It’s never great to see a grown man cry but them’s the breaks when you help out at a food bank. But here we are in a rich country where millions of people, including one in five families with children, have either gone hungry or skipped meals in recent weeks because they couldn’t afford to buy groceries. To put it in stark terms, eight million adults and three million children experienced food insecurity in January 2024. Sometimes, it gets too much and people break down. That happened today.
Obviously, I can’t go into details, but suffice to say that when you are seeing someone who has hit rock bottom and openly admits that they can’t see any point in living, you can’t unhear it, so to speak. Being an older person, it’s easy to say that I have experienced a lot in my life and it takes a lot to shake me up and to be honest very little does. But this did because I heard it on my watch.
It’s not that I fell apart instantly and needed a time-out, but it heightens your senses and, in my case, it made me angry. And being mad about the sheer levels of injustice that lead to people being at the end of their tether drives me on. It drives me on in two ways.
First, it drives me on to do whatever I can to help alleviate food poverty through my own actions. Second, it drives me on to campaign to get rid of this repulsive government that literally doesn’t care if people go without food. I am obviously a highly political animal, but I have tried to make this part of the blog as non-political as possible, but that’s becoming impossible.
When this Conservative government, in which some Lib Dems took jobs, came to power in 2010, there were barely any food banks. There were barely any lengthy NHS waiting lists, either. Our seas and rivers are now full of shit, schools are crumbling, life expectancy has stalled and in some places it’s actually falling, leading to the logical conclusion that Britain is broken. And the simple fact is that eight million adults and three million children are suffering from food insecurity as a direct result of deliberate political choices. Rishi Sunak and his pals know the consequences of austerity, as they make the rich richer and the poor poorer, but it’s just too bad. After 14 years, it would be absurd to pretend that this is anything other than a crisis made in Downing Street.
This blog barely scratches the surface of what is happening at our food bank and numerous others around the country. People are breaking down in a country that’s broken down and where the only businesses which are booming are food banks.
Millions more are an unexpected bill away from using a food bank. It needn’t be like this and it wouldn’t be like this if we chose to abolish food poverty, not just here in Melchester but everyone across the UK. You know what to do.
