Philip Alston, the United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights squeezed onto a school bench alongside a dozen children in one of Glasgow’s most deprived neighbourhoods and posed a question: “Who should help poor people?”
“The rich people,” Soroush, one of the children, shot back. “It’s unfair to have people earning billions of pounds and have other people living on benefits.”
After an itinerary dominated by meetings with politicians and charities, the world-leading human rights expert ended his week at Avenue End school, which serves some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. In places like Craigend and Ruchazie about 30% of adults are on benefits and life expectancy for men is about a decade less than in the affluent south of the city.
The children were asked to jot down what being poor might mean for a person. John Adebola-Samuel, 12, quietly penned: “He cannot afford meals. He cannot buy trainers. He cannot watch TV.” John’s family relied on food banks for two years and for a long time he only took bread and butter to school for lunch. “I got hungry because I was smelling the other food,” he said. “I had to take my eyes away from it. The most unfair thing is the government knows families are going through hard times but they decide not to do anything about it.”
“When you see how austerity has panned out in this country and you see people in crisis far more often, that for me is a fundamental human rights issue,” said Judith Robertson, chair of the Scottish Human Rights Commission, who is backing a change in the law. “At this moment in the UK we have lost the idea that all human beings are equal and should be treated with dignity and respect.”
Alex Thornburn, a disabled man who has lived in poverty, told Alston at a meeting in Edinburgh that austerity policies “have sanctioned, stigmatised and de-humanised millions”. Extending human rights protections to welfare could change that, its advocates hope. Objectors say it could give rise to costly new obligations, which would require big changes to public finances and that it would give sovereignty over key policy issues to an international body.
The Citizens Advice Bureau provided Alston with unpublished figures suggesting 21% of 2,700 people who responded to an unweighted open survey had gone a whole day without eating and 40% admitted running out of food.
Bill Scott, the policy director for Inclusion Scotland, a group for disabled people, told him about a woman who had chronic physical and mental health problems who said she had sex for money after her benefit was stopped following a work capability assessment. She hadn’t eaten for nearly a week but was deeply ashamed. “She couldn’t live with herself,” he said.
Karen Reid, 35, a single mother of four in the deprived Pilton neighbourhood - close to affluent Stockbridge and the elite Fettes College public school - told the Guardian how she last worked nine years ago, struggled with depression and once drank so heavily she suffered permanent nerve damage to her hands and feet. Her disability allowance has been stopped, costing her family £600 a month.
“Things are going wrong and they are getting worse,” she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/09/its-unfair-un-envoy-meets-children-living-in-poverty-in-scotland
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