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Moving beyond the crisis of everyday liveability
Gloomy prognoses concerning Wales’s challenges can be confronted if we move away from our fixation with the GDP, and look at the lives of normal people, writes LUKE FLETCHER MS
Graffiti on the side of a building in Port Talbot, South Wales

FOR the past three years, airwaves, screens and column inches have been saturated with news of the cost-of-living crisis, inflation, industrial disputes, soaring energy costs and the resultant profiteering. These have been unimaginably difficult years for the vast majority of people in Wales.

Most have had little if any financial breathing space in what has amounted to collective anxiety as one month is struggled through to the next. Despite the fact that inflation shows some tentative signs of slowing, living standards show no indication of improving in Wales.

This week, the Bevan Foundation released its summer 2023 Snapshot of Poverty report which showed that the cost-of-living crisis remains poised to grind down people’s ability to live decent and dignified lives.

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