Lee Anderson, Ashfield MP insists Jack Monroe has made a fortune on the backs of the poor.

[newnamethanks]

AIBU to hope for a libel trial as entertaining as Vardy v Rooney and an outcome that rivals the Katy Hopkins debacle?

Can anyone explain the using energy to melt soap bit to save money?

Just use the soap?

I melt soap, to avoid buying plastic bottles of liquid soap.

A bar is pennies. Melt it with water in the microwave and it makes enough to refill several liquid soap dispensers, if that's what you prefer to use.

It is cheap. It cost very little to make it into a liquid. Some people prefer it to a bar that gets cracked and dirty looking.

That's fair enough.

I'm struggling to square needing to do that v buying a designer puppy and all the costs that entails.

I do think people jump on her every word looking for inconsistencies. Which she will obviously have, being human. Her tendency to attack others leaves her very vulnerable to the same unforgiving attitude back. She's clearly volatile and inconsistent (perhaps due to ND or trauma). I don't think she's a calculated con artist, as many suggest.

She doesn’t live in London. She lives in the nice bit of Southend She’s been in that house for years, longer than any fixed term contract would normally be. The ex partner moved out a few years ago. The house is worth around £800k and on a road of million pound houses. Moving might go some way to buying some shampoo.

Fairly recently she complained she couldn’t afford that house but was aiming to buy one for £500k in a couple of years. Every few months she will talk about moving to a tiny flat because where she lives is so awful/expensive but never happens.

She isn’t poor, struggling whatever. This is her job, saying stuff and getting people to send cash without question. That’s grifting.

I don't think she's a calculated con artist, as many suggest

If that's what you think, you haven't been paying attention, which is what she relies on.

I think she'd be much more slick in her media appearances if she was as calculating as that. I think she's more chaotic than slick.

Ive got a bag of soap bits, I love soap and buy quite expensive soap and would love to know how to use the bits up,, I remember looking it up and it all seemed quite faffy to make new soap

Do you mind saying how you do it, or PM me if possible as dont want to hijack the thread with soap recipes!!

The easiest thing to do with them is use a soap bag. Something like the one I've linked to.

Soap tends to last a bit longer too, as it lathers it up well, and you just leave the end bit in when you pop in the new bar.

amzn.eu/9sH9Ah2

This is interesting. My soap bits are actually currently being stored in a turkish hand mitt which is sort of rough linen. Judging by that, I could just leave the soap in the mitt and use it to wash with until its used up?

Definitely worth trying @bellac11 !

Ah yes, a designer puppy, hair done in Toni & Guy plus a tattoo but poor Jack is skint.

Quick…send cash.

oh wait….around 700 people a month do already. Minimum of £3.50….um….yeah!

Grifter and a liar while people live in poverty. Sit down Jack…..you are NOT and never have been in poverty thanks to your lovely family .

Do any people genuinely in poverty use her recipes? I know books were supposedly given to food banks but I’ve never seen any of them or even any signposts towards them in any of the 3 food banks I’ve helped out at. I have seen her book in kitchens of almost all of my middle class friends houses though.

I don’t think Jack Monroe is a bad person and I don’t think she’s deliberately grifting. I do think she should be much better advised by people around her as her ND clearly stops her viewing her actions as anything other than perfectly normal when most people in her situation would have acted very differently - asking wealthy parents/ supportive baby father for financial help before going down the sex work/ selling lightbulbs route, not spending £1,500 on a designer puppy if so financially insecure you’re thinking about moving to a one bedroom flat and sleeping on the sofa etc.

Erm, the point is she did get help from her parents/ex, the rest is made up to get money, AKA grift.
Imagine lying about sex work, particularly when you have a child who can read that online. As can his friends....

Nobody living in poverty uses her recipes.

Is someone really going to rinse the sauce off a tin of baked beans to bung them in a tinned peach curry or whatever terrible concoction she’s dreamed up, in the hope that their kids are hungry enough to eat it .

Of course not, they going to heat them up and eat them on toast, or even eat them cold straight from the tin.

Have you seen her vegetable peel bake? <not envy

I think her recipes are more like a middle-class idea of what the poor should be cooking, than what anyone who is skint is likely to cook in reality.

It's Faux poverty and novelty poverty

The woman at the local Aldi filling her Harvey Nichols bags always springs to my mind. She wasn't there because her was hard up, her could have sold her handbag and fed a poor family for a month.

I don’t see her as calculating, I feel quite worried for her. She has always seemed very unstable and fragile. I don’t think she’s well at all.

I think some of her articles contain good tips for making grocery money go a bit further; her recipes I haven’t enjoyed on the few occasions I’ve tried them. Ironically I wouldn’t be game to try them if I couldn’t afford to bin the result and have cheese on toast instead.

I remember seeing her articles on how to make your own ready meals and at the time I thought although she was quite right, you could make a nicer version for less money, she really lacked empathy about the effect of chaos, mental illness, unrelenting poverty etc on anyone’s ability to produce a pretend ready meal
lasagne.

I don’t think you have to be in poverty to shop at Aldi!

@bellac11 it's a work in progress! Leave the soap sitting in a dish of water for a day. Maybe microwave it for 30 secs.

Mine was too hard for the pump dispenser at first- it took far more water than I anticipated. Don't try and whisk or blend out the lumps, you get bubbles!

I've now found that I can microwave my glass soap dispenser bottle and add more water. It's currently the perfect thickness! I've more sat in the fridge waiting for the next top up. It goes further than letting the bits melt in a mitt.

The cognitive dissonance is so strong. One minute it’s fuck all landlords the next it’s oh my granda was a landlord I enjoyed working there. I can’t get over the parents, one has an MBE, one was a nurse, is active in the local church and both of whom fostered children, rent out property and are big in the local community neglecting Jack or enabling Jack. It’s not right.

Has the other thread from yesterday been pulled? Threats to sue I suppose? Gets a bit tedious...

As someone who is autistic and currently going through the assessment process for ADHD, I wonder how you have come to the conclusion that ND makes her view her actions as normal? JM plays the autism and ADHD cards a lot, her backstory about her autism diagnosis is iffy and contradictory but I do believe she has got ADHD. Buying a dog on impulse and being generally impulsive with money could be caused by ADHD but the dog was planned as she posted pics of visiting the litter a few weeks before she brought the dog home. Anyone who can't put a lightbulb on due to poverty should not be bringing a puppy into their lives, even if it was gifted as she is now implying.

If I was being generous I would say depression is making her catastrophise about poverty and doing stupid things like buying those garden lights instead of spending a few pennies putting on a lightbulb. However, she has form for exaggerating her poverty and then showing screenshots of her bank accounts and grifting for money using extremely emotionally charged language.

I'm on a budget food group and a lot of people seem to love her peach and chickpea curry but I've not seen her other recipes being used or praised.

Tory MP complaints that a wealthy person is exploiting the poor and making money out of it. Who said irony died when BJ stepped into No 10?

I googled JM on Companies House and it came up with an address for a JM who owned a company called "On a Bootstrap" and occupation was listed as 'writer'.

Is that the same person?

The reason I ask - DoB was listed as March 1978, which would make them 44 yo. But everything listed online about JM puts her/them as 10 years younger. 😕