While Children Go Hungry…….

Marcus Rashford gettyimages-1257626131

I love Marcus Rashford! His statement on child hunger is brilliant, but I don’t entirely agree with him. In his impassioned plea for us to take child hunger seriously (which I could not agree with more), especially through the school holidays, he says: “this is not politics, this is humanity.” The reality is that EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL. Politics is about how we see the world and how we live together. Economics is about how we share and manage the resources between us. Child hunger and child poverty IS a political and economic issue! We can’t hide away from this. We can call for political unity over the issue, we can appeal to the deep compassion of the human heart – but we cannot try and de-politicise the issue, however hard we try. Nor can we remain silent, in case it looks like we’re playing party politics. I am not associated with any political party. None the less this is a deeply political issue – political with both a small p and a very big one!

 

Listening to the debate in the House of Commons about whether or not children should be given meals, provided by the state, during the school break, there seemed to be four main objections to the idea proffered by some of the Conservative MPs.

 

  1. Rather than give children meals, thereby nationalising them, we should be actively promoting parents to take more responsibility, rather than being absent and encourage them to provide for their children properly. We need to deal with the causes of the causes.
  2. If the state were to intervene, it only encourages dependency and laziness by parents who can’t  be bothered to provide for their children properly
  3. The state is already giving out quite enough help already, thank you very much, via Universal Credit.
  4. We’ve all got to play our part in helping out. We’ve had ‘eat out to help out’ for the rich, now we need ‘eat nowt to help out’ for the poor…..(slight tongue in cheek point, perhaps….)

 

Let’s just examine these from both a population health and social justice perspective:

 

  1. Well….I don’t know of very many parents who don’t want to ‘take responsibility’ for their children’s wellbeing. In fact there is hugely weaponised stigma and societal shame (wrongly) applied to those who can’t. There is a massive difference between not wanting to and not being able to. I don’t disagree that we need to get to the causes of the causes of poverty and child hunger – absolutely right! But this will take a generational, focused, gargantuan and sustained effort and will involve us turning the tide on: Adverse Childhood Experiences, an unbalanced and unequal education system, spiritual and psychological degradation, ingrained and systemic racism, white privilege and abusive patriarchy, county lines, unaffordable land and housing (both to buy or rent), poorly paid work, a broken justice system (over 300000 children have at least one parent in prison) etc. We should definitely work on all of this! And as we do it will enable people to be able to take more responsibility and make more positive choices – I’m all for that. Unfortunately at present, the reality is that there are far fewer real choices available for people living in our most economically deprived communities. This is not about either/or – it’s about both/and. So, in the mean time, whilst we’re working on the causes of the causes, perhaps we could also guarantee that we don’t perpetuate the cycle further and ensure children are fed?
  2. The idea that by the state stepping in it encourages dependency, fecklessness and laziness is actually ridiculous. State intervention to provide for the hungry would actually show that we have a society and a government who care deeply for people who are struggling and having a hard time. It is one of the great debates about the role of the state, but the sad reality is that charity alone, simply won’t cut it. We need a state (be that city, regional or national – preferably all), that acts as a safety net for those who are finding life the hardest. Rashford puts it best: “……since March, 32% of families have suffered a drop in income. Nearly 1 million have fallen off the payroll. This is not dependency, this a cry for help. There are no jobs!! 250% increase in food poverty and rising. Nobody said this was simple…” Until we fix the causes of the causes, we are going to need to ensure we have appropriate interventions to the difficult realities so many in our communities face. Perhaps this might include children being fed through the holidays?
  3. Despite the ‘positive changes’ to the benefits system, with more people in work, we had rising poverty levels even before the pandemic, with more children in poverty, (worsening over the last ten years) and now we have massive job insecurity, higher
    Rise in use of Food Banks – Trussell Trust

    unemployment and we’re heading into a recession. At such a time, to imply those benefits are enough, when we know that the use of foodbanks (which are supposed to be a temporary measure) is rising, is somewhat short-sighted. I have heard so many testimonies of families who are on the ropes. Holiday food vouchers are a life line. However good you might think your benefit system is, when families are telling you they are having to choose between fuel and food as we head into winter, perhaps we might want to think about how we ensure children are fed? After all, nutrition is one of the key building blocks of a healthy and well child.

  4. It is simply inhumane to ask the poor to fit the bill of the ill thought through spending of public money over the previous several months. There have been some VAST pay outs (which will indebt the very children the government are refusing to feed) to many companies, with clauses protecting them should they not deliver on their contracts, (which is lucky for them, because they have failed, badly)….and yet we can’t find the money to ensure that children are fed. One might wonder whose side the government is on.

 

I make no secret of the fact that I am personally deeply motivated by the politics of Jesus. There are two really clear things that he had to say on the issue.

 

  1. “I have come to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4v18-19) – and he backs this up by stating that He will restore ‘Jubilee’ – this is a radical economic redistribution of money and resources, to the poor, to combat greed and bring things back onto a level playing field.
  2. “Let the children come to me, for to such belongs the Kingdom of Heaven” (Luke 18v16) – Not only are we to care for children, because they are important – we’re supposed to become more like them (Matthew 18v3)!

 

In other words, if the politics of Jesus are to be taken seriously (and it seems that many conservative voters and MPs profess a ‘Christian’ faith), let it be noted that according to the Christian faith, the poor, the hungry and children really matter to God! And yes – there is space for the church, other faith organisations, charities, communities and local leaders to step into the gap and ensure children are fed, despite the government’s response – but there is also a ‘prophetic mandate’ to challenge injustice and hold leaders to account. The truth is that the need is great – 1 million children across the UK will be hungry over October half-term – they don’t want this to be ‘relooked at for Christmas‘ – they want their bellies fed now. The national government’s arguments fall flat. While children go hungry, they find themselves defending their senseless ideologies and punishing the defenceless. They urgently need to change their minds!

 

 

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Knife Attacks – Whose Crime Is It?

I find myself staring at the screen, unable to comprehend how utterly devastating it must be as a parent, to have a police officer knock on your door in the early hours of the morning, to be told that your darling child has been stabbed to death. My heart weeps for the senseless loss of life, young lives stolen away in this rising tide of violence. I know what it is like to break truly awful news to people and their families and my heart goes out to the police officers on the beat or the clinicians in the Emergency Department, who have to break the terrible news to the parents and the siblings, that so suddenly, a bright shining light in their lives, has been extinguished.

 

Knife attacks are a crime, there is no denying that, but the burden of guilt is not so easily apportioned. We are seeing an exponential rise of it in our streets, with a 93% increase in recent years across England, whilst in Scotland, they have seen a 64% decrease over a similar timeframe. We need to examine what has gone on in that time and ask some very uncomfortable questions. We also need to call people to account for decisions which have been made, despite knowing the evidence, and  we desperately need a ‘whole systems’ approach to tackling this epidemic.

 

The Primeminister has stated that “knife crime” is not linked to a decrease in policing numbers. The police chiefs disagree. The truth is, that it’s not only the police who have disappeared off our streets (and these are community police officers, who knew their communities well and were respected and trusted – it takes years to build up those kind of relationships) – we’ve had a perfect cocktail of cuts right across the board which is directly attributable to the mess we are now in. Ongoing austerity, which is a political choice, has also led to the closure of youth centres, more young people than ever excluded from school, (who then have a 200 times higher chance of being groomed into violent gangs) and massive cuts to public health and local government, meaning many preventative schemes have disappeared. When policy fails, it has to be called out and challenged. Everyone with a brain knows that prevention is better than cure. And for those who have lost loved ones, there is now no comfort – this could have been prevented, but has been allowed to escalate at such an alarming rate because we do not have a form of politics or leadership that listens to what is really going on in our communities, but continues to drive through ideological changes without thinking through the consequences. This is unacceptable.

 

When Heidi Allen MP came to Morecambe, she heard the testimony of my friend, Daniel, who grew up in some really tough circumstances, forced into a gang culture in order to help put food on the table and prevent harm coming to his family. Tears streamed down her face as she heard his powerful account of what it meant for him as a young person, to have his youth centre closed, his local high school closed and being told he was not a priority when he was street homeless. She told us that she had not realised the layers to the poverty that many are experiencing across England. And this is how the (perhaps) unintended consequences of remote policy decisions affect ordinary people in droves across the UK. When school budgets are cut and mental health teams are cut and social care provision is cut and youth centres are cut, children and young people from home environments which are already struggling to make ends meet, already processing significant trauma and adversity, fall prey to gangs and criminal networks who use them and abuse them for their gains across county lines.

 

And yet in Scotland, we are seeing an altogether different picture emerging, because they saw this problem 10 years ago and decided to make a difference by dealing with complex living systems, rather than tinkering clumsily with mechanistic thinking. So it is high time that England ate some humble pie and learnt from our Celtic friends.

 

Scotland, unlike the English, are not delaying on taking a serious approach to Adverse Childhood Experiences, hoping to become the first fully trauma informed nation in the world. They have taken a public health, holistic approach to the knife crime problems in Glasgow and then spread the learning across the nation, rather than making devastating cuts to their PH budgets. What they have done isn’t rocket science – it’s plain, public health common sense. They have chosen not to criminalise, label and stigmatise young people (something the hostile environment rhetoric seems to do). They have refused to see it as a race problem – because it isn’t (but some in our press in particular, and some members of the government have stirred up this nonsense anyway) and they have invested in early and effective youth intervention programmes, amongst other things.

 

One of things my work has taught me to do, is suspend my judgements of those who we would automatically and ordinarily point the finger at, the supposed perpetrators of a crime, and really listen to the truth. The truth here is complex and I’m not saying that people who commit violent acts do not need to face the consequences of their actions. They do. But what I am saying is that we need restorative justice in our communities that breaks this horrendous cycle. We also need to recognise that there has been terrible violence done to our most vulnerable children and young people across England by a series of political decisions. The government has failed those it should have protected. In my line of work, those kind of errors would lead to massive learning events and the dismissal of those who had failed in their leadership. Perhaps people have such little faith in the political system we have because there is seemingly such little accountability. Now is not the time for silly political defence of failure. Now is the time for humility, repentance and a genuine turning of the hearts of the fathers and mothers in the nation to the rising generation, far too many of whom are no longer with us.

 

 

 

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Health Spending in The North vs The South

Tweet A few months ago, I wrote a couple of blogs exploring the social justice issue that is the vast difference between the health spend in the North, compared to the South.   This week a graph was produced by HM Treasury to show how overall spending has changed across England since 2012. Here is [Continue Reading …]

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We Have a Power Problem!

Tweet NHS – we have a problem! This blog forms a hiatus in the middle of a 4 blog mini-series about what I call the four rings of leadership (in the context of healthcare). I have been musing on some statements made at the IHI conference in London, Quality 2017, and before I go any [Continue Reading …]

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Just to be Clear – This is a Social Justice Issue

Tweet Following on from my blog earlier this week, I want to be really clear in what I am saying! The funding formula used in health and social care is weighted towards the wealthy and the well…therefore the north is worse off compared to the south… We are already at a major deficit in terms of health outcomes, [Continue Reading …]

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What Every Northerner Should Know About the North/South Health Gap

Tweet Everybody knows about the Gender Pay Gap – it’s well publicised and very much in the public domain for discussion – and too right! – How is this even still an issue? It it is quite simply wrong that women should earn less than men, any time, any place, end of discussion.   Well the [Continue Reading …]

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How do You Solve a Problem Like………..£50,000,000?!!

Tweet On Friday night, watching comic relief, I got quite excited as the total neared £50 million – I turned to my lovely wife and said – ha – there now, we can plug the gap in our local health economy for next year! (Obviously the money is desperately needed in many situations across the [Continue Reading …]

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