Comedian Rhona gets dog’s abuse over claims poor have to eat pet food
SCOTTISH comedian Rhona Cameron has been ridiculed for claiming that poverty has driven people to eat dog food.
Miss Cameron, 49, claimed on BBC2’s Newsnight that ‘catastrophic times’ had f orced f amilies to ‘ t r agic and desperate’ l engths to f eed themselves.
The Left-wing comic claimed British people were ‘crying out for a party with a heart’ as she lavished praise on Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn.
‘Some families are eating dog meat in some parts of the country,’ she said.
‘We are living in catastrophic times – if you’re a baby boomer, if you bought houses at the right time, if you’re a wealthy person, if you’ve got a couple of properties, you can’t understand how tragic and desperate this situation is.
‘There are millions of people living in poverty, with the highest working poor since the 1890s. It’s time to change it from the heart.’
But the Trussell Trust, a food bank charity, admitted it rarely encountered such dramatic incidents. A spokesman said: ‘We work with 117,000 people in Scotland. We have heard one story about dog food in the last few years, but it’s very infrequent.
‘I think Rhona is being a bit overconfident saying something like that.
‘The last time we were aware of something like that was in 2013. It was a girl in South Ayrshire who had eaten dog biscuits.
‘It’s hard to quantify with any evidence because people are very embarrassed and often don’t want to talk about it. When you do hear stories like that, people are in utter destitution. Even then it’s very infrequent.’
Miss Cameron also denounced t he ‘Americanisation of our culture’.
She said: ‘The lip service we paid to free market capitalism, the commodification of our culture and the economics of consumerism is dehu- manising people. This has been a disastrous time for working people in this country. Labour are in disarray and so they should be.’
But Scottish Tory welfare spokesman John Lamont accused the Dundee comedian of being ‘sensationalist and out of touch’.
He said: ‘The UK Government’s welfare reform measures have actually reduced poverty by getting people off benefits and back to work. We’ve stood up to the challenge of welfare reform to get the country back on track.
‘We do realise that there will be certain circumstances when people need help from the state.
‘That’s why we have a system in place, to help people when they most need it.’
‘Millions of people living in poverty’