A couple of weeks ago BBC Question Time went to Barnsley in the Grim North and among its audience of hand picked members of Momentum was the lass below Samanatha Thompson who bleated on about how she and her family had to use food banks and this was a sign of wicked Tory austerity causing rising poverty, blah, blah, blah. I gather that Samantha has taken offence at some Tory councillor who noted that for someone claiming to be on the brink of starvation she is, to put it bluntly, very fat indeed. Miss Piggy reckons that this is offensive and wants an apology and maybe in these PC free speech denying times the poor chap will be forced by his party to grovel. Since I have no such pressure I say "Miss Piggy your are a fat blubbermonster and if you find that offensive how about you eat less and stop looking quite so much like a beached whale? Of course this story gets more ridiculous.
The first thing to note is that poverty as defined by Miss Piggy and the left is relative poverty.So you are poor if you earn less than 60% of the mean average wage. If the banksters get big bonuses even if the poor get real pay rises too and so have more purchasing power and are thus better off, the left says that their poverty has increased. This is clearly utter rot.
There are rising levels of relative poverty but there are actually falling levels of absolute poverty, in good part thanks to the evil Tories massively increasing the threshold at which one pays tax, a measure that is of most benefit in terms of disposable incomes to low earners. If you are actually poor ( as in struggling to feed your family) it is absolute not relative income that you care about. Relative poverty is only something those who are well enough not to be troubled by real cash worries, like Guardian journalists and Labour MPs and most middle class public sector lefties, can actually afford to care about.
SZo the left tell us that soaring food bank usage is down to increased poverty. But the facts are that in absolute terms ( i.e) purchasing power, poverty is going down. So why do so many folks use food banks? Because they offer free food silly! That means that food bank users have more disposable cash for things like fags, booze. expensive fast food takeaways, playing the voluntary tax on the stupid that is the lottery, SkyTV subs and foreign holidays. Foreign what FFS? That brings us back to Miss Piggy...
Go to her facebook page, below, and among the many examples of blatant consumerism is this pic of her on a foreign holiday. There are others. Summer and winter breaks. Such is the face of poverty in 2017 Britain.
Miss piggy gets to go on even better foreign hols thanks to food banks. What percent of food bank users smoke/have foreign holidays/play the lotto/have Sky etc? It would be an interesting academic study but what are the chances of any academic daring to risk career destruction by requesting to do such a study?, They are of course nil. But that will not stop those on the left screaming that any suggestion that food bank growth is down to anything outher than increased poverty is just a wicked Tory lie.
