Our food bank was open a day earlier today, due our venue being used tomorrow, Thursday, as a polling station for the people of Melchester to elect a new … er … police and crime commissioner. Yes, that’s right. A police and crime commissioner (PCC), a total non-job, which comes with a salary of £88,600 per annum. The irony of a food bank, which exists because of food poverty, being moved in order to elect a meaningless job on a salary something like two and a half times the national average. Nice ‘work’ if you can get it.
Meanwhile, on a quieter day than usual – let’s hope people who were asked to see us today don’t assume we will be there tomorrow because otherwise all they’ll get is some jobsworth asking them for photo ID in order to vote – we still had tears.
We know that Rishi Sunak thinks all benefit claimants are scrounging parasites, so he would have hated one of our callers whose Universal Credit (UC) was dramatically less than usual, for reasons she couldn’t understand. While the local advice group are trying to find out, she cannot feed herself, nor her seriously disabled daughter. Another caller lived in a hostel and had been a victim of theft. Both were at their wits’ end.
Billionaire Sunak doesn’t understand how ordinary folk live their lives and doubtless had he been with us today, he’d have told them to suck it up and get a job. I did my best to make them feel human and not humiliated, embarrassed and broken. This is 21st century Britain.
We were short of volunteers today because not all of us are doddery old fools who don’t work anymore. Some juggle their food bank commitments with their jobs and caring commitments. We all do what we can. We don’t need or want thanks, which is probably just as well, and we don’t want money. We just want a society in which we are effectively made redundant.
We’re back to normal next week, if you can call a food bank normal. I don’t think our existence is the new normal. It’s the new abnormal, a perverse chapter in an increasingly dystopian country where we think it’s perfectly normal for people to go without food, with only a charity as their last resort.
Still, at least we will have a new PCC tomorrow, doing nothing useful, producing nothing at all for a mere £88,600 plus expenses, office space, admin staff and Christ knows what else. And worse still, some people will vote for the Tory who messed this country up so much we actually need food banks. Irony is dead. Let us hope that hope isn’t, too.
