UN investigator slams UK government for forcing food banks to keep ‘picking up the pieces’

UN investigator Philip Alston is currently touring the UK to assess the scale of damage that Conservative-led austerity has caused in recent years. And he has slammed the government for outsourcing the task of ‘keeping people alive’, just as newly released figures show food-bank use is continuing to rise.

Food-bank use keeps rising to “pick up the pieces” for devastating Tory austerity

Announcing a 13% increase in food-bank use on the previous year, the Trussell Trust insisted on 6 November:

Foodbanks cannot continue to pick up the pieces – we have to make sure our benefits system can protect people from hunger.

This morning we release #foodbank figures for April-Sept 2018, showing a 13% increase on the same period in 2017. #Foodbanks cannot continue to pick up the pieces – we have to make sure our benefits system can protect people from hunger. More here > https://t.co/Eh10r6zFxK pic.twitter.com/5grY4js6hw

— The Trussell Trust (@TrussellTrust) November 6, 2018

#Foodbank figures for our network are soaring – and these numbers don't account for help given by other food banks. Our network accounts for roughly 2/3 of food banks across the UK – so we know the scale of need is even bigger @IFAN_UK#StopUKHunger > https://t.co/afpnAhGJdR pic.twitter.com/IWGrs8paf0

— The Trussell Trust (@TrussellTrust) November 6, 2018

Meanwhile, media reports suggest that many people are now “surviving day by day”:

“The #foodbank volunteers explained: “We can barely cope. Many are forced here while waiting for their #UniversalCredit to start. Some had delays of ten weeks. People are surviving day by day.” 4/5 > https://t.co/GFyDA3p8Fn

— The Trussell Trust (@TrussellTrust) November 8, 2018

And some of the accounts are utterly harrowing:

“With hunger growling in his stomach, a man in his 30s collected an emergency food parcel, ripped the bag open, unscrewed a jar of peanut butter and began frantically scooping it into his mouth”. Is this the country we want? https://t.co/34vI98M9i3

— Peter Stefanovic (@PeterStefanovi2) November 6, 2018

"A woman with 3 children arrives at the #foodbank distraught & crying. Her friend admits she’d been “doing favours” for her landlord to help pay rent after losing some of her benefits but has now been evicted: “He abused her & now she is alone. She slept in an abandoned car" 2/5

— The Trussell Trust (@TrussellTrust) November 8, 2018

UN investigator speaks out: “you have issues here”

Speaking outside a Newcastle food bank which featured in the film I, Daniel Blake, Alston said:

When you have rates of maybe a third of children living in poverty and you have a food bank clientele at a place like this that is growing and growing and growing, you have issues here.

Alston also insisted that food banks were essentially turning into a “real safety net so that [people] don’t quite starve”, in the absence of effective government support. And he stressed that the government risked sending out the message that it “can just outsource these things” in the “hope that a private community is going to take it up and keep people alive”. That, he suggested, was unacceptable.

An end to austerity?

Between April 2017 and March 2018, Trussell Trust food banks distributed around 1.3 million three-day emergency food packages – 484,026 of which went to children.

And it is the Conservative Party’s capitalist extremism (neoliberalism) that led us to this point. This failed ideology, which hits the poorest people the hardest and only makes sense for the very richest, was not a necessity. The Conservatives chose to implement it – and they chose to do so in spite of all of the evidence against the doctrine, and the inequality and suffering it leaves in its wake.

We deserve so much better.

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Featured image via Teacher Dude/Flickr and Airman 1st Class Jeffrey Parkinson (image was altered)