Even before the endless years of Tory immiseration, there was a steady buildup of language around poverty that was depressing because it wasn’t honest. What does “child poverty” mean? Aren’t all children poor? None of them work, all they do is learn, eat and ask for weirdly expensive magazines. All it can conceivably mean is to be a child in a poor family, which is to say, adult poverty. What does “fuel poverty” mean, for that matter? Does it have its own currency, benchmarked against something other than the dollar, which you can run low on for reasons unrelated to the exchange of your labour? Because if not, aren’t we, in fact, talking about “stuff poverty” or, for brevity, “poverty”? And on and on: period poverty, funeral poverty, clothing poverty, the endless fragmentation of need, so that a problem that, actually, is very simple and widespread looks complicated and diffuse.
It’s only in the past 14 years, though, that we’ve seen the ever-expanding taxonomy of “banks”: food banks, baby banks, furniture banks, pet food banks. Last year, one in five students had to use a food bank, which should definitely be enough to get them their own classification, the “student bank”. Those of us who remember life with a social safety net would find that very confusing, and be expecting it to mean a £50 welcome deposit and your own chequebook. Students themselves, however, would understand. The president of Lancaster University students’ union, Cerys Evans, told the Question Time panel last week that she had people come to see her who hadn’t eaten for three days.
Charities often start these classifications, probably adhering to some campaigning principle that people find it hard to empathise without specifics. Thinking about “poverty” is a lot harder than imagining what it’s like to not be able to feed your children, or buy tampons, or go to the beach for one day during one year, and buy one ice-cream. Detail is humanising, or that’s the idea, anyway; the effect, when everyone does it, is like pointillism in reverse, a picture of hardship disintegrating into dots of colour.
Trussell Trust was founded in 1997, initially helping children who were living on the streets in Bulgaria. It opened its first UK food bank in Salisbury in 2000, and by 2011 it had opened its 100th food bank. From 2010 to 2011 the number of people they were helping had leapt by 50%, from 40,000 to 60,000. Last year, Trussell Trust delivered 3m parcels and they are, of course, no longer the only food banks in town.
Blue Cross pet food banks are comparatively new (the first one opened in Grimsby in 2022, after vets noticed an increase in pets who were emaciated). Volunteers describe the food as “literally touching the shelf and going back out again”. The “multi-bank” was devised by Gordon Brown in the same year, which he described as “a food bank, clothes bank, toiletries bank, bedding bank, baby bank, hygiene bank and furniture bank all rolled into one”. And, bless the man, he’s getting to the heart of the practicals – nobody can afford the stuff they need in order to remain alive – but slightly fudging the point. When you can’t afford toothpaste or bedding, that’s not a logistical matter waiting for a one-stop shop. He was attacked at the time for a “sticking plaster” approach, which is unfair: were he chancellor, he would be doing something more systemic, which we know, from all that time he was chancellor.
Nevertheless, each new, practical solution to desperate hardship feels like another strut in the construction of a society in which the social reformer William Beveridge’s “five giant evils” – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – are just a fact of life, and a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay is a lost relic from a bygone age, the way rickets and, for that matter, hunger used to be. That’s what I’ll remember and never forgive about this century’s Conservatives: that they took pragmatic, everyday generosity and kindness, and used it to shore up a state that was cruel, and everyone in it more precarious.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
