Reblogged from Sodium Haze:
[...] “It’s like the third world” cried one incredulous damp person whose toilet had stopped working and it is surely at this point that only the most blinkered of observers can avoid this obvious question – why do the sodden matter more than the hungry?
Click on this link and
scroll through the 1,080 food banks now open up and down the land for
people so desperate and so poor that they must fill in forms and beg for
vouchers for three days of emergency food. A million people will visit food banks this year -
that’s more than ten Wembley stadiums full of people going hungry in
Britain today – isn’t that rather more third world than flooding
alongside rivers which can surely happen anywhere?
Where are the BBC radio cars
and the shocked reporters poking through cupboards with no food in,
houses with no heat on and indeed people with no homes at all?
How is it that we can be ‘a rich nation’ and that ‘money is
no object’ when it comes to bailing out damp homeowners with insurances
and bank accounts to buffer them – but we maintain a callous
indifference, even an outright hostility, to anyone unfortunate enough
to need social security?
Scroll through this list of the callous, random and unjust sanctions that
led to withdrawals of basic support from vulnerable desperate people
and the contrast between our empathy for the poor and the comfortably
off is starkly illuminated.
But what is the determining factor in modern Britain that
seems to parcel out unlimited ‘money no object’ support for some but
punishments and scorn for others – the answer is clear, MONEY.
If you have money and agency in
British society today then you matter and no amount of extra support
will be deemed unsustainable or in need of scrutiny. If you don’t have
money and you are unemployed, on poverty wages, disabled or sick – then
you will receive not empathy but opprobrium, destitution will be a
constant threat as the social security net is summarily withdrawn...
Read more...
