When the Trussell Trust, which operates the majority of food banks in Britain, recently announced donations of food had fallen in recent times and pleaded with The Great British Public to help out, the response was as you might expect. Kindness and compassion won through and warehouses began to top up their empty shelves. Most people, as I never tire of saying, are good people. Social media always does its level best to prove me wring.
The hateful middle aged and older people shit pit that Facebook has become did its best to show it can do hate better than most platforms. Post after post on a recent Trussell Trust thread condemned not food poverty, but the people they claimed were abusing local food banks. Apparently, food poverty did not exist. The people who used food banks were feckless scroungers, living the life of Riley by turning up every week for a free bag of food, pulling the wool over the gullible “do-gooders” who work and volunteer there. These lazy parasites should get a job like everyone else. Needless to say all of them were migrants, particularly asylum seekers, and they were, to quote one highly thoughtful person “taking the piss”. All that and so much more. If you let it get to you – and it only gets to me via mild anger at the sheer levels of ignorance and stupidity illustrated by some – it could make you deeply disillusioned at the state of our country. I would like to tell you one thing: the only thing to get angry about is that we have a country in which food poverty is so widespread.
The University of Life, which I joined in 1974 when signing up with the then DHSS (for work, I hasten to add), followed by stints at a variety of charities, some shittier than others (British Red Cross, Headway), has taught me that actually poverty is real and that people who use them are genuinely in crisis. At this point, it is worth me pointing out that food banks like the Trussell Trust do not provide regular food parcels week-on-week for people in permanent food poverty: they exist for one-off emergencies. Other types of food banks, like ‘larders’, can help with regular shortages but they operate in a completely different way. People cannot just turn up at a food bank: they need to have been referred by a partner organisation. In other words, food bank users have to go through a necessary bureaucratic procedure in order to get help. A turn-up-on-the-day food bank would be chaos. By the time people get to Trussell Trust food banks, the odds are overwhelmingly that callers are genuine.
I can honestly say that if I thought food bank callers were “taking the piss”, do you seriously think I would carry on volunteering so much of my time and making financial donations? I have a decent enough antenna to work out what’s real and what’s make believe so when, frankly, thick people come to the view that food banks are somehow packed with idle, feckless spongers I can treat their views with the contempt they so richly deserve.
Having said all that, I understand that food banks represent little more than essential sticking plaster. They – we – are not a long-term solution and it has long been an area of concern for me that while the Trussell Trust and other organisations do wonderful work in dealing with millions of short term crises, they come up short in terms of long term solutions, the main one being political action.
I am not referring to party political action, although it has to be pointed out that food poverty was nowhere near the problem it is today until the hardline, austerity-heavy Conservative government of 2010, in which some Liberal Democrats, including current leader ‘Sir’ Ed Davey, happily took jobs. Facts need to be presented to politicians as well as strategies to ensure we have a viable and achievable way out of the necessity for food banks. We cannot go on forever just asking for the public to donate more stuff. Solutions, like the current government’s scrapping of the two child benefit cap, free school meals and increases to the national minimum wage, are helping and more will need to be done to help people who can work get back to work. At some undefined point in the future, I can see myself making a considered judgement about whether food banks are doing enough to change the nature of the debate by way of active campaigning or simply using what are temporary solutions on a permanent basis. That time is not now.
Kindness and compassion is forever but maintaining the status quo is not enough. Food poverty is the issue and you can’t end it if you don’t deal with the root causes which, we know, are political by nature. If there are still thousands of food banks in, say, ten years time, the whole project will have failed. As of now, I remain unconvinced that anyone has a vision beyond sticking plaster.
Charities exist to do things that the public has decided are not important enough to be paid for collectively through taxation. That is an inescapable fact. I appreciate that governments can’t do everything but if ensuring people have enough food to eat is not part of the government’s job, then I do wonder if there is much point in it doing anything and leaving everything to well-meaning do-gooders in the charity sector?
The kindness of strangers stops people starving. For how much longer can we be expected to rely on them?
