A shorter blog post today (Wednesday). On Monday (July 29, 2019), the British Social Metrics Commission published their – 2019 Report – which reveals (staggeringly) “that 4.5 million people are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 7 million people are living in persistent poverty” in Britain. So around 22 per cent of people in the UK are living in poverty. In this day and age, poverty is like polio – it is completely avoidable if governments adopt the right policy mix. Persistent poverty means that a people “are in poverty now and have also been in poverty for at least two of the previous three years.” In other words, the policy failure is persistent. As Britain approaches the October 31, 2019 deadline and, hopefully, finds itself free of the neoliberal, corporatist nightmare that is membership of the EU, it certainly needs to take action to insulate the economy from a possible downturn. The forecasts coming out of the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) are clearly negative but hardly catastrophic. They certainly do not match the hysteria that you read in the Guardian on a daily basis about the end of life as we know it in Britain. But the Government has the capacity to circumvent any downturn. The OBR assumes that facing a recession that the Government does nothing of a discretionary nature (stimulate via fiscal policy) to attenuate that event. What responsible government would not act? And why did the OBR not model some fiscal stimulus scenarios in the wake of the decline in non-government spending they estimate will follow a No-Deal? The reason, is, of course, that that would give the game away. They know that the Government can offset their predicted (though modest) downturn if it chooses. The Government could also go a long way to avoiding such a downturn, and, bring this horrendous (austerity-driven) poverty rate down rather quickly if it takes positive action. That is Boris Johnson’s challenge. And if he takes it up and succeeds then it is ‘goodnight’ Labour.