6th January 2014

The year has turned.

And no sooner than Christmas is tidied away it is Epiphany.

The church I was Vicar of near Bedford, used to set the Magi off on their Journey on Christmas Eve, slowly they wound their way Eastwards, (I know they came from the East but the Crib was under the Altar and they always set off from the West Window) until they arrived at the crib with their gifts.

I hope that I haven't caused too many folk to lose their faith over the years I have been a 'punk' vicar, but I do recall one person complaining, after a sermon in which I suggested that no-where in the New Testament does it say that there were Three Kings, just Three Gifts, that I had challenged everything that she had believed.

Oops!

Sorry!

But three gifts, three Kings, Herod's helpful directions and Mary and Joseph high tailing it to Egypt have, for me at least this year a resonance.

We are always being offered a vision, always following a star to some better place.

Governments are always promising, as New Labour did, that things are going to get better, well, they did, and they didn't.

Now we are told that for the hard working, all will be well, whilst for the shirkers, all will not be well.

This Epiphany for many people, any hope of Gold, Frankincense or Myrrh will be as mythical and impossible to dream of, as cheap ipads. For some this year, the Christmas Stocking was lucky to be half filled with a couple of Walnuts and a Satsuma. For the rest there were Food Banks.

Co-op Food has been holding collections of food in its stores, for distribution to Food Banks.

This has been very successful and Co-op Members and customers have been generous in donating food which has then been delivered to the Food Banks by Committee Members.

This suggests that the general public, or at least those who shop in the Co-op, are much more sympathetic to those reliant on Food Banks than Mr Duncan Smith or Ms McVey appeared to be in the debate in Parliament.

Why sympathetic and why the increase in the use of Food Banks.

The Trussell Trust opened one Food Bank in Salisbury before the last election, by the time of the election there were 10.

This could be, as has been suggested a tenfold increase, but we know about statistics and certainly such a sloppy use of statistics would not have been allowed in my School, and anyway the Trussell Trust now operates 400 Food Banks in partnership with local churches and all those who use them are referred, either by Social Services, The DWP or GP’s.

The vast majority of people who turn to Food Banks are struggling to feed their children.

Child Poverty in Eden is lower, under 10%, of the population than elsewhere in Cumbria, it is significantly higher, in Carlisle, on the West Coast and in Barrow.

It has been suggested that Food Banks are indicative of the much rumoured 'big society' but I suspect that they are symptomatic of a wider malaise in Society, although the response to them is indicative of a more generous view within wider society than appeared to be expressed by those on the Government side in the recent debate.

As an Anglican Clergyman I have over the years welcomed many different types of person to my front door and provided food and drink. Many of those people were homeless and had a variety of problems often associated with substance abuse or misuse. Most appeared pleased to see the sandwich or whatever, apart from one man who came on a difficult day, I was eating a Beetroot sandwich so I shared it with him, he was so outraged that he threw the sandwich onto the ground and stormed off, shouting as he went, that the previous Vicar always served Fried Egg and Bacon.

People now turning to food banks do not fit this stereotype.

The ending of crisis loans, increases in rent, increases in energy costs, (my own energy costs have risen by £50 per month over the last year), mean that for some people, especially those with young families, as John Major observed, are having to choose between ‘eating and heating’.

We are faced with an administration that has launched a wholesale attack on those reliant on benefits, drawing a mean distinction between the ‘hard working’ and the ‘scrounger’, and this from a Chancellor photographed, sitting in his Land Rover eating a Burger whilst parked in a disabled space?

  

In the Financial Times this weekend the Chancellor is quoted as promising to save, ‘Billions of Pounds from the Welfare Bill’ a promise clearly linked in the same paragraph to Tax Cuts.

I have always taken the view, underpinned by the training course I was required to attend when I first joined the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in 1963, that Beveridge’s attack on the 5 Giants of Squalor, Ignorance, Want, Idleness and Disease, represented the intellectual basis for the MPNI’s (Now DWP) mission.

Alongside Beveridge’s generous response to social need lies R H Tawney’s view that ‘major structural change is required to bring about social justice for the poor.

Sadly the ‘structural change’ being implemented by this Government, the smaller state and less intervention, with the Market setting both the pace and the rules is resulting in a very different outcome whether in work, pay, health, housing, welfare or education.

That Food Banks are a necessity for many people after four years of austerity, largely borne by the poorest, many of whom are working and actually earn their poverty, is in my view a disgrace.

The Magi have arrived at the Manger, I wonder what wisdom those wise men might wish to offer us today? Or whether as T S Eliot had it in his poem they were left: 

no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, 

With an Alien people clutching their gods.