End Hunger Fast: Resisting the Lie of Scarcity

A Talk at St Bride's given on 16th March 2014 by Steven Shakespeare

I want to begin by acknowledging the passing of Tony Benn this week. He was a socialist deeply formed by his nonconformist Christian heritage. He was also a controversial figure – but then, if he had only said things everyone agreed with, he wouldn’t have been worth listening to, or seen as such a threat.

A quotation from Benn has been doing the rounds on Facebook: ‘if you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people’. It sounds simplistic, of course. But sometimes, the truth is that simple at its core.

The complicated thing is how hard it is to recognise that truth. Recently I took a tutorial with some second year philosophy students. We are reading a book by Martha Nussbaum and thinking about issues of equity, capability and global justice.

We were talking about welfare, and I remembered an article a year or so ago back in the Independent, which carried a headline something like ‘The public is wrong about almost everything’. It showed that, when asked, people assumed that figures for a whole range of things like immigration or crime were far higher than they were.

So I asked the students what they thought the level of benefit fraud was. One replied: about 45%. The others nodded. The true figure is less than 1%. Now you can talk about under-reporting and so on, but there is no doubt that my students, like most of us, assume a figure that is wildly out of touch with reality. And they not only guess at it, they feel it is right.

At another time with the same tutorial group, we were talking about redistribution of wealth. One said it was a nice idea, but because human beings are naturally competitive, they will always fight against each other and create massive inequality. I said: Ok, but we live in a system that runs on competition. What if we are not naturally competitive, but we have been shaped by the system to think we are? Wouldn’t it be in the interests of capitalism to produce people who thought of themselves as competitors for scarce resources? The student said he had never thought of that before.

I am not telling these anecdotes to suggest any brilliant insight on my part, since what I said seems like common sense. But bear in mind that these students have been doing philosophy at university level for a year and a half. They have critically studied theories of human nature, and they have been doing political philosophy for much of this year. And yet it is so hard for them to think outside of the system, a system which has shaped them inside and out.

I don’t blame these students (nothing is more tedious than academics looking back to the golden age of their own student life which probably never existed in that form, and certainly was elitist!). They, like us, have been moulded, their whole sense of self has been conditioned, and it is very hard to break that – not least because to do so needs not only critical ideas, but imagination, the ability to feel and see how things could be different.

One of the aims of the End Hunger Fast campaign has been to draw attention to the myths we’re told about benefits, poverty and food. It is a church campaign, initiated by, among others Keith Hebden, a priest in Mansfield.  It calls for an end to the scandal of people having to rely on foodbanks. Half a million have used them – a scandal in one of the richest countries on the world. If this is what David Cameron meant by the Big Society, it looks a lot like a sticking plaster on the running sore of social injustice.

The campaign also calls on government to ensure the welfare system and paid work are robust enough to avoid the need for foodbanks. Effectively this means reversing welfare cuts, punitive sanctions and breaking the link with inflation and more – making welfare catch up with the rise in real prices (30% in 5 years). It means making work pay. Instead we are getting a workfare culture carried into the workplace itself: casualisation, zero hours contracts, no security, poor levels of pay.

Insecurity is being institutionalised. It suits the system for people to be always nervous, always on the back foot, or reliant on charity to survive if they can’t play the game of being useful producers and consumers, measured in narrowly economic terms. The system needs its scapegoats as much as it needs its entrepreneurs.

Behind the headlines are, of course, stories of people. People who are not lazy scroungers, but human beings with real lives, real crises, real losses, real illnesses, real hopes and capabilities. Many at St Brides will know such stories through their own work with the foodbank here, or in other settings.

I want to share some stories which come from the West Cheshire, found on the End Hunger Fast website (http://endhungerfast.co.uk/food-bank-britain-stories-west-cheshire/):

 ‘Neil shared how he felt about the benefit change that had affected him:

“Briefly, ten years ago I sacrificed a good job to go on Carer’s Allowance and lived at home with my mother in order to keep her out of a care home. Sadly, she passed away 2 years ago. I fortunately gained tenancy of her Council house but am now unable to find a good job due to my disabilities (monocular vision, arthritis, depression) and have been subsequently burdened by the bedroom tax. Having saved the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds in care bills I feel it is an injustice to be punished with the bedroom tax which is basically a tax on poverty. Taxes should be progressive and not penalise the most vulnerable people in society”

. . .

Karen visited because her family is struggling on a low income:

“I have come to the Foodbank today as I am struggling to keep my family’s head above water, even though I work full time. My husband lost his job and I have two kids, so my wage has gone on bills. The job centre informed us they couldn’t help as I worked more than 24 hours per week, without even asking what my salary was, also my son who is in part time college is not entitled to anything so I am supporting the four of us.”

Every person who visits us has the opportunity to share their story. Joe was sanctioned because he didn’t look for work on Christmas and New Years Day. Stuart had a nervous breakdown and simply doesn’t receive enough through Employment and Support Allowance to live on. Jessica’s husband is ill, and their child tax credits have stopped. Carol visited after her husband Trevor had a stroke.’

Are these the people who should bear the burden for the failures of pour financial system? Are these the people to blame for an incentivized competition culture which led to whole nations’ economic wellbeing gambled on the markets? Are these the people who should continue to suffer when the bonus culture is back with a bang in the City? Recently we heard of £35m in bonuses paid out at to RBS and Lloyds - banks which would not exist if they had not been bailed out by the state, the common purse.

It seems simple. But it is not. Remember the students. That’s us too. We need collective action built up again from the grassroots, after years in which we have been fragmented, demoralized and told that there is no other way. We need our sense of self, and our sense of being with others, to be reshaped. That is not an easy or quick task.

So End Hunger Fast also calls people to a spiritual discipline: to fast, to go without. The reasons are to show solidarity with those who hunger and to experience in a vivid way what hunger is. Of course, if you fast voluntarily, you do so from a privileged position. You now you can stop, you know where your next meal is coming from. OK, this is not about pretending to be poor, or romanticizing hunger: what matters is that it focuses our attention on the stories of real hunger. It wakes us up. It unplugs us from the ideology around us.

Our society has 3 commandments: consume, consume, consume. And if you don’t consume or can’t consume, then you are a deviant who needs to be despised. That’s the trick being played on us. End Hunger Fast is a call to see past this sleight of hand.

Three people, including Keith Hebden, are fasting for whole 40 days. That’s a radical step which is definitely not appropriate for all. But there many others ways of getting involved: missing a meal or fasting for 24 hours; giving help or resources to foodbank; and crucially, giving time to calling for change and building collective alternatives.

So take a look at http://endhungerfast.co.uk/. There are lots of resources to challenge the myths we are told about poverty, as well as support for Bible study and campaigning.

Don’t believe in lies about human nature, or the smokescreen of the Big Society. The problem of hunger is niethjer inevitable, nor is it solved by the charity of the great and good. It is overcome by people acting together, sharing things in common, unlocking the wealth of resources we already have around us.