Brazilian who says the bedroom tax is nuts

Let’s hear it for Raquel Rolnik.

Who? She’s the UN official prepared to stand up to David Cameron over the bedroom tax which is tipping thousands into poverty by charging claimants with a spare bedroom £550 to £800 a year.

Last month the bold Brazil-based architect came to inspect housing in the UK. She says she was invited by our Government they say she wasn’t. Either way, she met the English Housing and Communities Ministers. And she didn’t mince her words.

Raquel told them: “The right to housing is not about a roof anywhere, at any cost, without social ties. It is not about reshuffling people according to a snapshot of the number of bedrooms on a given night.

“It’s about (creating) environments for people to maintain their family and community bonds, their local schools, work places and health services allowing them to exercise other rights, like education, work, food and health.”

Kerpow, David Cameron et al. Take that! Instead, they took the huff. Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith called Raquel “a loopy Brazilian leftie” and the Tory chairman wrote to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon demanding an apology for her “disgraceful” comments.

He didn’t get one.

Meanwhile Raquel, whose parents fled to Brazil when her Polish grandfather died in the Holocaust, is sticking to her guns. The UN special rapporteur on housing held a news conference in London to publicise her preliminary findings and said she was “deeply touched” by testimonies from single parents and grandparents having to choose between food and the bedroom tax “penalty.”

More and more evidence is proving Raquel right.

Last week, the Trussell Fund said 350,000 people visited food banks this year three times more than last year.

Folk get access to food banks by referrals from social workers, MPs, MSPs, councillors or doctors. So you can bet these cases are legit.

How shocking is that? In the seventh richest country in the world, a third of a million people are dependent on hand-outs.

Trussell say some of that is down to the bedroom tax, but most is down to low pay and benefit mistakes.

People leaving hospital after major operations have had their payments stopped. And folk are handing groceries back to some food banks because they can’t afford the leccy to cook it.

So things are tough. And that’s before the announcement of whopping fuel price rises by SSE and British Gas. And before a survey found a quarter of us have less than £50 a month to spend after bills. And before the Social Mobility Commission showed our low wage economy means work doesn’t pay two thirds of kids living in poverty actually have a parent in work. And before another chaotic switch to Universal Credit starting this month.

Yet some folk have loadsamoney.

A new book shows London is the most unequal city in the developed world.

The richest 10% of adults have 273 times the wealth of the poorest 10% more unequal than cities in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa.

Britain’s got cash. It just hasn’t got the will to distribute it fairly. And that is tearing society apart at least in Scotland some semblance of community and social protection remains.

No wonder 31% of us were undecided in the latest independence referendum poll. I’ll bet many folk who just want more power for Holyrood are wondering if it’s time to go the whole hog and vote “Yes”.

Meantime there’s no doubt Britain has become positively Dickensian.

And if it needs a stubborn Brazilian to come and tell truth to power, then Raquel haste ye back.