A last, desperate bid to catch Omicron this morning saw me land at Tesco in Yate, whereupon I passed a wonderful woman and her two young children emptying a trolley loads of goods into the local food bank collection point. “That’s a lovely thing to do,” I told her, wishing I had bought something to add to the collection. “Thank you”, she replied. To be fair to me, my partner and I donate to a food bank every single week of the year via our on-line Morrisons shop but I found myself humbled by this woman’s generosity. Then I got home and read a report from DEFRA, an actual government department, which stated that before the pandemic, 5.4 million people didn’t have enough food to eat. How can this be in a rich country like ours?
Well, it’s a political choice, albeit one which was more complex than usual in 2019. In Boris Johnson, much of the country knew we’d be getting a lying charlatan with a clown act who promised to ‘Get Brexit done’. That he didn’t is neither here nor there because his main opponent was Jeremy Corbyn, an elderly far left crank politician who enabled racism (antisemitism) to flourish on his watch. Johnson came from the right, which means a small state, light touch, low tax government in which those who have nothing should be thankful for what they haven’t got. We, or rather some of you, voted for that, so you essentially voted for more food banks.
In 2004, the Trussell Trust operated two food banks. The number increased during the financial crash to over 40. Now after 11 years of a hard line austerity heavy Conservative government, in which for the first five years Lib Dems took jobs and knighthoods, there are over 2200 food banks. The increase from two to 2200 did not happen by accident.
Now I don’t enjoy paying tax more than the next person, but I like seeing people going without food even less. I celebrate those who make a success of their lives and earn a good salary, buy a nice car and house and enjoy foreign holidays. My experience is that most people who are well-to-do wince when they see the conditions in which other people live and like the lady in Yate this morning actively do something about it.
If there were 5.4 million people without enough food before the pandemic struck, I dread to think how many are starving now. And while Johnson and his chancellor Brand Sunak are gurning for the cameras, pretending they have protected the most vulnerable in society, we need to call them out. Brand Sunak, with a keen eye on the succession, was the man to cut Universal Credit by £20 a week, in a direct attack on the poor, particularly the working poor.
We don’t need to shaft the comfortable middle classes but surely they can pay a little more to help stopping people going without? And the super rich, with their clever accountants, can avoid paying their fair share by all manner of means. They can afford to pay much more. The richest man in British politics, Brand Sunak, might not be so keen.
In a previous job, I once took someone to a food bank in Midsomer Norton and it was one of the most sobering experiences of my life. They were extremely embarrassed, humiliated even, by the need to get a hand out, which was how they saw and described it. At another table, a young woman wept as she told her story and collected a small box of essentials. I took the person back to their small flat, where the heating was turned off for most of the day because the bills even back in the mid 2010s were bad enough back then. How many more people will be thrown into fuel poverty this winter? I dread to think. I know what it’s like to live in a house without heating and I found out years later than my own mother went without food to make sure I didn’t. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone for years about that, My mum, I suspect, never told anyone.
In stark numbers. 5.4 million people is approaching two thirds the population of London. And we as a society don’t give a toss.
My view is that you can judge a country by how it looks after its poorest. In Broken Britain we don’t look after them at all.
