Still struggling with the aftermath of Man Flu, I nonetheless dragged myself, courageously some might say, along to the Melchester Food Bank for my weekly stint on the front line of food poverty. I’m at the dog end of this virus, which means that I’m likely no longer contagious, but I am coughing like an 80 Woodbine a day man and I feel a bit meh. In other words, nothing much wrong with me but the Food Bank day is a ‘must do’ day in my short list of priorities and happier though I would have been shifting occasionally from my Man Cave to my bed and back again, there was only one place I would be going today.
Post Easter, we were very quiet, the polar opposite of pre Easter. And there was plenty of spare time for me to waste by checking the latest news on X. Yet even with a limited number of callers, Broken Britain was present in all its lack of glory.
I used to think, before I started my Food Bank work, that users would all come from the same demographic. My inbuilt prejudices were that it would be almost entirely people from the lower working class and, the group some refer to as the underclass. And it’s true to say that while many people fulfil those criteria, but it’s only a small part of the story. What I hadn’t really allowed for was the number of full time workers using food banks.
I saw one such person today and I always feel a mixture of sympathy for the person concerned and anger towards a society that enables this to happen. This person was relatively young, probably late twenties, and they lived in a privately rented flat/bedsit. They worked full time and tried everything to keep their head above water. This week, because they had taken time off work for being sick, their pay was reduced and after paying the rent and utility bills, there was nothing left to buy food. Now they were back at work, but with no wage due for a few weeks, there was nowhere left to go.
Their mental health was shattered. I wasn’t surprised by that. Working hard, playing by the rules – what was the point of that? These were not their words but my thoughts. They were desperate to find a cheaper property to rent, but according to the local authority they was nowhere on a waiting list. A single person with no obvious issues. Just forget it.
No money to pay for a bus ticket, they had quite a long walk home but they didn’t complain. By walking slowly and stopping frequently, they would get there, eventually. Not ideal when you’re hungry. Filthy rich prime minister Rishi Sunak just clicks his fingers and summons an RAF helicopter when he wants to go somewhere. The working poor? It’s just too bad.
I am sure, beyond reasonable doubt, that almost everyone we see has a very sad story to tell. If someone is taking the piss and ripping us off by having a tin of baked beans, I haven’t met them yet and trust me, I’m a grizzled old hack who spent 15 years working with the DWP fraud department and I don’t feel I’m particularly gullible. Here, I see the best in people and the worst of a society that happily sits by and watches lives fall apart.
If you’re working full-time but sometimes, despite how careful you are, you won’t have enough money for food, that can’t be right, can it? But until enough of us agree it isn’t right, the more this will carry on.
