Esther McVey is spending over £200,000 on a study everyone already knows the answer to

Esther McVey
Support us and go ad-free

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) secretary Esther McVey has once again proven how out of touch she is. She’s launched a £217,000 study to discover whether the government’s continued commitment to austerity is “harming poor people”.

But people have already worked out the answer.

Are we to blame?

The Liverpool Echo drew on a Guardian exclusivereporting that:

The Tory welfare chief and her department are trying to find out if its policies are behind the surge in people relying on food banks.

The £217,000 research will seek to answer what campaigners have long argued after the number of emergency food parcels soared from 61,000 in 2010/11 to 1.3million last year.

Yes, yes you are.

Yet McVey could have just asked the question on social media, as people were chomping at the bit to tell her the answer:

Read on...

Support us and go ad-free

And others thought that the fact she even had to ask is evidence that this government exists in a “parallel universe”:

Meanwhile, campaigning lawyer Peter Stefanovic wasn’t impressed:

Delusional

McVey is MP for Tatton, close to Manchester and Liverpool. In response to her study, a Liverpudlian on Facebook stated:

Just goes to show what a clueless delusional gravy-train riding idiot she really is and so far detached from reality and her constituents it’s laughable.

I’ll do the survey for £10 and come up with the same answer.

And while the new research will focus on DWP policies, others have previously laid bare the impact of cuts elsewhere. A 2017 study published in the medical journal BMJ Open linked Tory cuts to health services to “around 120,000 excess deaths”. Meanwhile, research by food bank charity the Trussell Trust concluded:

Analysis of foodbanks that have been in full UC [Universal Credit] rollout areas for a year or more shows that these projects experienced an average increase of 52% in the twelve months after the full rollout date in their area.

Perhaps most startling of all is that, between July and August 2017, over 74,000 three-day emergency food supplies went to children.

Lip service

But people think the government is well aware of how damaging its policies have been:

And welfare and disability campaigner Charlotte Hughes is concerned that the government is paying “lip service” to the issue in a bid to silence people:

Therefore, it’s up to all of us to continue to pressurise this government into reversing its cruel policies. Thankfully, people aren’t buying McVey’s faux compassion.

Get Involved!

Follow Charlotte Hughes’s blog, The poor side of life.

– Join The Canary, so we can keep holding the powerful to account.

Featured image via UKParliament/YouTube

Support us and go ad-free

We know everyone is suffering under the Tories - but the Canary is a vital weapon in our fight back, and we need your support

The Canary Workers’ Co-op knows life is hard. The Tories are waging a class war against us we’re all having to fight. But like trade unions and community organising, truly independent working-class media is a vital weapon in our armoury.

The Canary doesn’t have the budget of the corporate media. In fact, our income is over 1,000 times less than the Guardian’s. What we do have is a radical agenda that disrupts power and amplifies marginalised communities. But we can only do this with our readers’ support.

So please, help us continue to spread messages of resistance and hope. Even the smallest donation would mean the world to us.

Support us

Comments are closed