Making foodbanks a laughing matter is a poor show by ignorant politicians

Last week, Jeremy Kite, Conservative leader of Dartford Borough Council, was pictured smiling and laughing at the opening of a local foodbank. Not content with the exceptionally poor optics of this, he doubled down on an LBC phone-in, during which he was not only unremorseful, but claimed: “Foodbanks didn’t begin with a political party.”

The laughter as the foodbank ribbon was cut is so jarring because of Kite’s refusal to recognise his own party’s guilt. Fewer than 30,000 food parcels were given out prior to the 2010 general election, rising to a peak of 2.5 million last year.

The concept of foodbanks may predate the current Conservative government, but the lived reality does not.

This series of events highlights an essential problem with Conservatism: praising community acts of micro-kindness while practising macro-cruelty.

Foodbanks are David Cameron’s “Big Society” writ large. People are abandoned by the state tasked with ensuring their welfare and forced to appeal to the goodwill of their local community.

Such communities will always step up to the mark, but this is massively insufficient. The right to food is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; this responsibility lies squarely with the state, not with kindly citizens.

This misunderstanding was underlined by MP Lee Anderson’s assertion that food poverty does not exist, that we have simply “got generation after generation who cannot cook properly, they can’t cook a meal from scratch, they cannot budget”.

Anderson further claimed his words are not meaningfully different from poverty campaigner Jack Monroe painstakingly devising and sharing low-cost recipes for families on small incomes.

If it isn’t obvious, the difference is that Monroe is sharing life experience, recognising the common humanity of people who find themselves struggling while actively campaigning against the material conditions that make it necessary. Anderson comes from a place of total ignorance; it is sneering paternalism, the worst kind of victim blaming.

People in poverty do not want contemptuous pity. The empathy of foodbank volunteers and former users sharing their own wisdom is a world away from a smirking council leader who clearly believes his responsibilities have been absolved by charity.

Fundamentally, everyone who volunteers in or uses a foodbank is justly furious that such a place is necessary. This doesn’t mean they go about constantly po-faced and earnest, simply that they know food banks represent political failure. If you are politically complicit in the existence of food poverty, this is no laughing matter.