On the day the Queen held a Christmas lunch for her extended family and MPs received an advertisement from Fortnum & Mason for a range of Christmas Hampers, you and I could have gone online to witness the obscenity of our Parliament pretending to debate foodbanks and the reason for their exponential expansion over the last 4 years. The deceit was carried out by ‘honourable members’ on both sides of the House and all involved should be ashamed of their behaviour. Sadly they are hiding behind the walls of their own rhetoric or watching from the vantage point of their own moral high ground.

I have written many times about foodbanks this year and on several occasions expressed frustration that the Government has not researched into their growth and the impact on society as a whole. Some research has now been carried out, but sadly the Government has not done as they promised and published it. Yesterdays debate was intended to be a call by Labour for this research to be published and for Parliament to resolve to change what it can to stem the flow of demand. This should have been a debate that all parties could have agreed to, pressing the Executive to act before things get even more challenging for all of us. Foodbanks are based on an American response to poverty and the largest network which exists in this country is 13 years old. The Trussell Trust has quadrupled the numbers of its foodbanks in the last 4 years and more importantly the numbers of people using these services has risen even more quickly with 11 times as many users since 2010. I have not seen any footage of this debate from the Commons, however it is clear from Hansard, and the social media commentary such as twitter that many of the MPs involved in the debate were acting as though this was a Party Political debate to be won or lost, not a nationwide human tragedy to be addressed and corrected. Indeed at one point the deputy speaker compared the behaviour of MPs to that of supporters at a football match!

Depending on what one reads, it could be assumed that the MPs were debating and voting on a simple resolution to publish the research and agree to act on its findings, reducing societal dependency on the foodbanks. However sadly that is part of the deceit. It would also be easy to assume that both sides would focus on the needs of the 100,000’s of people who have been forced to visit a foodbank, let alone the many whose pride has not allowed them to do so. However sadly the debate transcript shows this was not the case in the case of many of those who spoke. Firstly the resolution itself which was brought to the House by Labour MP Maria Eagle, Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: “That this House notes that the number of people using foodbanks provided by the Trussell Trust alone has increased from 41,000 in 2010 to more than 500,000 since April this year, of whom one third were children; further notes that over the last three years prices have risen faster than wages; further notes the assessment of the Trussell Trust that the key factors in the rising resort to foodbanks are rising living costs and stagnant wages, as well as problems including delays to social security payments and the impact of the under-occupancy penalty; calls on the Government to publish the results of research into foodbanks commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs which Ministers promised would be made public in the summer of 2013; and further calls on the Government to bring forward measures to reduce dependency on foodbanks, including a freeze on energy prices, a water affordability scheme, measures to end abuses of zero hours contracts, incentives to companies to pay a living wage and abolition of the under-occupancy penalty.”

I am no Parliamentary expert, but the section of this resolution that I have put into bold are at odds with  current Government Policy. To ask Conservative and Lib Dem MPs to vote for this resolution with this final section shows how shallow this debate really was. If Labour misled us regarding what they were asking for yesterday, the behaviour by Conservative MPs and Ministers was just as appalling. This is part of the speech by Esther McVey who as a Government Minister, responded to the debate: I welcome this debate to answer honestly the points made in the motion and to clarify all this, but to be honest, a far more realistic debate would have been brought by Government Members and the people of the United Kingdom on how Labour derailed the UK, destroyed its finances and made it such a vulnerable place … [this challenge to Labour went on for some time until finally]… The Trussell Trust saw what was happening in 2000. It looked at the evolving problem that was caused by personal debt, overspending and people living beyond their means. It set up the first food bank in that year and the food bank network in 2004. The number of food banks had grown tenfold by 2010.

The Trussell Trust set up their schemes in response to a number of factors and those mentioned by Ms McVey are part of that, however they also responded to people in need because they had no work and the state was failing to provide a safety net for them. These people include young families who had struggled to maintain their housing, and men and women leaving the Army, people struggling on low incomes and facing unexpected costs, and the list could go on. In any case Ms McVey never did honestly answer the points in the resolution, despite her promise to do so. The needs of this nation and the poorest members of it, cannot be treated as a political football by our Politicians. That is not why they were elected, that is not what they are paid for. We need a change, and we need it now, before matters get worse!