The latest figures from the Trussell Trust show that the demand for food banks is rapidly increasing. More than 350,000 people, between April and September this year, received a three-day food package of emergency staple sustenance. This is three times more than during the same period last year.
David Cameron should, the Trussell Trust says, urgently look at
this.
Another bleak problem I’d advise him to examine and quash is the growing, frankly shameful, vocal hostility within his party and supporters – Michael Gove, Lord Freud, Edwina Currie – to food banks themselves. It’s incredible that a party which peddled notions of a Big Society now sneers when communities work together to be charitable, generous and empathic, to bring light, to stop hunger pains, to shove cheap tinned soup and budget brand cereal into the mouths of those without.
Using food banks is a last resort, they’re the opposite of where one
wants to be in life, rock bottom. This humiliating rigmarole of throwing oneself
upon the mercy of strangers, signing the forms and queuing in return for a bag
of dry pasta and some loo paper is not where those 350,000 people chose to be –
as if they were a bit bored with the charcuterie selection down at Lidl.
The Trussell Trust also said some that recipients of emergency
food supplies are so poor they’re returning the tinned foods that requires
cooking because they can’t afford the power to heat the food up, which reminds
me of that Jennifer Aniston line in Friends, “I really thought I had
hit rock bottom, but today it's like rock bottom, 50 feet of crap and then
me”.
Of course, I’m sure if you called Edwina Currie for a soundbite
she’d say she prefers her cheap tinned soup stone cold anyway, in fact cold food
is character building, and then if we’re lucky, Katie Hopkins might treat us to
a soundbite about stupid starving people too, at £75 a shot – which will pay
for her family to eat a hearty dinner.
Meanwhile, more sage sorts like the Trussell Trust are working
to keep people fed and alive. Being hungry, I must remind you, isn’t a weakness,
it’s not a crime. It’s a bodily function, a symptom of being a human being. And
if you are someone who thinks that living throughout winter on basic cheap
rations, without any of the little edible treats that make a grey British life
liveable – a bottle of wine, a night out eating pizza, a takeaway curry, a nice
steak, a fry-up at the weekend – is anything less than grim, perhaps have the
common decency to shut up about it as you’re embarrassing both yourself and the
Prime Minister, who is still dealing with the image catastrophe from the last
time the Conservatives were in power.
How many days in a row, I wonder, has Lord Freud lived on
watery canned soup and white bread, with no let up, no sparkle, no moment of
delicious cheer on the horizon. Freud declared recently that the demand for
food was only increasing because the “free food” was there. I wonder if it has
crossed his mind that until the arrival of the “free food” people had spent
months or years in daily hunger.
I have never bought the sweeping
idea peddled by tub-thumping socialists that all Tories are evil. Politics and
people are so much more complex, and I have several cheerful, kind conservative
friends (whom I could cheerfully strangle because of their views on abortion
laws and relaxing hunting laws). I have many more prolier-than-thou
Labour-voting friends who preach tolerance and equality while swilling
champagne, hiring cheap home help to wipe their kid’s bottom and playing with
their property portfolio. But this growing Tory umbrage over the existence of food banks needs to be put in its
place.
We are currently feeding human beings in pretty much the same
way as we catered for the local cats’ and dogs’ homes a decade ago, slinging
spare cans in a wheelie bin, trying to do our bit. It is like we learned as
children at Harvest Festival when the display of sad vegetables and tinned
tomatoes was carted off “for the poor” – which we all agreed was for the
best.
Conservatives bad-mouthing food banks, for me, is as bleak as
the sudden outbursts of sexism and racism that Cameron has worked so hard to
move his party away from. Because the real problem with the Let Them Eat Cake
brigade is, they’d even resent poor people having only that to eat.
