Isabel Hardman has written a piece on food banks in this week’s Spectator.
Church Action on Poverty/Oxfam recently reported that 500,000 people had used a food bank in 2012, more than double the figure for 2011. What's Hardman’s line? Basically, she wants to say that they are 'a good thing', and should be celebrated: "Clients munch baked beans on toast at tables with cheery gingham cloths and silk flowers. Volunteers joke and clatter about in a small kitchen area. It's the opposite of the Dickensian image conjured by the critics."
For her, the rise of food banks should have been evidence of a "big-hearted" society but the Left has attached it to economic and policy failure. Food banks have been successfully – but wrongly – presented as evidence of the wilful indifference to the real effects of government policy on the vulnerable. On the contrary - Hardman protests – food banks have been around since the early 2000s. These poor have long been with us. It's not the failure of this government, but the failure of governments in general, to resolve deep rooted social and economic problems that have created the need which they serve.
Food banks, then, should be seen not so much as proof of growing poverty, but of a charitable and generous public. They represent "society doing a job that government could never do". Their genius is that they connect "two very important groups: those in crisis who need the food, and donors who are moved to provide it".
There are similarities here with faith groups' response to the current context. Having struggled to identify their public role in a more religiously diverse, individualistic, and better-provided-for post-war Britain, churches and faith-based agencies have enthusiastically stepped up to the Big Society plate. The proliferation of food banks is one result. They feel, no doubt, that this is a 'good thing', but I hope and don't doubt that their engagement in the issue won't be confined to sweeping up collateral damage caused by whichever government.
Hardman is right in some ways, wrong in many others. True - this Government might not have created new unique problems, but it has exacerbated some old ones. Yesterday's announcement that new JSA claimants will have to wait a week after signing on before receiving any support (leading the BBC's Robert Peston to speak of the Wonga spending review) will make life even harder for those in the low-pay, no-pay cycle of unstable employment (in fact, it seems to me a further disincentive to take temporary work). We would all celebrate the possibility of them finding help from a food bank rather than a pay-day loan company, while lamenting the fact that they would feel the need to go to either.
In 1988 Gordon Brown wrote an article in the Times describing charity as "sad and seedy competition for public pity". That's going too far. But to celebrate society's charity while ignoring the reasons we need that charity in the first place seems perverse. The "two very important groups" that Hardman speaks of are, after all, already connected by the bonds of citizenship as well as neighbourliness.
Paul Bickley
Image by Birmingham News Room from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence
