THE Tory Works and Pension Minister, Iain Duncan Smith, is furious with the accusation that the government’s policies of cutting all benefits to the bone, introducing caps and in many cases simply cutting off benefits to the unemployed completely, are in any way responsible for people starving.
He made his fury apparent last week when he flounced out of the House of Commons during a debate on food poverty, refusing to respond in person to accusations that as the man charged by Cameron to slash welfare benefits he might have anything to do with the dramatic increase in the number of food banks that have sprung up in every town and city across the country.
The scale of food poverty is huge; the Trussell Trust, a charity responsible for the great majority of food banks, recently reported that in 2010 they provided food to around 41,000 people, but in the past eight months the number has increased to more than half a million, a third of whom are children.
The charity is now opening three new food banks every week as it tries to deal with the crisis caused by benefit cuts, pay cuts and soaring food prices.
For the past six months the head of the charity, Chris Mould, has been trying to arrange a meeting with Duncan Smith to discuss this vast increase in numbers with every request being turned down.
Not content with refusing to even discuss this crisis, Duncan Smith with true Tory arrogance has attempted to shift the blame for poverty onto the working class and the Trussell Trust itself.
In a letter to Mould he wrote simply that ‘I strongly refute this claim and would politely ask you to stop scaremongering in this way.’
A further letter from Duncan Smith’s government department laid the blame for the increase on the charity and the working class for using them saying that the increase in food banks meant that ‘it’s not surprising more people are using them.’
This is the twisted, vile logic of the Tories – more people are using food banks because there are more food banks for them to use.
The answer then surely is to close down food banks then less people will use them.
This won’t solve the crisis of hunger but it will mean that workers and their children can starve in silence without troublesome charities kicking up a fuss and engaging in ‘scaremongering’.
The way Duncan Smith portrays food banks is that they are some kind of ‘lifestyle choice’ by the working class, a place where anyone can pop-in and pick up some free tins of food should they feel like it.
In fact every person seeking food parcels from these banks has to be referred to them by an official agency, usually the job centre.
They are issued with vouchers that allow them to receive three days supply of basic foodstuff with every claimant limited to just three occasions for emergency aid.
Jobcentres today are the source not of jobs but of charity relief vouchers.
It is easy to vilify Duncan Smith as some aberrant Tory monster, in fact he represents the real face of capitalism, a system that is quite happy for millions of workers and their families to starve on the streets in order to pay off the trillions of pounds of debt run up by the banks.
This is the price worth paying for the bourgeoisie and their political representatives in order to keep bankrupt capitalism going.
For the working class the only way out of this crisis is through putting an end to capitalism and replacing it with socialism.
This means forcing the TUC leaders to either call a general strike to bring down this weak, divided and hated government and replace it with a workers government or be removed and replaced with a leadership prepared to lead such a struggle for power.
Only the WRP is building this leadership, join today.
