I heard someone say last week that food banks are the Conservative party’s one great success in terms of growth. In the last year, food banks in the Trussell Trust network distributed more than 3.1 million emergency food parcels – the highest number in its history. More recently, in the last five years the number of emergency food parcels issued by them increased by a staggering 94%. I am in the process of retiring the stand alone ‘Tales from the food bank’ section on this blog because I have probably said all there is to say about it but that is not to say I am not going to carry on writing about food poverty, because I am. Before we go any further, let’s go through some statistics:
The Trussell Trust issued emergency food parcels from 1,699 locations across the UK in 2023/24 and there are at least 1,172 additional independent food banks. I do not know whether ‘Food Pantries’ come under the heading of ‘additional food banks’ but during my weekly stint last week at the Melchester Food Bank, I was reminded that local schools, including one that our children went to, run food pantries whereby hard up parents can pay a set amount, I think it’s a fiver, for a parcel of food that’s actually worth much more than a fiver. Allow me to explain what is happening here.
Food banks like ours are the end zone for people in food poverty. People with no food and no money come to see us. Food pantries are there for people who may have some money, but not enough to feed themselves, nor their families. Essentially, what we are seeing is a new group of people who, from my experience, never imagined they would be so short of money they would not be able to properly feed themselves but have, shockingly, run out of road. Last week, I met people had gone from food pantries to food banks. You would need a heart of stone not to be moved by people’s real-life stories.
You would need a heart of stone not to be moved by the sheer injustice of it. People in work, sometimes full time work, who don’t have enough food to eat. A carer with a severely disabled child who even in the warmer weather requires the heating to be on 24/7 who cannot afford to eat herself if she heats her child. Last week, things were so bad she couldn’t afford food for either of them. Someone whose mental health was in bits and was basically howling at the moon for a better life that just wasn’t going to come. I am a grizzled old hack and I can deal with the heartbreak, but I still think about it when I’m not at the food bank. There must be a better way.
Until the worldwide financial crash of 2008, in which the likes of former hedge fund trader Rishi Sunak made fortunes at our expense, there were barely any food banks. Now we have an epidemic of food poverty and I can guarantee, my loyal reader, that food poverty is very real, that the people I see are, in my experience, utterly genuine and sadly desperate. This is not a case of ‘scroungers playing the system’, as the gutter press might put it. It never was. It has happened as a result of government choices, particularly government-induced austerity which has undermined the social structures in our country, not least by cruel changes to social security benefits which have made the poor even poorer. That so many people in poverty are also in work illustrates just how bad things have become.
The examples of poverty I gave represent the norm, not some isolated exception. The poverty net is widening too, catching yet more folk who never once dreamed they would get caught up in it. But here they are, often in tears of pain and anguish, desperately embarrassed and humiliated (“I never thought it would come to this” was one I heard, as well as “this happens to other people, until it happens to you”).
Since 2010, the Conservatives have created record levels of food poverty from scratch. Worse than that, they must surely have known what they were doing and what would happen. And they still did it. 14 years on and things are worse than ever but Sunak’s pals are too busy placing bets on when the election will be than doing anything to improve things. Why, in any event, would Sunak care? In the last financial year, his and his wife’s personal fortune rose by £120 million to somewhere close to three-quarters of a billion quid. No wonder he parrots ‘self-reliance’ to the lower orders whose lives he will never understand.
I can’t put up with this anymore. Never could put up with it, really, but in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 I was in a minority, as I usually am when it comes to General Elections. The choice for 4th July is straightforward. More of the same or change. Hopeless or hope. Party before country or country before party. Things got better under Labour from 1997 and got worse, much worse, under the Conservatives. There must be a better way. And that’s Labour.
