Some time ago, an article did the rounds on social media in which the author described the benefits of foraging and ‘skip diving’ – the practice of digging through supermarkets’ refuse for expired and nearly expired food stuffs – as a way of surviving welfare sanctions, food poverty, and unemployment. The article appeared at a time when all over the United Kingdom volunteers were working round the clock to stock and man foodbanks that were everywhere reporting record levels of dependency. Every day there were stories in the tabloids about parents raising hell over their mentally handicapped adult children being declared ‘fit for work,’ benefits being cut off to terminally ill women and men reduced to living on a few pence a week, and reports of suicides and isolated people dying alone in their flats of starvation – starvation, no less. At the time, wellmeaning as the article was, it sent me into a rage. Here we were in one of the richest countries in the world, and decisions made by a government of privately educated millionaires in London were forcing people into the woods to scratch out a living from the undergrowth or into the garbage.
In the few years since the appearance of that survivalist article I have been on something of a journey. Hélder Câmara, the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife between 1964 and 1985, famously remarked: “Quando dou comida aos pobres, chamam-me de santo. Quando pergunto por que eles são pobres, chamam-me de comunista” – When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist. How could it be, in a land of plenty; a land that boasts a nuclear arsenal, innumerable palaces and landed estates, and Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club, that human beings are forced like animals to rake through rubbish for something to eat? Call me a communist, a radical, a terrorist if you must, but Câmara’s question demands an answer.
Since the Conservatives came to power in May 2010 and introduced their savage and sweeping austerity regime, it has been reported that in England and Wales alone some 130,000 have died unnecessarily in the hospitals of a National Health Service which has consistently been on the receiving end of cutbacks and cost-cutting measures. North of the border, the Scottish government has fought tooth and nail to mitigate the London-imposed cuts, taking money and resources from other essential services. Everywhere the situation is becoming more perilous and there is no denying the serious and negative impact this is having on the lives of ordinary, hard-working people. It is now completely academic to ask why voters are getting desperate. In one election after another we see Britain’s hold on Scotland, Wales, and the north of Ireland weaken, while in England the inequality epitomised by the Grenfell Tower disaster boils up in the rising support for the strongman politics of Brexit and the far-right.