I hate this despicable bunch of tory twats so much for what they have inflicted on citizens of this country, and in particular on children and the very vulnerable. On Monday night’s Dispatches documentary, Breadline Kids, 10-year-old Cara described how it feels to be hungry in Britain in 2014. Wise beyond her years, she explained there’s no point being angry because it just makes the hunger worse. At Birkenhead’s historic town hall, the inquiry team heard about a homeless man crushed to death while scavenging in a skip behind a shopping centre. The driver collecting the skip had seen something moving but thought it was “a rat or cat”. But it was a 50-year-old man, John Bassett, looking for food. In Wiltshire at a hearing at the Salvation Army, the Bishop of Salisbury, Right Reverend Nick Holtam, told the story of a woman with aggressive cancer driven to use a local foodbank because she couldn’t afford her trips to hospital. In Birkenhead, members of the inquiry team – Frank Field, Rt Rev Tim Thornton, Bishop of Truro, Labour MP Emma Lewell-Buck and Conservative Baroness Anne Jenkin of Kennington – heard a school governor tell how children went home “not only to no food, but to a dark, cold house… children arrive in our school having had no food or nutrition since the day before.” We also heard repeatedly of unfairly applied and ridiculous sanctions, and of the grinding poverty caused by low – often zero hours – pay. In Birkenhead, we heard about a man sanctioned for attending his mother’s funeral. In Salisbury, a man who couldn’t use a computer told how he had been sanctioned because he hadn’t been applying for enough jobs online.A Victorian poverty has been unfolding out of sight. But I would challenge anyone to sit in the remaining sessions and to say that the welfare state is working for people in or out of work. A dozen years after Iain Duncan Smith’s Easterhouse Epiphany, the welfare safety net has been replaced by jumpers for goalposts and nothing but a shoestring stretched taut in between. It’s a catastrophe for ordinary people. “All people should have food,” says 10-year-old Cara. She doesn’t have the strength to be angry. But we who are lucky enough not to be hungry, do. mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/families-slipping-through-welfare-net-3672185#ixzz37ID7fmwX Follow us: @DailyMirror on Twitter | DailyMirror on Facebook
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 21:43:09 +0000
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