On 28th March 2022, the former prime minister David Cameron tweeted this: “For the last two years I’ve been volunteering each week at the Chippy Larder, a food project in my local town, which helps low income families with surplus food from supermarkets (and cuts food waste at the same time).” I have to take it on face value that Cameron is sincere and genuine in his desire to help the less well-off. Chippy is short for Chipping Norton, that poverty-stricken market town in Oxfordshire, inhabited by paupers such as Rupert Murdoch hack Rebekah Brooks, TV farmer and all round gobshite Jeremy Clarkson and the old Etonian, Oxford University-educated David Cameron. And yet there is, even in one of the leafiest and most affluent areas of the country, food poverty, which is why the Chippy Larder exists. And I could take Cameron more seriously if he wasn’t the actual person who sowed the seeds for the mass food poverty we see today.
In 2010, when the Conservatives formed a new government in which some Liberal Democrats took jobs, 60,000 food bank packages were handed out in Britain. In the year ended March 2023, the figure was just under 3 million, an increase of 37% on the previous year. Let’s break these statistics down a bit.
- In the last year, 2,986,203 emergency food parcels were issued.
- A parcel is a week’s food for a person or a family.
- 1 million emergency food parcels were issued to children.
- 760 thousand people used a food bank for the first time ever in the year ending 2023.
- December 2022 was the busiest month ever for the Trussell Trust.
I hope you’re shocked. You should be. The current situation has been caused as a result of political choices, specifically those made by the Conservative party during the last 13 years.
If you’ve read my ‘Tales from the Food Bank‘ blogs, you will have read my ramblings about the situation in a small part of Bristol where, in March, we took in eight tons of food while giving out 16. Sadly, we are not alone. The Stroud Food Bank distributed 8663 emergency parcels last year, an increase of 77%. As I understand it, the situation everywhere across the land is similar. Wherever you go, whether it’s an inner city area or an affluent rural town, there are poor people who can’t afford to eat.
It’s almost as if there is some kind of structure within the food bank community. The bottom rung would be actual food banks but just above them are ‘larders’ or ‘food pantries’ which offer cheap food for those who can afford to pay a bit.
The Trussell Trust, for whom I volunteer, runs 1300 centres in the UK. As well as that, there are at least 1,172 independent food banks. The Salvation Army run some food banks, schools and hospitals run them too, as well as numerous government offices, particularly in the DWP, including in Bristol, which are run for the staff. The food bank phenomenon is more than a blip: it’s an epidemic and with sky high food inflation – 15.7%, we hear today – and rocketing fuel bills it will not be ended any time soon. But then, we see no evidence that the latest prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is going to do anything different than Cameron. In fact, under Sunak, the richest man in politics who is married to a billionaire, the government has literally chosen to make the rich richer and let the poor go to hell.
Beyond the raw statistics lies human tragedy. I thought I knew how bad things were before I started volunteering at a nearby food bank, but I didn’t really. Until I was confronted with the sight of people who reached their nadir in life, unable to eat or heat, they were just numbers, just the statistics I have reeled out here. Now, I have seen the reality. It hurts and it makes me angry. And in the next year or so, we will all have the opportunity to do something about it.
We can choose to go on like this, in a sad, dispiriting, unequal, broken country, ravaged by food poverty, or we can choose something better. Ultimately, that will be to get the Conservatives out of office by voting Labour, or whichever local party stands the best chance of ousting the Tory, preferably the Lib Dems, despite their treachery when they took jobs in Camerons’ awful government from 2010 to 2015. And we can make a start in this week’s council elections.
Oddly, it was David Cameron who coined the phrase ‘Broken Britain’ in the late 2000s, blaming the worldwide banking crisis on the Labour government. But Britain wasn’t broken in the 2000s: Cameron started to tear it apart with his vicious austerity and his disastrous decision to call a referendum, which led to Brexit from which the country may never recover. Then, he handed the country over to the likes of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and now the wretched Rishi Sunak who finally broke it.
Things can get better, but only if we want them to.
