I dipped in and out of Comic Relief last night. It’s what I always do during marathon length TV charity events. I don’t have the necessary powers of concentration to take in hour upon hour of anything on TV. What I did see, though, made me very sad. This very worthy charity event is not just helping starving people abroad: it’s helping to feed starving children at home. How on earth did our society come to this point? Isn’t it because we chose to?
In cold political terms, in 2010 the country elected a Conservative government in which some Liberal Democrats had jobs. The economy which was recovering well from the world-wide financial crash of 2008 took a very different course under the coalition government which imposed austerity on the country in general but the poorest people in particular. To the affluent middle classes, there was on the face of it little to worry about. If they were healthy, the savage real terms cuts to the NHS did not affect them. If their children had left school, they will not have noticed the schools funding crisis. If they were not old and infirm, the near collapse of social care was something that happened to someone else. And if they were not struggling to make ends meet, it was hard to believe that others were. But they were.
I do not write about my current employment but in my jobs before that, I saw the direct effects of austerity. I saw just how badly people were struggling, I accompanied some to food banks. The first time I attended a food bank where people, most of whom were working for a living, was an upsetting, unsettling experience. I had heard about people who were unable to afford to eat. Here, in the Salvation Army hall in Midsomer Norton, were these very people.
I was lucky. Even though my mum and I were very poor, she always, without exception, ensured I had something to eat. She would hang around the butcher’s shop after a long day at work, waiting for the minutes before the shop closed for the day to see what off cuts she might pick up. On the occasions she couldn’t get anything, she would call in Templar’s fish and chip shop in Brislington and ‘cadge’ a bag of ‘scrumps’, the crispy remains of the batter in which the fish would be cooked. I looked upon it as a treat because they were delicious, albeit not exactly the healthiest meal on the planet. It wasn’t a treat because Templar’s gave them away. Things are much worse today.
I have visited the houses of people who have empty cupboards and exist, as opposed to live, hand to mouth. It is so easy for the rest of us, who live in Happy Valley, to imagine everyone is like us, a place where we are trying to lose weight as opposed to a place down the road where people couldn’t put on weight if they tried.
Food banks are a modern day necessity. If we did not have them, people, including children, could become very ill, might even die. The reason is very simple: inequality.
We choose to live in a society that knows some people are in dire straits but we believe helping them – giving them money for nothing, as Dire Straits might have put it – isn’t the answer. Work, say the right wing politicians like Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May, gives the best path out of poverty, which sounds nice until you realise it simply isn’t true in every case.
Yes, the road to equality is a long and winding road. However, it should not be beyond the wit and imagination of politicians to come up with a better way of ensuring that children in our country go without food. By no definition could we possibly call Britain great in these circumstances.
As for Comic Relief, it reminds us that charity exists in order to provide the things we deem not important enough to pay for through our taxes. We’re well and truly lost, aren’t we, if ensuring children can eat a decent meal isn’t thought to be important.
