It was good to see, when I got home from my day at the Melchester food bank, that Prince William had also been doing his bit to alleviate food poverty in leafy, affluent Sunbury on Thames, supporting the Surplus to Supper initiative. I’m not taking the piss here. While I think the very existence of a pampered and privileged royal family is absurd, that doesn’t mean all of the people in it don’t care about the lives of those they will never understand nor experience. Call it a photo opportunity, call it what you will, anything that draws attention to food poverty is alright with me. But if people are going without in the very richest areas of the land, what price working/middle class Melchester?
Anyway, no royal visitors for us yesterday. Just people who don’t have anything to eat and once again it was a busy day. I know this sounds a bit pathetic, but still recovering from near terminal Man Flu, I was quite tired after yesterday’s stint, to the point that repeated efforts to blog about it ended in repeated failure. Eventually, I decided to sleep on it.
One of the questions I often hear is this: “How did people manage before food banks?” Some people say it in such a way as to imply that people managed perfectly well before food banks came along. And it’s a good question, given there were only 37 food banks in 2010 when Labour left office and now there are around 3700, plus 4250 schools which do the same thing of thing that we do. It’s seeing young children at our food bank that makes me sad. I’m such a snowflake.
I know through bitter experience how what happens in childhood can affect what happens throughout the rest of your life. And no matter how hard we try to make our food bank as welcoming and friendly as we can, it is impossible to escape the fact that people are there because they have no money nor food. When I was young (here I go again) my mum hid it from me that she was going without food so I didn’t have to, so I was protected from the potential embarrassment, shame and guilt that I felt in later life, but even the youngest of children will know what it is we do in our food bank and why their parents have taken them there. I am not going to pretend that I am the one who is scarred by seeing hungry families – I am not that self-centred and crass, honest – but I simply cannot see how we, in a civilised society, can allow this to happen, to enable it to happen by voting Conservative. Sorry to any Tory readers – like I will have any – but this is 100% down to you, like it or not.
The people you see are you and me, or they would be if the kind of luck we enjoyed was their luck. Apologies if you have read this before, but many of us are one bereavement, one cancer diagnosis, one stroke, one unexpected bill, one domestic disaster away from having to use a food bank. The difference between me, in my childhood and early adulthood, and many of the people I see is paper-thin. I know that and that’s, eventually, how I deal with the fatigue.
Prince William did his bit and given the publicity he will attract for his bit, it will help us, here in Melchester, no end. Contrast William with pampered billionaire prime minister Rishi Sunak whose client journalists today celebrate his latest attack on the sick and disabled with headlines like the one in today’s Express, ‘PM TELLS SICK NOTE BRITAIN: GET A GRIP AND GET A JOB.’ That’s why if William visited our food bank, I’d happily shake his hand and if Sunak arrived I’d shake him warmly by the throat.
Most people, despite what you may read in the gutter press or get from here today, gone tomorrow politicians, are good people. That’s why food banks are able to help desperate people in need.
I’ll be back next week and I’ll be there until I drop or until we see the end of food poverty. So probably the former. We were almost there in 2010 until David Cameron and Nick Clegg started the rot and left us in the mess we are today under Sunak, and we can be again. But only if we want it.
