On Aug. 6 former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned in the Guardian that the U.K. is facing a winter of “dire poverty” and skyrocketing energy costs. As a former Labour Prime Minister, Brown urged outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson and leading Tory candidates Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and MP Rishi Sunak to come together to establish an emergency budget to deal with the situation. Johnson turned this down.
Brown forecast that the continued rise in fuel prices will place 35 million people in 13 million households—constituting 49.6% of the U.K.’s population—at risk of poverty in October. This, he said, is a “financial timebomb.… There is nothing moral about indifferent leaders condemning millions of vulnerable and blameless children and pensioners to a winter of dire poverty.” He said that if the trio he named don’t act, Parliament should be recalled to force them to do so.
