Hunger, violence, cramped housing: lockdown life for the poorest children

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Admin

Many families are enduring terrible hardship, and campaigners fear long-term consequences for the most vulnerable in society

“Before Covid, my three children and I had structure. We would wake up in the morning, they would go to school and do their thing, and I would do mine. We had joy,” says Vicky (not her real name), a single parent living in one of the most disadvantaged boroughs in the country, in south London.

The capital has the highest rate of child poverty in any English region – more than 700,000 children, and 43% of children in inner London. Over the past five years, child poverty has risen in every London borough, in part because of the capital’s uniquely high housing, childcare and living costs, as well as low pay (72% of children in poverty are in working households) and the impact of £39bn cut nationally from the benefit system since 2010. Then, in March, came Covid-19 and lockdown, deepening and accelerating deprivation across the UK, increasing rates of child abuse, mental ill-health and domestic violence.

Johnson makes U-turn on free school meals after Rashford campaign

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Admin

‘Covid summer food fund’ announced after pressure from footballer and campaigners

Boris Johnson has been forced into a humbling U-turn over providing food vouchers for some of England’s poorest families after a campaign launched by the footballer Marcus Rashford threatened to engulf his government in another crisis.

In an embarrassing about-face, the prime minister said that on Tuesday he had called the England and Manchester United striker to explain the reversal, and made the remarkable claim that he had only become aware of Rashford’s interest in the issue earlier in the day.

Sleazy bosses, exploited barmaids: US cinema finally discovers the left behinds

Posted on May 6, 2020 by Admin

From The Assistant to Support the Girls, American cinema is swapping feelgood escapism for gritty unsettling realism. We talk to the women spearheading this new wave

‘I wanted it to be relatable to any woman who’s ever worked in an office,” says Kitty Green of her new film The Assistant. “Everything in the film has been in the press already. But I wanted to take viewers on an emotional journey, so they could empathise with the character.”

The #MeToo saga has been examined to near exhaustion, but The Assistant manages to add something new. Rather than perpetrators or victims, it focuses on a relative bystander: a young office worker at a New York film production company. We follow this character, played by Julia Garner, through her demeaning routine: commuting in before daybreak, photocopying, printing, taking her male co-workers’ lunch orders, clearing up leftover pizza from the meeting room (as the men come in for the next meeting, she is humiliatingly caught with a crust in her mouth).

‘The situation is critical’: coronavirus crisis agony of Spain’s poor

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Admin

Charities struggle to help country’s most marginalised groups, including sex workers

Paloma Pérez, a smoker who has dealt with pancreatitis and cancer, has more reason than many to fear the coronavirus as she waits out the lockdown in her house in the mountains outside Madrid.

To limit her exposure, the 74-year-old has told the home help who used to pop in twice a week to stop coming, and her main meal of the day – usually fish or meat, but with a decent variety of sides – is left outside her closed front door by the Catholic charity Cáritas.

Roma suffer under EU’s ‘environmental racism’, report concludes

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Admin

Thousands live in squalor due to policies of exclusion and deprivation, says study

Europe’s Roma communities are often living on polluted wastelands and lacking running water or sanitation in their homes as a result of “environmental racism”, a report has concluded.

The European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a pan-European network of green NGOs, found Roma communities were often excluded from basic services, such as piped drinking water, sanitation and rubbish collection, while frequently living at or near some of the dirtiest sites in Europe, such as landfills or contaminated industrial land.

Whether in the UK or the developing world, we’re not all in coronavirus together

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Admin

In the slums of Delhi or Lagos, social distancing is a dream while social exclusion is all too real and pernicious

See all of our coronavirus coverage

‘The virus does not discriminate,” suggested Michael Gove after both Boris Johnson and the health secretary, Matt Hancock, were struck down by Covid-19. But societies do. And in so doing, they ensure that the devastation wreaked by the virus is not equally shared.

We can see this in the way that the low paid both disproportionately have to continue to work and are more likely to be laid off; in the sacking of an Amazon worker for leading a protest against unsafe conditions; in the rich having access to coronavirus tests denied to even most NHS workers.

‘It felt like intentional torture’: the Windrush victims who are still homeless, two years on

Posted on March 10, 2020 by Admin

It has been two years since the government apologised for the scandal and promised to rectify the injustices. Yet those affected are still being failed by the Home Office - with some still destitute

It requires a military level of discipline to live most of your life in Heathrow airport. Gbolagade Ibukun-Oluwa, 59, has been homeless since 2008 and for the past five years has developed a routine that sees him spending several nights a week in the cafes just outside the departures area. He arrives between 11pm and 1am, as day staff are replaced by the night shift, rotating between a Caffè Nero in Terminal 4 and a Costa coffee shop in Terminal 5, where the workers know him and offer him a cup of hot water. If flights have been cancelled and the cafes are very busy, he takes a bus to a 24-hour McDonald’s on the airport slip road, and waits there until dawn, occasionally managing to sleep for an hour or two in his wheelchair.

In the past, Heathrow security have been hostile, calling the police, who would put him in a van and drive him beyond the airport perimeter, where they would drop him and tell him: “If we ever see you there again, you’re in big trouble.” But that aggressive approach has stopped, and mostly he is ignored by passengers and staff; at a glance he looks like any other traveller, his belongings tidily packed into a few bags. “I have a routine to arrive as late as possible and to move on as early as possible,” he says. “They don’t bother me. They’re used to people waiting all night for a flight.” For all the hassle, the airport is at least warm and safe.

Climate, inequality, hunger: which global problems would you fix first? – interactive quiz

Posted on January 15, 2020 by Admin

Interactive quiz: With only 10 years left to achieve the UN’s sustainability goals, find out how your priorities compare

Food for thought: the school lunch scheme linking London and Liberia

Posted on January 14, 2020 by Admin

By providing free school meals to some of the poorest children on Earth, a UK charity is also ensuring they get an education

It’s breakfast time in Domagbamatma (population: 63) in the depths of the Liberian rainforest, but there’s no food in evidence in the home of Massa Kamara. The eight-year-old has been up since dawn, collecting firewood, fetching water.

Now she’s ready for school in a crisp white shirt and navy-blue skirt in her family’s muddy, two-room shack.

Severe childhood deprivation reduces brain size, study finds

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Admin

Brain scans of Romanian orphans adopted in UK show early neglect left its mark

Children who experience severe deprivation early in life have smaller brains in adulthood, researchers have found.

The findings are based on scans of young adults who were adopted as children into UK families from Romania’s orphanages that rose under the regime of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.

EU accused of seeking to cut funds for poor in post-Brexit cost savings

Posted on December 29, 2019 by Admin

Plan to drop dedicated fund while defence spending rises dismissed as false economy

The European commission has been accused of seeking to cut EU funding for the continent’s poorest people by 50% to secure post-Brexit cost savings and extra funds for defence projects.

Jacques Vandenschrik, the president of the European Food Banks Federation, said the EU executive’s proposed spending plans for the next seven years posed a risk not only to the most vulnerable but to the stability of wider society.

Barriers, barbed wire and borders in the head: Josef Koudelka’s Holy Land

Posted on December 24, 2019 by Admin

The Magnum photographer grew up behind the iron curtain. As a documentary charts his journey where Israel and Palestine meet, Koudelka talks about challenging official narratives – and himself

There’s a surreal moment near the start of Koudelka Shooting Holy Land, a documentary about the acclaimed photographer Josef Koudelka. He has pointed his lens at one of the concrete barriers that separate Israel and Palestine but has been stopped by an official and a heavily armed soldier. His local assistant, Gilad Baram, is trying to smooth things over. “It might result in a book,” Baram tells the soldier. “He is a one of the most renowned photographers worldwide. He is a photographer with an agency called Magnum.”

Suddenly the atmosphere changes. “Magnum? Ah, I know it,” says the soldier, his stern face breaking into a smile. A short discussion later, a friendly handshake and all is well.