Foodbanks, schools in crisis, poverty... so austerity’s over is it?
I WAS thrown the weirdest of looks by my wife as I left for a football match last Saturday.
“Where are you going with that bag of groceries? Is there a family we don’t know about?” she asked, getting surprisingly close to the truth. Like hundreds of others, I was dropping off tins and packets outside Liverpool’s ground to help families I didn’t know, who would go hungry if it wasn’t for groups like Fans Supporting Foodbanks supplementing the Trussell Trust’s diminishing stocks.
As I struggled with my bag on a packed bus, it hit me that I’d been going to Anfield since 1966, yet had never arrived with food to help strangers fend off hunger. That’s despite Britain being unrecognisably wealthier than it was 52 years ago.
The next day, as I walked through the city centre trying to avoid tripping over homeless people’s legs in sleeping bags, I thought again of 1966, and the first TV play that had an effect on me, Cathy Come Home.
Ken Loach’s landmark drama about homelessness had a startling impact back then because, despite many Britons still having to use outside loos, it was deemed an outrage that anyone in a civilised country would be forced to sleep rough. Today, in this uncivilised one, it’s seen as quite normal.
On Monday, Channel 4’s Dispatches reported on something I’d never heard of: Baby Banks. More than 100 have grown up across the UK since 2010, with volunteers handing out food, clothes, nappies and wipes to 35,000 desperate parents who’ve been referred by public agencies.
What does all that say about human progress, I thought? What does it say about a country famed for valuing fairness that 1.2 million of its citizens now rely on food banks to get through the week, more than 5,000 sleeping rough every night with tens of thousands of families housed temporarily in hostels, and parents relying on charity to feed, clothe and clean their babies?
What does it say about the majority of this country’s media and voters, who willingly swallow the lie from our Prime Minister and Chancellor that the days of austerity are over?
How can austerity be over when you look at those statistics above? Or when you see your council shutting libraries, care centres and youth schemes because they’ve had their budgets slashed in half ?
Or when some schools are talking about closing for half a day a week because they can’t afford to pay the teachers, and teachers are reaching into their own pockets to feed their pupils and buy them books?
Since 2015, schools in England have lost £2billion per year in real-terms funding. Yet in this week’s budget, Philip Hammond sought to prove austerity is over by giving each primary school £10,000, the equivalent of one classroom assistant.
How can they say austerity is ending when they know the roll-out of Universal Credit will push many vulnerable people into poverty, when half of the welfare cuts announced in 2015 have yet to be implemented, and unprotected departments will continue to see budgets fall?
Maybe they feel they can say it because they’ve just handed out £2.7bn a year of tax cuts, which will largely benefit the already well-off, thus convincing people who didn’t really notice in the first place that austerity is all an illusion.
Since the Tories began to slash spending after the banking crash – as a means of dismantling the welfare state and shrinking the pubic sector – the rich have carried on getting considerably richer.
Meanwhile, the poor, who were the least culpable but the most affected by that crash, have got unrecognisably poorer.
But austerity is dead, they tell us. If so, God knows what is must look like when it’s alive.
The poor, who were least culpable for the crash, have just got poorer