Former Labour leader says rising UK poverty ‘would make Dickens furious’ and calls for wealth tax to help reverse it
Labour must scrap the two-child cap on benefits to lift children out of poverty, the party’s former leader Neil Kinnock has urged.
Rising levels of poverty “would make Charles Dickens furious”, Lord Kinnock said in an interview with the Sunday Mirror, in which he also called on ministers to introduce a wealth tax.
The peer, who led Labour in opposition between 1983 and 1992, is the latest senior party figure to pressure the government to end the two-child limit on benefits, which was introduced by the Conservatives in 2017.
The former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown recently said ending the two-child limit, as well as the benefit cap, would be among the most effective ways of reducing child poverty.
