differences between what would once have been referred to as the upper and lower classes.

https://www.ft.com/content/55746268-...c-e64da4c0f981