Food banks in the UK: raving lunacy

[Comrade Thomas]

Hello RevLeft,

I don't know how many of you live in the UK and/or follow its politics but does anyone else find this extremely disturbing? In one of the world's richest countries people depend on food-based aid in the same way like those people in the third world.

What would everyone's solution be to this? Relative to a democratic context.

All views welcome,

Thomas

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Capitalism is a global system so you shouldn't be shocked that poverty exists in all areas of the globe, including the areas with supposedly high wealth. All across the world the capitalist class extract wealth from working people and it concentrates in fewer and fewer hands whilst everyone else is forced to scrape by. Yeah, it's irrational but then it's an irrational system altogether.

Immediate things that would alleviate some of the reasons people are forced to use food banks in the UK could include: stopping sanctions of benefits, capping rent, increasing the minimum wage to a living wage that increases with inflation, getting rid of the cuts to council tax benefit cuts and other things of that nature. Also, there's a possibility to implement a basic income that would provide everyone with at least enough to live a dignified life. These are all tangible things we could organise around as well.

Frankly though, these things would just be band aids covering a wound and the level of poverty and income inequality that leads to people needing to use food banks is a facet of capitalism itself. Ultimately the only way we can establish a rational society would be to abolish capitalism altogether and build an economy planned to function in such a way as to distribute necessary goods throughout the community instead of relying on the fickleness of the market or, where that inevitably fails, philanthropy.

[radiocaroline]

I live in the East Midlands and find that food banks are ever more active in my area, ever since collecting for them through school a few years back.

I think that what we have seen in the UK and the North and Scotland in particular, is the classic Marx concept of polarisation of the classes, closely linked to pauperisation. Where we see the expansion of socio-economic divide to extreme with the rich becoming even more rich and the poor marginalised into poverty and the very minimal forms of existence.

Cameron is always talking of the wealth of our nation and it's potential to challenge once again on the top tables of world commerce, and he is right in saying that we are a rich country. But this is completely contradictive with the living standards which the government has enforced onto its people. Countless policies attacking the poor, such as the bedroom tax and the divide and rule ideologies expressed in the hegemonic media superstructure have led us to hate those below us, just like the bourgeois propertied classes do, the underclass has become a scapegoat and a tool in order to pacify the plights of the working class against the Tory elite.

We hear optimistic news of dropping unemployment and a growing economy, but to what extent is this just a fabrication of the real economic state of the country? And how far will
David Cameron go to further stratify an already hostile society by allowing tax cuts on the rich and unhindered tax fraud and evasion by global giants like google and Starbucks who take the British economic system for a joke.. Unsurprisingly unlike the capitalist ideals of wealth distribution, these problems all trickle down to the poorest in society who are scrutinised in every sense in order to criminalise us as a culturally deficient horde of unemployed benefit dependants.

[red flag over teeside]

The existence of food banks as other posters have made clear is a clear vindication of the increasing failure of a capitalist system to provide an adequate safety net to those most in need in a capitalist society. When I say most in need I'm not only referring to unemployed workers but there's plenty of evidence to show that those in work are also beginning to rely on food banks.

One other point to make food banks also shows at best the failure of existing reformist organisations such as the Labour Party both local as well as national as well as the trade unions to defend workers interests. Seems to me that both sets of organiations are more interested in defending their respective organisations as shown by the recent announcement by Wolverhampton councillors that they are going ahead with Condem imposed cuts even if this means that 2,000 council workers will loose their jobs while vitally needed services are further slashed.