Before we went on our holidays – DID I MENTION I WAS ON MY HOLIDAYS? – I was carrying out my weekly chores at our food bank. You know, the place where people go when they don’t have any money nor food, the end of the line for people who have, usually through no fault of their own, nothing. The DWP used to be the end of the line, but now it’s food banks which exist through the kindness of those not in food poverty. It’s a sorry state to be in, possibly the worst place ever. How can those not in food poverty relate to those who are?
Some of us, and I’ll include me in some of us, know from personal experience what it’s like to have next to nothing. I don’t know what it’s like to have to pass on meal times because, I discovered later, my mum did that so I didn’t have to. Although we were poor, as were my paternal grandparents, I was never allowed, if that’s that’s the right word, to feel poor. That my grandparents had an outside toilet and literally no bathroom at all didn’t occur to me as being odd.
I don’t know the backgrounds of my food bank colleagues. It is not something you talk about when you’re packing and issuing food parcels, but what they do display is the act of being human. They, we, are comfortably off but we have compassion, we have empathy and sympathy, we recognise the pain and suffering of others. We want to do something to help.
No one, I would argue, needs to explain sacrifices they have made along the way, which would enable them to understand how those in food poverty feel. If they have not had to make any, it doesn’t mean that they find it impossible to empathise. Food banks are places where good people do good things. Their background doesn’t matter. Honesty does.
Yesterday, I was struck by an astonishing ITV interview with prime minister Rishi Sunak in which he said he had to “sacrifice all sorts of things” as a child.
ITV: “Can you give me an example?”
Sunak: “All sorts of things … like lots of people, all sorts of things … famously Sky TV.”
Now let’s take a rain check, here. Rishi Sunak, through no fault of his own, enjoyed every possible privilege it was possible to have. He went to Winchester College as a boarder, which today would set back his parents a cool £52,000 a year. He went to Oxford University and then Stamford University in the USA. He then worked for various hedge fund companies, making money from money until he joined the Conservative party. He married the daughter of a multi-billionaire and is now believed to be worth around £700 million, almost three-quarters of a billion quid. When Sunak says he had to sacrifice “all sorts of things … famously Sky TV”, I call bullshit.
Now, back to the point. You do not have to have made sacrifices in order to understand the lives of those who have and do. It is about who you are and what you believe in. Yes, and it’s about being human. If a very rich person volunteered at our food bank I would never query their credentials if they were doing the same work as everyone else, for the same reasons. What I would be concerned about is is they had an attitude like Sunak’s.
He says his parents didn’t pay for Sky TV because they wanted to direct all their money towards sending their son to one of the most elite schools in the land. They took, said Sunak, extra jobs, presumably highly lucrative jobs, in order to pay for it. Not that I agree with the idea of elite private education in the first place, but that’s another subject. They gave their son the best education and opportunities money can buy and that’s that. What I cannot accept is Sunak’s pretence that his life too involved sacrificing “all kinds of things”. Just be honest. Why not say something like this?
“I was brought up in a wealthy household and wanted for nothing. I went to an elite private school and two world class universities. I am well-off but I have done my best to understand the lives of others. And just because I am financially secure and live a good life does not mean I am a bad person who doesn’t care about others. I am in politics because I want to change people’s lives and make them better.” Something like that, but no, he mumbles some tosh about the terrible hardship of having to go without Sky TV.
It is hard to understand what is going through someone’s mind when they say things like Sunak has said, but I have a theory. He wants to be seen to be something he isn’t, someone who can engage with the struggles of others and has, in his own way, made sacrifices. Yet that shouldn’t be second nature for a politician: it should be first nature. “Poor, poor pitiful me,” he didn’t say. “I had to sacrifice The Simpsons, Monday Night Football and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine so my parents could scrape together the fifty odd grand a year so I could go to Winchester College. Don’t you dare tell me I don’t know what it’s like to go hungry when my parents couldn’t afford to buy food. Or something. Now excuse me I’ve got a private helicopter to catch.”
Of course, it matters that some people are obscenely rich, like Sunak, and that many others are obscenely poor, like people who use food banks because of people like Sunak. But what really matters is that people are authentic, for real; human. This bloke is just an empty vessel, a tetchy, whiny, entitled, pint-sized loser and every day in every way, he just goes on to prove it.
