Sometimes the supposed wickedness of one's opponents can make you lazy. The left have spent the best part of the last 30-odd years blaming the late Margaret Thatcher for their own terminal decline and UK society's ills to boot. And they're now keen as custard, if you'll excuse the culinary reference, on vilifying the views of her associates on the foodbank issue whatever the merits (admittedly scant) of what they have to say. While it may be hard to stomach ex Tory ministers Edwina Currie and Norman Tebbit, spouting ill-considered bile about the inadequacies of the poor - notwithstanding the recent contrite comments of the latter following an encounter with the apparently food-poor; I find it harder still to swallow today's left-liberal refusal to countenance any alternative view on the subject than their own.
Those who have questioned the government's critics' unofficial-official account - accepting, as most do, that the DWP version of events doesn't stand up to scrutiny - have also met with no little hostility. It is not enough to accept, or even regret, that some people are hard-up and desperate. You have to sign-up without question to the completely counter-factual notion that a million or more people are actually going hungry. Or else be banished from polite company. Robin Aitken, co-founder of the Oxford Food Bank, for instance, is one of the few people involved in the industry (for want of a less cynical term) to question the dominant narrative that there has been an increase in 'food poverty'. I find this intolerance of any counter-argument or criticism on the grounds that it is itself tantamount to cruelty, about as shocking as the poor-pitying no doubt find the imagined plight of the allegedly hungry masses. And about as anger-inducing as the notion that a compassion-light, cutting-obsessed, Tory-dominated government is inflicting unprecedented deprivations on the 'vulnerable' and needy.
But it is only a notion, and a shaky one at that. According to figures provided by the Trussell Trust - a network running more than a third of the country's foodbanks and, according to Nick Cohen, 'the Anglican conscience at its active best' - the increase in take-up of food parcels preceded the coming to power of the apparently ever-so-austere coalition government. (A government, it should be noted, with which the Trust has been in a very public spat of recent.) So there were 2,814 people in 2005/6 - under a Blair government - receiving the at least 3 days worth of non-perishable food that their food voucher entitled them to. This shot up to 9,174 the following year; and again, under the ill-fated Brown government to 13,849, 25,899 and then 40,898 in each of the years that followed. In other words, there was a very significant upward trend in foodbank demand under the preceding Labour governments. In 2010/11 under Cameron's Lib-Con administration there was even a relative slow down in the rise to 61,468 referrals. It was after this that the trend of high proportionate increases under Labour gave way to high absolute increases, with 128,697 referrals in 2011/12 and 346,992 recorded in 2012/13, under the coalition.
The reasons for the increase are various: including things like unemployment, domestic violence, sickness and delayed wages. Over the winter period, the Trust even began issuing 'kettle boxes' for the extremely desperate few who, because they had been made homeless or were just plain broke, couldn't afford to use a cooker; and 'cold boxes' for those who didn't even have the means to heat water. But, in the latter period at least, there is good reason to point to welfare changes as having the single most sizeable bearing on the rise in foodbanks and the take-up of food parcels. According to the Trust (ever-reliable in recording its foodbank activity), in 2013/14 benefit delays accounted for the highest number of referrals at 31% of the total 913,138. Another 20% were a consequence of 'low income', 17% down to benefit changes; and 8% a consequence of debt problems. In other words, at least half of the referrals - whether or not you include things like the refusal of short term benefit allowances or crisis loans - were in one way or another related to recent changes in the benefits system, both to its reform and its (mal)administration.
That this has been happening is not in question. In fact it would be silly, as the government has indeed been doing, to deny it. But the extent and nature of the 'hunger' problem is in question. It would be remarkable if somebody somewhere didn't find the claim that 'Britain isn't eating' a little far-fetched. Indeed, it is only in questioning the orthodox view which, in my view, tends to exaggerate the problem that we might arrive at a sensible explanation about what is causing it. We only, after all, have half an answer.