Them Belly Full

But we hungry

by Rick Johansen

These days, I tend not to share Facebook memories, certainly not on Facebook because, frankly, who’s interested? I’m certainly not. But every now and then a memory comes along and I begin to feel the same way I did when I first posted it. The picture that heads this particular blog certainly has that effect and in this case it’s anger.

It is fair to say that I am not particularly enamoured with the self-styled IDS, Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative MP for Chingford. In fact, I hate his guts. Hate, I know, is a very strong word, but let’s look at the evidence:

  • IDS came up with the idea of Universal Credit (UC). Severely underfunded as it is, UC continues to make the poor poorer and it is making the not so poor, poor. It is a major reason for the number of referrals to food banks as claimants, many of whom are in work, as they run out of money and food.
  • He oversaw the Bedroom Tax.
  • He brought in Fit For Work tests.
  • He introduced harsh benefit sanctions.
  • The abolition of Disability Living Allowance.

Much of his ‘work’ in government was to inflict pain on the most vulnerable people in society. And what kind of price did he pay for his evil deeds, the man who said, “Losing a limb shouldn’t guarantee a pay out”? For his legacy of incompetence and cruelty, he was knighted. Arise Sir Food Bank.

I suspect when IDS said he was “happy for people to visit food banks”he was not feeling “pleasure or contentment”, as one dictionary definition puts it. Perhaps he had a “sense of trust and confidence in” the arrangement, but you never know with people like him. Look at this picture of IDS at a food bank and make your own mind up:

He looks happy enough to me. I will never understand how anyone can carry out an engagement, in this case asking ordinary folk doing their weekly shopping, with a great big smile on their faces. As well as my heroic efforts volunteering at our local food bank, I also take place in our regular collections at a large supermarket. I won’t say which one but every little helps, don’t you think? Anyway, I always decline photo ops and that’s not just because one look at me might damage the camera lens. It’s not why I am there. And when I am collecting, or doing my work at the food bank, I reckon I have worked out how to behave, without having a smug, self-satisfied grin, wearing my best suit. IDS clearly hasn’t. In 2013, he showed his true colours.

The Trussell Trust, which manages over 1400 food banks in the UK, asked to meet IDS to discuss the escalating crisis and he refused, accusing them – us, as I now refer to it – as, and I quote, “scaremongering”. It gets better. I’ll quote his own words when it was suggested, rightly, that his benefit reforms – that’s cuts to you and me – were responsible for the proliferation of food banks. He accused the Trussell Trust of being “political”.

“I strongly refute this claim and would politely ask you to stop scaremongering in this way.” He then reeled off a bunch of statistics claiming that “the government has taken action to help families with the cost of living”. 12 years on and we know that IDS was talking what is technically known as bollocks. Things are far, far worse than they were back in 2013 and they were bad enough then. Read here to find out exactly how. Now let’s examine the claim that the Trussell Trust is “political”.

If ours is anything to go by – and I am sure it is – it is totally non-political. The admin team is solely concerned about alleviating food poverty and finding solutions to end food poverty permanently. The volunteers are, in my experience, non-political and even when they are political, people like me, it has no effect on what they do or why they volunteer. I wasn’t handing out Vote Labour leaflets before last year’s General Election. My only motivation is either to make people’s lives better, or maybe less worse. Same as my colleagues. But while we were on the subject, let’s do some politics.

When the last Labour government left office in 2010, food poverty was an issue, especially following the worldwide financial crash, with the Trussell Trust operating 35 food banks across the country. David Cameron’s hardline, austerity-heavy Conservative government in which some Lib Dems took jobs (never forget, never forgive), consciously and deliberately introduced policies that made things dramatically worse. Put very simply, food poverty had become an epidemic under the Conservatives, made worse by every prime minister from David Cameron to the wretched Rishi Sunak. They will have known exactly what they were doing and the effects it would have on the poorest in society, but they carried on regardless.

I volunteered on every possible occasion in December and frankly it left me emotionally spent, almost burned out, something I had not expected. The days were uplifting when kind individuals and companies made incredibly generous donations and draining after scores of people, many of whom had never dreamed they’d have to use a food bank, came to see us with all other options exhausted. I am able to set aside my own feelings, like the hardened and unpaid professional that I am, but it always feels wrong that I have to be there at all.

Hopefully, the energy and enthusiasm I need to give a bit back to society (how awful does that sound? Sorry) will gradually return and I’ll be able to carry on volunteering until we, as a country, have ended food poverty and put organisations like the Trussell Trust out of business.

There is something badly wrong with a country where over 13 million people, including nearly four million children, live in poverty. And this has come about as a direct result of government policy and government decisions. People like IDS may be “happy” for people in poverty to visit food banks. I am deeply ashamed that they need to. If that’s seen as being “political”, then so be it. Politicians created this mess and it seems it’s up to the people to clean it up IDS doesn’t “have a problem” but I do. I remember him taking exception to being referred to by protestors as “Tory scum”. Well, the easiest way to stop that is to stop acting like Tory scum. Maybe he should try it?

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