A few years ago, I came into contact with some people who helped in food banks and also with people who used them. The experience has never left me. It was basically an old shop full of non perishable food. Unpaid volunteers collected the food and handed it out to people who looked just like me. The food was not handed out willy-nilly. There were quite a lot of questions involved and, so far as I could tell, no one was taking the mickey. I learned very quickly that food banks were genuinely needed.
Before I had seen a food bank, I suppose I was a little sceptical. I imagined how problems might have arisen through poor home economics or greed, but I soon realised that the only reasons people were there at all was because, well, they didn’t have anything to eat. They plainly didn’t want to be there either. One volunteer described to me how some were embarrassed to the point that they covered their faces entering the building and many were tearful to varying degrees. They had to be reassured that they were not regarded as beggars.
Another shock for me was the number of people attending a food bank who were in work. Most of them seemed to be in work and even the ones who weren’t didn’t fit within the benefit scrounger mentality developed by Iain Duncan Smith and his friends in the right wing media. They did not arrive in rags, they were not dirty; they were just people who had nothing.
To read that Walmart owned Asda stores are to remove all their food bank collection points makes my heart sink. The store said that scrapping food bank collection points was because of a ‘review of its community programme’, whatever that is supposed to mean. No replacement initiative is in place so the review must be taking place following the ending of the scheme. They denied that cutting the collection points was anything to do with cut throat competition from the likes of Aldi and Lidl. Of course, it wasn’t, just like ending the generous perk of giving staff a few pieces of toast and a cup of tea every morning has been scrapped too. The company obviously feels that the £6.76 an hour they pay their employees, at least for the first six months in post (the rate includes weekends and evenings) is more than generous.
This will obviously not be in anyway connected with the store’s tacit support of the Conservative Party, not least during the last general election, when David Cameron seemed to be forever turning up at Asda stores and making speeches to baffled employees, telling them they’d never had it so good. “You even get free toast, plebs” he might have said, although he may have had a tip-off that this generous perk would soon be removed so thought better of it.
One million people used food banks last year. That’s an incredible number, so it is great to hear Duncan Smith announcing that “I have no problem with food banks.” He has no problem with desperate people turning up to collect a box of food because otherwise they might starve? He cares that much, he is thinking of sending some Jobcentre advisors to food banks, perhaps with the intention of demonstrating they have too much time on their hands and should work harder. A secretary of state with some kind of heart would be mortified by the very idea that a million people don’t have enough money to eat. But not this one. Not this fanatical right wing hard line roman catholic who married into serious money. He has “no problem with food banks.”
I have a big problem with food banks, or rather I have a big problem that they are needed – and they are needed – in this day and age. It reduces to even further farce the Tory line that “we are all in it together”. It merely proves that some are in it more than others.
Think again, Asda. The cost of having food bank collection points in your stores must be a pin prick in your profit margins. People need food banks. I would much rather they weren’t needed at all, but thanks to circumstances beyond their control they are. The definition of Thatcherism to me was capitalism without a conscience. That is how I wold describe the actions of Asda today.
