Watch Iain Duncan Smith SNEAK OUT of food banks debate as Tories LAUGH at stories of starving families

[ttosca]

IT was the day the Nasty Party showed its true-blue colours – by sneering at the plight of hungry families forced to rely on food banks.

Tory MPs laughed and jeered as they were told how some hard-up shoppers were so desperate they fought to snap up discounted items in supermarkets.

Astonishingly, all the Government ministers from the responsible departments – including Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith – sneaked out after just an hour of the crucial Commons debate.

By then a cowardly IDS had already ducked questions, putting forward his deputy instead.

In one of the most shameful episodes ever witnessed in Parliament, Tory backbenchers sniggered and hooted as Labour MP Fiona MacTaggart told of shocking scenes at her local Tesco in Slough, Berks, as people battled over cut-price fruit and veg.

She said the store had now been forced to draft in extra security.

Almost drowned out by mocking Tory MPs, she asked: “Isn’t that a shocking sign in the 21st century?”

Senior Labour politicians later described the Tories’ callous reaction as “shameful” and “a total disgrace”.

Labour MP Jamie Reed said: “I regret to say the laughter from the Government benches says more about this issue than words ever could.”

His colleague Barry Gardiner said it was “extraordinary” to see Mr Duncan Smith smirking as it was pointed out that half a million people are now using food banks.

And The Trussell Trust, the nation’s largest provider of food banks, said it was “disappointed” by the attitude of those who jeered.

Labour had called the debate after nearly 150,000 people signed a petition backed by the Mirror, the Unite union and The Trussell Trust calling for an inquiry into the growing dependence on food aid.

But Mr Duncan Smith refused to answer for the Government, leaving it to his deputy, Esther McVey.

And in an ill-judged speech, she sparked fury by claiming it was a good thing that more people were turning to food banks.

Incredibly she insisted: “It is positive that people are reaching out to support other people.”

She went on: “In the UK it is right that more people are going to food banks because as times are tough, we are all having to pay back this
£1.5trillion debt personally. We are all trying to live within our means, change gear and make sure that we pay back all our debt.” Labour veteran Sir Gerald Kaufman described her speech as the “nastiest” he had heard in his 43 years as an MP.

Labour’s Lilian Greenwood added: “They are the nasty party through and through. She doesn’t get it and won’t take responsibility.”

Shortly after Ms Mcvey’s performance, Mr Duncan Smith scurried from the chamber, followed by an number of other senior Tories.

Speaker John Bercow said he had no power to stop them, but said the view that it was a disgrace there was no minister there “may be widely shared”. Shadow Environment Secretary Maria Eagle said the increasing need for food banks was a damning indictment of Government policy.

She added: “Since April this year more than 500,000 people have relied on assistance from the 400 food banks run by The Trussell Trust charity, double the number of food banks compared to this time last year.” She added: “It’s a scandal which is getting worse and the Government now has the humiliation of the Red Cross helping to collect and distribute food aid in Britain for the first time since the Second World War.”

Former Labour Cabinet minister Paul Murphy told the Commons he had never seen such poverty in his 40 years as a Welsh politician, apart from during the 1984 Miners’ Strike.

Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Rachel Reeves told the House: “It’s a tale of two nations – tax cuts for the rich, food banks for the poor.”

Not all Tories joined in the mocking and jeering.

Wycombe MP Steve Baker gave an emotional speech in support of food banks as he revealed how poverty had caused the break-up of his family when he was a child.

He said there was no one to help when his self-employed dad ran out of work. They had to go hungry and his parents eventually split up.

He blamed the current plight of hard-up families on politicians pretending there is a “magic wand” to solve the problem.

Mr Baker said 12,000 children in Buckinghamshire were currently living in poverty, with one in five in his constituency going to bed hungry, rising to one in three in some areas.

He added: “It is a scandalous indictment of the safety net that is the welfare state.”

But Tory and Lib Dem MPs banded together to defeat Labour’s motion, calling on the Government to reduce dependency on food banks, by 294 votes to 251, a majority of 43.

Food banks give a minimum of three days’ emergency food to people facing crisis in the UK.

People are referred by care professionals though a voucher system to ensure only genuine cases receive help.

Vouchers are also held by Jobcentre Plus for emergency distribution.

Each food bank is run in partnership with a local church or community. All food is donated by the public.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/food-banks-debate-video-iain-2941100

Whilst I heartily agree with you Extraordinaire, a damn good 'pat' on the back would serve to dislodge a couple of hefty chips that seem to be burdening a couple of posters.

Food banks: cowardly coalition can't face the truth about them

Conservatives cannot admit a real fear of hunger afflicts thousands

---

I went to the Trussell Trust food bank round the corner from the Observer's offices just before Christmas. If I hadn't been reading the papers, I would have assumed it represented everything Conservatives admire. As at every other food bank, volunteers who are overwhelmingly churchgoers ran it and organised charitable donations from the public.

What could be closer to Edmund Burke's vision of the best of England that David Cameron says inspired his "big society"? You will remember that in his philippic against the French revolution, Burke said his contemporaries should reject its dangerously grandiose ambitions , and learn that "to love the little platoons we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections". Yet when confronted with displays of public affection – not in 1790 but in 2013 – the coalition turns its big guns on the little platoons.

It would have been easy for the government to say that it was concerned that so many had become so desperate. This was Britain, minsters might have argued, not some sun-beaten African kleptocracy. Regardless of politics, it was a matter of common decency and national pride that Britain should not be a land where hundreds of thousands cannot afford to eat. The coalition might not have meant every word or indeed any word. But it would have been in its self-interest to emit a few soothing expressions of concern, and offer a few tweaks to an inhumanely inefficient benefits system, if only to allay public concern about the rotten state of the nation.

But the coalition is not even prepared to play the hypocrite. Iain Duncan Smith showed why he never won the VC when he was in the Scots Guards when he refused to face the Labour benches as the Commons debated food banks on 18 December. He pushed forward his deputy, one Esther McVey, a former "TV personality". All she could say was that hunger was Labour's fault for wrecking the economy. She gave no hint that her government had been in power for three years during which the number attending food banks had risen from 41,000 in 2010 to more than 500,000. Her remedy was for the coalition to help more people into work.

If she had bothered talking to the Trussell Trust, it would have told her that low-paid work is no answer. Its 1,000 or so distribution points serve working families, who have no money left for food once they have paid exorbitant rent and fuel bills.

But then no one in power wants to talk to the trust. As the Observer revealed, Chris Mould, its director, wrote to Duncan Smith asking if they could discuss cheap ways of reducing hunger: speeding up appeals against benefit cuts; or stopping the endemic little Hitlerism in job centres, which results in unjust punishments for trivial transgressions. In other words, a Christian charity, which was turning the "big society" from waffle into a practical reality, was making a civil request. Duncan Smith responded with abuse. The charity's claims to be "non-partisan" were a sham, he said. The Trussell Trust was filled with "scaremongering" media whores, desperate to keep their names in the papers. But he had their measure.

Oh, yes. "I understand that a feature of your business model must require you to continuously achieve publicity, but I'm concerned that you are now seeking to do this by making your political opposition to welfare reform overtly clear."

Ministers will not confess to making a mistake for fear of damaging their careers. But it is not only their reputations but an entire world view that is at stake. Put bluntly, the Conservatives hope to scrape the 2015 election by convincing a large enough minority that welfare scroungers are stealing their money. They cannot admit that a real fear of hunger afflicts hundreds of thousands. Hence, Lord Freud, the government's adviser on welfare reform, had to explain away food banks by saying: "There is an almost infinite demand for a free good."

My visit to the food bank showed that our leaders' ignorance has become a deliberate refusal to face a social crisis. Of course, the volunteers help working families and students as well as the unemployed and pensioners. Everyone apart from ministers knows about in-work poverty. As preposterous is the Tory notion that the banks are filled with freeloaders.

You cannot just swan in. You get nothing unless a charity or public agency has assessed your need and given you a voucher. The trust is at pains to make sure that the beggars – for hundreds of thousands of beggars is what Britain now has – receive a balanced diet. To feed a couple for five days, it gives: one medium pack of cereal, 80 teabags, a carton of milk, two cans apiece of soup, beans, tomatoes and vegetables, two portions of meat and fish, fruit, rice pudding, sugar, pasta and juice. That this is hardly a feast is confirmed by the short list of "treats", which, "when available", consist of "one bar of chocolate and one jar of jam".

Sharon Cumberbatch, who runs the centre, tells me that she is so worried that shame will deter her potential clients that she packages food in supermarket bags so no one need know its source. The clients, when I met them, reinforced her point that they were not the brazen freeloaders of Tory nightmare. They trembled when they told me how they did not know how they would make it into the new year.

Most of all, it was the volunteers who were a living reproof to a coalition that can cannot correct its errors. They not only distribute food but collect it. They stand outside supermarkets all day asking strangers to buy the tinned food they need or hand out leaflets in the streets or plead with businesses to help. Sharon Cumberbatch is unemployed but she works to help others for nothing. Her colleagues said they manned the bank because hunger in modern Britain was a sign of a country that was falling apart. Or as one volunteer, Richard Moorhead, put it to me: "I am gobsmacked that people are going hungry. I'm ashamed."

The coalition can call such attitudes political if it wants – in the broadest sense they are. But they are also patriotic, neighbourly, charitable and kind. They come from people who represent a Britain the Conservative party once claimed a kinship with, and now cannot bring itself to talk to.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/28/coalition-wont-face-fact-of-food-banks

'The further up the ladder you climb, the further you fall'. I don't think it's how far, but where you fall to. Those on the lower rungs will fall in the mire, those higher up will still be cushioed by memory foam, encased in the 1000 tc egyptian cotton. And, if, on the tooth and nail scramble climb up the ladder you did not make provision for the potential fall, more fool you. The huge mortgage, trendy kitchen and state of the art bathroom, the three or four 'wonderful' holidays, designer trappings all because you 'deserve' it and to make your friends jealous impress your friends. And the private education, of course, because your special ones children couldn't possibly be tainted by the hoi polloi 'Tylers' and 'Kylies'. Of course you're soooo over-taxed on couldn't possibly save.

ttosca - The last two sentences of that article resonate with me, because my Mum was a lifelong Conservative, as were her parents. They were, to the core, 'patriotic, neighbourly, charitable and kind.'. Thatcherism killed that in Toryism, 'though Thatcher acolytes and apologists would rather have the contents of their bank accounts donated to 'Friends of North Korea' than admit it.