Campaigns to help hungry children in the UK are a great idea, but we shouldn't need them

The fact that the food bank movement exists, and the success of appeals like the one The Independent is currently running, suggests to me I’m not alone in finding this situation deeply troubling

James Moore
Saturday 02 December 2017 12:38 GMT
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We should be ashamed that we need to rely on food donations to feed children in a developed country
We should be ashamed that we need to rely on food donations to feed children in a developed country

I’m not quite sure when the glaring problem with the food bank advent calendar my wife and I are putting together with the weekly shop occurred to me.

But it’s there and it’s huge and it’ll lose you sleep if you have anything resembling a conscience.

Let me explain: it’s not that I’m questioning acts of charity that aim to tackle the problem of hunger in this country. There’s no need for people to scream “he’s a witch, burn him on Twitter because he doesn’t want to help hungry kids” or to write to my editor demanding my immediate firing.

It’s the problem such acts aim to solve. Do you see it yet? For those that don’t, I’ll spell it out. It is this: how the hell did we get into the position where kids in a modern, wealthy, developed country go to school hungry?

How was this allowed to happen? Why aren’t people frothing with outrage about it?

We live in an age where it seems people are cross about something nearly all of the time, so cross that they’re willing to threaten people with physical violence and even death at the merest hint that they disagree with them.

You should see the reactions I sometimes get when I write about Brexit.

But people froth with outrage at far more trivial things than that. Spend a few minutes in a pub after the footy results are in on a Saturday if you don’t believe me. Consider the fact that MoneySupermarket’s “dance off” ad featuring gangs of twerking businessmen and pole dancing builders attracted 455 complaints.

It seems slightly surreal to me that a goofy ad actually appears to rile people up more than the fact that children living near them will be attending school this morning on an empty stomach.

That’s the real outrage. That’s genuinely something we should be upset about. It is no less than an ugly stain on the conscience of our nation. A pus-filled boil that festers untreated on the skin of us all.

We are regularly exhorted to be proud of our country. To talk up Britain. Quite how one can be proud of a country that has allowed such a situation to develop is something I find bewildering.

The fact that the food bank movement exists, and the success of appeals like the one The Independent is currently running, suggests to me that I’m not alone in finding this situation deeply troubling.

Help A Hungry Child: How the Felix Project is tackling food poverty

It’s a positive thing that people are willing to do something about it.

But while what so many of us are doing is very necessary, vital in fact, as it stands we are ultimately treating a symptom and not the underlying problem

The fact is that Britain as a nation is in need of deep-seated reform. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has become a chasm, and it’s getting worse by the day.

As The Independent’s chief business commentator I see the other side of the coin all too regularly. My focus will shift in the New Year to commenting on another running sore; the grotesque and absurd salaries doled out to the managers running our great public companies.

There is a whole industry of people that are paid handsomely simply to try and justify what is essentially unjustifiable, to prop up the bloated sense of entitlement at the top of British business while the people they step over on the way out of the opera endure cold and hungry nights.

The contrast between the two stories; hungry children on the one hand, fat cat captains of industry on the other, could hardly be more stark.

It has caused a cancer to grow at the heart of our body politic, one that is metastasising, infecting us all with a sense of deep unease.

Unequal societies are unstable societies and this country is currently in as unstable a state as I’ve ever seen it.

How do we fix it? There is one very obvious step that could be taken as your starter for ten. It is the scrapping of the Conservative Government’s universal credit.

The delay in getting payments through to needy people it results in creates thousands of individual crises for thousands of individual families. Many of them end up knocking on food banks’ doors because they have no choice.

The measures announced in the Budget to address the issue amounted to placing a band aid on a broken leg and I suspect ministers know that.

The problems I raise in this piece are deep rooted and complex. To solve such problems we require multi-layered, carefully thought through, long term measures, and the willingness of multiple agencies to see them through – central government most of all.

However, real and meaningful reform of a truly desperate piece of policy making that the May Government is clinging to only out of the worst kind of ideological pig-headedness, would at least be a good place to start.

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