Taylor Swift, food banks and insecurity

When Taylor Swift gave substantial donations to food banks in each UK venue she played at during her 2024 UK tour, she was widely praised for her generosity. One of the effects, according to charities, was that it allowed them ‘breathing space’ as they struggled to keep up with demand. Another effect was to highlight the fact, often hidden from the wider gaze, that food banks are as widespread as they are. And it led some people at least to question the reasons why they are so necessary for so many.

Increasing hunger

To put some figures on their use, according to recently published figures by the Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest food bank charity, Trussell is currently making around 3 million deliveries to food banks annually, while accepting that this figure represents a significant underestimate of actual demand. Nor does it include networks such as Independent Food Aid (IFAN), which supports around 550 food banks, or Food Bank Aid which supplies around 20,000 people a week at 32 food banks. And, of course, there are myriad other food banks organised locally and independently by charities, churches and volunteer community groups. IFAN has reported a 25-50 percent rise in supplies needed over the last year, while the Trussell Trust shows well over half a million new people using their food banks for the first time in 2023/24, with over a third of the recipients being children, of whom the number receiving food packages has doubled over the last five years. And given the well-known fact that many struggling families, especially those with children, do not turn to food banks but suffer in silence cutting back on food or skipping meals, campaigners have raised the issue of potential life-long risks to physical and cognitive growth for children who may suffer from malnutrition.

Increasing homelessness

The growth in the number of people struggling to feed themselves, therefore, seems exponential, driven, according to a recent IFAN survey, by such factors as cost-of-living increases, Universal Credit waiting times, low wages, insecure work, and disability costs. And of course none of this takes fully into account homeless people who may not be using food banks to survive. In London, for example, the most recent figures showed a 29 percent increase in rough sleepers compared to the previous year with over 4,000 people seen sleeping rough between April and June 2024, close to 2,000 of these ‘new’ to the experience. A spokesperson for the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who has pledged to ‘eliminate’ the problem, said: ‘No one should have to sleep rough on our country’s streets, so it’s shameful that numbers are rising in London and across the country.’ Recent reports have shown that the increasing homelessness feeding this has a number of triggers, one of which is people’s inability to pay rising rents, even when in regular employment or in receipt of all available benefits. A recent case that garnered much publicity was that of a 75-year old woman, Susan Curtis, made homeless in Romford, East London, when the landlady of the home she had lived in for 13 years sold up and evicted her, and she found all other accommodation well beyond her means. A report on this on the BBC news website told us that she was now living in poor health in a small hotel room without proper cooking or other facilities. She said she felt ‘on the edge’ and ‘hopeless’, scared that things would get even worse and she would end up on the streets. She added that ‘it’s a brutal system and I feel ill-equipped to deal with it’, thus summing up the plight of the 100,000+ households (including around 130,000 children) in the UK living in hotels, B&Bs and other temporary accommodation.

The charity Shelter was founded in 1966 with the promise to get rid of homelessness in Britain within 10 years. Today, close to 60 years later, its aim of ‘a safe, secure, affordable home for everyone’ seems further away than ever. In a special debate in the House of Lords on 29 April last year, anti-poverty campaigner and founder of the Big Issue magazine, John Bird (now Lord John Bird) said that millions of children are ‘inheriting poverty’ and called for an ‘enormous mind shift in tackling destitution’. He called upon the government not to try and ameliorate or accommodate poverty by on-off emergency measures but to eradicate it by tackling the causes. Worthy and well-meaning words of course, and when, several months after, in November 2024, he perceived government lack of interest in this, he walked out in exasperation on a session of the parliamentary select committee on homelessness and rough sleeping, proclaiming it a farce.

Lord Bird’s Ministry of Poverty

The farce is to imagine that an end to homelessness, food banks and poverty is even feasible within the framework of the system we live in. It is of course not, since at the end of the day, profit based on ‘growth’ must always trump need and this is what those in government who oversee that system will always give priority to. The best they can ever do is provide band-aids to put over the sore of poverty rather than end its domination over so many lives. A prime example of this is the very latest solution suggested by Lord Bird. As co-chair of a new All-Parliamentary Group Business Responses to Social Crises, he is calling for a ‘Ministry of Poverty’, yet at the same time, he is quoted as saying that its purpose would be ‘to tackle issues such as poverty and the housing crisis through entrepreneurship’. The idea that ‘entrepreneurship’, a mainstay of the system of which poverty and insecurity are inevitable features, could actually solve such problems is nothing short of baffling, especially as at the same time he also seems to accept that the worst poverty is largely down to the fortunate or unfortunate circumstances of your birth and early existence, something that the statistician, David Spiegelhalter, has labelled ‘constitutive luck’.

The machinery of abundance

As is widely accepted, we live in an era where there exist adequate resources and the technology to make beneficial use of them which could provide a decent life for all. As far back as 2009, Tristram Stuart’s book, Waste, worked out that ‘farmers worldwide currently provide the daily equivalent of 2,800 calories of food per person – more than enough to go round’, and estimated that, if food were produced and distributed rationally (meaning for need rather than for profit), there could be enough to feed those going hungry 23 times over. Yet, while there are patently enough resources to feed and house everyone on the planet, large numbers continue to go hungry and homeless. And, even in countries such as the UK, where food is manifestly plentiful, many people, as we have seen, are still forced to have recourse to food banks. So why should it be that the machinery that could give abundance leaves so many people in want and forces them to live hopeless, fragmented lives which both waste their natural potential and make them unhappy?

Comfort and dignity

Pensioner Susan Curtis’s final word was that she would like to be living ‘a comfortable and dignified life’. Who wouldn’t? That is what everyone would want for themselves and for others. Yet we live under a system where very few can be sure of having that – at least for all of their lives. Even those who are not among the 16 million living in poverty in the UK and who have employment that allows them and their families to live with reasonable comfort, can never be fully secure. They can never know quite how long that will last, living as we do in a system which is inherently unstable and prone to crisis and where very quickly insecurity may loom. And this will always be the case until we get together democratically to establish a different social order, a moneyless, marketless society of free access to all goods and services, one in which the rule of the market and the coercion of paid employment are replaced by planned cooperation and democratic association, one in which every single person is able to develop their interests and abilities with full social support and without the gun of material insecurity to their heads.

HKM


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