UN rapporteur: tax cut plans of both Johnson and Hunt 'a tragedy'

Philip Alston told meeting both Tory candidates’ proposals would ‘tremendously increase’ UK inequality

Robert Booth in Geneva
Thu 27 Jun 2019 13.34 BST Last modified on Thu 27 Jun 2019 13.35 BST

Tax cuts for the rich promised by Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt have been attacked by the United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty who compared them to Donald Trump’s fiscal policies and warned they would “tremendously increase inequality” in Britain.

Philip Alston told a side meeting at the United Nations human rights council in Geneva that it was “a tragedy” the Tory leadership candidates are promising tax cuts, warning they “mean even less money not just to spend on the poor but on infrastructure and the middle classes.”

He said: “Tax cuts on this level are a bid to dramatically increase inequality and benefit those who are already wealthy” and said that even conservative economists now recognise that inequality is “counter-productive to economic growth”.

Alston is in Geneva to present his final report on UK poverty which concluded austerity had caused the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”, leaving 14 million people in relative poverty. It was based on an 11-day fact-finding mission to places including Essex, Newcastle, Glasgow, Belfast and London, as well as months of research.

He has already angered the UK government by calling its flagship Universal Credit welfare reform “a digital and sanitised version of the 19th-century workhouse” and on Thursday stepped up his criticism accusing the Conservatives of “rupturing” a cross-party consensus that existed since the 1942 Beveridge report in favour of a social welfare state by following what he said were politically motivated austerity policies.

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