Although overall relative poverty levels have flatlined in recent years at about 21% of the population, life for those below the breadline has got materially worse as they try to subsist on incomes many thousands of pounds beneath the poverty threshold.

About 6.8 million people – half of all those in poverty – were in very deep poverty, the highest number and proportion since records began three decades ago, said the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), which carried out the analysis.

Households on the lowest incomes were still experiencing a cost of living crisis four years on, with millions of people forced to go without food, falling behind on household bills and having to borrow to survive, said JRF.

“Poverty in the UK is still not just widespread, it is deeper and more damaging than at any point in the last 30 years,” said Peter Matejic, the JRF’s chief analyst.

Very deep poverty is defined as less than 40% of the UK poverty threshold after rent. The average income of a household in very deep poverty is 59% below the poverty line. For a couple with two young children this amounts to £16,400 or below.

Although households move in and out of very deep poverty, about 1.9 million people (3%) in the UK are persistently in this category. A couple with two young children in very deep poverty would need to earn an extra £14,700 a year to entirely move out of poverty.

The most recent estimates show about 3.8 million UK people experienced destitution – a category even more extreme than very deep poverty, in which households cannot afford to stay warm, dry, clean, clothed and fed, the JRF said.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jan/27/very-deep-poverty-uk-record-numbers-joseph-rowntree-foundation-analysis

The e problem with the rich is that, because they have so much money, they demand too much of our productive capacities. Their money translates into massive purchasing power (and also enables them to increase their investments and ownership of production). So we are then required to use our labour and resources to produce things like mansions, private jets, sports cars, estates, luxury goods and so on. This facilitates elite consumption and accumulation but it does not benefit society – it is wasteful, ecologically destructive, and it should be curtailed so that we can undertake production that does benefit society.

Taxation can be used to help achieve this in two ways: a) tax income and wealth over a certain threshold, and b) tax damaging and unnecessary goods.

Ultimately, we do not need to tax wage labour at all.

If a key purpose of taxing income and wealth is to reduce excess demand and consumption, then it is reasonable to implement a very simple and straightforward tax rule. All income below a certain minimum threshold (the level needed to acquire goods and services necessary to live a good life) should be taxed at zero per cent, and all income above a certain maximum threshold (a level beyond which additional consumption is clearly unnecessary and destructive) should be taxed at 100 per cent. This is consistent with calls for a maximum income policy.

The vast majority of workers do not consume too much – in fact, in many cases they consume too little and struggle to make ends meet. If so, they do not need to be taxed.

A maximum income may sound radical, but it is perfectly reasonable once we understand that money is not just abstract credits that can be accumulated endlessly. It represents demand for – and enables increased control over – real labour and resources. Clearly it makes little sense to allow elites to consume as much of our labour and our planet – and our future – as they want.

https://newint.org/equality/2026/who-should-pay-public-services

Seeing a book I had in hand but had not yet read, called Slice of Life, The British Way of Eating Since 1945, a female security guard in the British Library let me know that she knew about mass hospitality, about the provision of canteens for all – and not the one where she worked now. “That book must talk about British Restaurants, then”, she said. I said: “what are they?” She said that when rationing was going on and there wasn’t enough food during the war the government set up ‘British Restaurants’ to serve cheap hot food for everyone so that people had enough to eat things like semolina and stew, she could just remember the smell. It was in the 1950s or 1960s. They were for workers and ordinary people and children, she said. She used to go when she was at school in Red Hill in Surrey, and they had died out by the time she went to secondary school.

She said yes, the food wasn’t too bad and they were really cheap. She was very keen to tell me about the British Restaurants, very excited; she remembered them fondly. I tried to imagine a British Restaurant now, a government-backed scheme to make sure all comers were fed as a matter of the greatest national importance: I couldn’t. When I spoke to the security guard, I’d just that day found out that while the British Library restaurant does continue to serve filter coffee, its cheapest offering, the new caterer (the third in ten years as none of the private companies can make it work) no longer advertise it, only displaying prices for more expensive coffees, alongside £17 hot mains and £5 cakes. It has phased out filter coffee by now.

Then I looked in my book and found that the British Restaurants served nutritionally balanced meals (according to contemporary science) and had libraries and fresh flowers on the tables and gramophones and pianos and felt as if I were reading about a utopian vision of the future like I would see in a science fiction film. Further research in the Mass Observation Archives shows numerous interviews with people who felt delighted at feeling so full, that the food was hot. They served 50 million meals a week in 1945. Lord Woolton, the conservative minister for food, who had asked a socialist friend he knew to design the state-subsidised canteens, called them ‘one of the greatest social revolutions that has taken place in the industry of our country’. Discussions were had in parliament about how the canteens produced astonishing improvements in workers’ wellbeing. After the war Conservatives dismissed them in parliament because they weren’t making profit. The canteens were allowed to decline, then disappear. Now food deserts and food banks proliferate and people do not have enough food to live. It is a strange situation that, as food poverty surges, we forget that we built canteens, once. The wartime memory of eating that has been encouraged to survive is of rationing, of lack, but for many people, there had never been so much hot, filling food. A seat, a table, a glass of water, a plate of food with the calorie density to sustain a life for a good while; the space and the time in which to unfold.

https://dinnerdocument.com/2019/04/30/i-dream-of-canteens/