The ghost of Christmas present

Food banks are brimming with good will this Christmas. The Trussell Trust has delivered food parcels to 60,000 people in desperate need of help during the festive season. While the government resolutely denies that welfare reforms are causing a dramatic increase in food poverty, the Department for Work and Pensions admits that delays to benefits payments have affected 32,000 people over the Christmas holiday.  What would Charles Dickens make of it all?

It’s a ghostly little Christmas story for our time.  Our hero, stubbornly refusing to believe his actions are inflicting pain on the poor and vulnerable, has unwelcome visits from the spirits of Christmases past, present and still to come.  He wakes all of a quiver on Christmas Day to discover there is still time to put right his many wrongs.

Ah, if only.

Let us call our hero Iain  (for that is his name ). Mr Duncan Smith, Conservative MP for Chingford and Woodford Green,  is not quite such a satisfying character as Scrooge: the shiny pate, the comfortably clad bones, the cleverly affected affability – that’s not the stuff of our favourite Christmas villain. But the member of Bucks Club (£1400 annual membership fee) and Pratt’s  Club for aristocrats (fee not known) could be a nicely rounded caricature of ideological  complacency.

What would Dickens make of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions? How could the Christmas spirits shake him from his conviction that welfare is the cause of social dependency?  Could he be whisked back to Easterhouse where the plight of the poor once brought tears to his eyes?  Or transported to some of today’s 400 Trussell Trust food banks where delays to benefits payments bring hungry families with referrals from their doctor?  Or forward to a future where his gravestone sits overgrown and unvisited in an unkempt cemetery?

Leafing through Christmas Carol, I am struck by Dickens’ magical touch.  What a great storyteller he is.  How deftly he weaves together the complex elements of Ebenezer’s character. We’re engaged from the very start. But there’s obviously emerging hope for the guy who can be moved to pity by the sight of the children Ignorance and Want, before he is faced by the awful reminder of his own mortality.

Scrooge’s conversion is the result of being brought face to face with reality, regaining his forgotten humanity.  The Victorian moneylender discovers empathy as he is forced to reconnect with the real lives of real people from his past and the world around him.  He’s really well on the way to being saved before those last terrifying visions.

But what would do it for that bunch in Westminster? So far the posh boys in power, busily unpicking our welfare society, seem pretty resistant to reality checks. Hard facts do not change the minds of the ideologically convinced. IDS, and his ilk, are too deeply committed to dismantling the state to accept that they are causing undue harm to innocent people.  No evidence, they say, to support claims that benefits delays, sanctions, bedroom tax etc, etc, have anything to do with the tripling of foodbank users in the last year.  Of course more people are likely to be seeking help, they say, there are more foodbanks to seek help from! Like the lighthouse inviting the storm, it’s the increase in foodbanks that is bringing more people looking for food rather than the gnawing hunger in their stomachs.

Oddly (given that ideological certainty), the government refuses Labour’s demand for a review into foodbanks.  Even more oddly they are refusing to release the DEFRA foodbank report  examining the rapid growth of food aid in the UK, published in June 2013.

Come on Iain. Time to wake up. There is too much ignorance and want.

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge…”A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow than I have given you for many a year! I’ll raise your salary and endeavour to assist your struggling family and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon.