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Here’s more from the former Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, speaking to BBC Breakfast about Wednesday’s spring statement.
Brown accused Rishi Sunak of missing out millions of people who are “facing real hardship” in his budget statement.
Any comparing and compassionate chancellor would want to do something about this level of fuel poverty.
There was a blank page in his budget statement this week and it missed out millions of people who are facing real hardship.
I’ve seen poverty when we’ve had unemployment and I’ve seen poverty when I was growing up in a mining town, and I haven’t seen anything as bad as this, and therefore there’s an urgency about the chancellor acting.
This is something that he cannot turn his back away from.
This is an emergency. It’s a cost of living crisis. You cannot ignore the needs of people who are having to choose between putting the heating up and feeding the meter and feeding the children.
That is simply not an acceptable situation.
We cannot allow this. We’ve got food banks, we’ve now got baby banks, we got clothes banks, and now what we’ve got in Fife here is effectively a bedding bank.
