The Nasty Party is back, sneering at food banks and those who use them

[fedsron2us]

The latest figures from the Trussell Trust show that the demand for food banks is rapidly increasing. More than 350,000 people, between April and September this year, received a three-day food package of emergency staple sustenance. This is three times more than during the same period last year. David Cameron should, the Trussell Trust says, urgently look at this.

Another bleak problem I’d advise him to examine and quash is the growing, frankly shameful, vocal hostility within his party and supporters – Michael Gove, Lord Freud, Edwina Currie – to food banks themselves. It’s incredible that a party which peddled notions of a Big Society now sneers when communities work together to be charitable, generous and empathic, to bring light, to stop hunger pains, to shove cheap tinned soup and budget brand cereal into the mouths of those without.


http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-nasty-party-is-back-sneering-at-food-banks-and-those-who-use-them-8884442.html

It is shameful enough to have to live in a country where MP's diddle their expenses and stuff their faces in subsidised restaurants while some children in this country go hungry. The situation is worse when well trousered Selfservatives slag off people and businesses who spend their own time, money and resources trying to do something about it.

Some of the comments today from Tory MPs past and present today on Food Banks have been beyond parody.

They should hang their heads in shame

[LeftishBrit]

1. Disgusting

And an example of how, for too many people on the Right, the advocacy of 'small government' and that the government should not be the main source of help for people in need, is really a cover for a belief that people in need should not be helped at all. Poverty, and other forms of misfortune, are seen as personal weaknesses, sins, or punishments, or all of these at the same time.

When I was a young adult in Thatcher's 80s, I sometimes heard right-wingers sneer at charities and charity workers as 'very worthy' (as though that was a bad thing) and 'do-gooders' (as though it's better to 'do bad').Sadly, this attitude seems to be coming back.

'They should hang their heads in shame'

Many Tory MPs seem to have no shame! And those who do, tend to be ashamed of 'softness' or lack of success, rather than of nastiness.

[non sociopath skin]

2. I wonder if there any other countries where "do-gooder" is a pejorative term?

The Skin

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

3. The US is one such country

WRT the Tories sneering at those who use food banks, don't you know that disdain for one's inferiors is de rigueur among conservatives? It goes with the greed and massive egotism that lies at the heart of the true Tory.