Why Britain is so much poorer than you think
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2022
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Poverty in Britain is bad and it’s getting worse. And yet, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has set out plans to tax the British public more than ever before.
Lewis travels back to Birmingham to visit a community centre which provides food and warmth for the local community, and he’s joined back in News Agents HQ by Torsten Bell, of the Resolution Foundation, and Duncan Robinson from The Economist to unpick the structural reasons of how it can be that the government is taxing more than ever before, yet public services are as bad as they are right now. This all comes with poverty becoming increasingly normalised in British society.
Planning: Melissa Tutesigensi
Socials: Georgia Foxwell
Video: Will Gibson-Smith
Production: Gabriel Radus
Deputy Editor: Tom Hughes
Day Editor: Ellie Clifford
Executive Producer: Dino Sofos
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.1 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.6 | So it's Thursday evening, the day of the autumn statement, effectively the budget. |
| 0:19.5 | Instead of being in Westminster or a newsagents HQ, |
| 0:22.6 | I happen to have basically come back home, |
| 0:24.6 | a couple of miles from where I grew up in South Birmingham, in Northfield, |
| 0:27.6 | a few miles away from the rover factory of my dad worked for years and years. |
| 0:32.6 | And I am currently standing in a church hall which is now doubling not just as a food bank |
| 0:41.1 | but as a warm bank somewhere where people families can come for three hours every week and charge |
| 0:49.3 | their phones sit and be warm and get a hot square meal. |
| 0:55.7 | And this is kind of the point of this week's podcast. |
| 0:59.2 | It is to take it out of the abstraction, |
| 1:01.9 | take it out of the dry as dust figures and the OBR spreadsheets |
| 1:08.2 | and ask two things. |
| 1:11.3 | What does it all mean on the ground for people |
| 1:14.8 | who are already so close to the edge, |
| 1:19.4 | and perhaps even more important, |
| 1:21.6 | is any of it, any of the changes, really necessary in the first place? |
| 1:27.8 | It's Lewis here. |
| 1:28.7 | Welcome to the newsagents. |
| 1:33.3 | The Newsagents. |
| 1:35.5 | So we don't get fed everywhere we go, I have to say. |
... |
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