Yes, I know, post-war, country in ruins etc.
Although rationing was still in force, her mother was permitted to buy extra steak to build her up for what became known as the “austerity Olympics”.
Just think of the twattish detail of that planning. The vast number of adults who had to be tasked with deciding who could have extra steak and who could not. The absurdity of having people sitting in offices deciding such things instead of having them out there prodding cabbages into greater fertility or wherever it is that steak comes from.
A backhander to a local butcher would have done the job with zero trouble. This was v likely a sanctimony caper to show the supposed benign nature of the state. To fuckwits who believe such bollocks anyway.
Look at all the steps involved in food banks today:
1. Somebody (a colleague, your child’s teacher) spends time hassling you for donations
2. You buy a few extra tins of baked beans on your next trip to Tesco
3. You take those tins to the designated food bank collection point (school, workplace, etc.)
4. Somebody drives round those collection points to pick up the baked beans and take them to the food bank
5. At the food bank they catalog the incoming food, and either put it on shelves or into ready-packed bags.
6. Customer comes to the food bank, collects their bag
Everyone in the chain feels virtuous, from the hassler to the driver to the sorter to the bagger. But it would be far more efficient to just give the customer £10 to go buy their own baked beans.
“But it would be far more efficient to just give the customer £10 to go buy their own baked beans?”
Oh no, they would spend it on beer and cigs if we did that.
I had just this argument with a Yank friend many years ago. She had a good job with a big accountancy firm and so would make herself feel virtuous by going around the local tramps and giving them McDonalds vouchers.
I suggested that they’d be much happier if she gave them the cash.
It took a while for her to compute that. She saw it in the end and said ( to her credit ) “Perhaps instead I should buy them all a small bottle of vodka each.”
Andrew M,
“Everyone in the chain feels virtuous, from the hassler to the driver to the sorter to the bagger. But it would be far more efficient to just give the customer £10 to go buy their own baked beans.”
If that was so, food banks would not exist.
This all sounds inefficient, but the alternative is the overpaid clock watchers in the civil service who are not helping much, filling out gold plated tenders that then mean Capita or Accenture charge huge money for the work (that then gets written off, because the civil service are fuckwits), going off sick at double the regular rate, attending diversity awareness workshops.
Most of the food bank things are voluntary. People get some virtue out of it? Great, that’s much cheaper than the benefit system. Charities are also a market with that whole “daily referendum” thing which means that the best ones move fast and do things reasonably efficiently compared to government.
Don’t food banks come close to Tim’s Bjorn’s pint thesis?
We don’t mind putting our hands in our pockets for food banks because it’s for locals and if they were abusing it it would be noted by the food bank people and they wouldn’t get any more, in theory.
Whereas there is not even the semblance of control of the extra taxes passing through the bureaucracy and then n to the hands of some stranger.
@Andrew M
You can get combine 1,2 and 3. I buy the occasional extra tin without hassle and the collection point is on a table behind the tills at Sainsbury’s.
This is apparently proof that capitalism doesn’t work.
The alternative is of course that I am taxed extra, the money crosses umpteen civil service desks before what’s left of it after civil service salaries is given to someone to buy an extra tin. This is a triumph of socialism.
This subject brings back memories of the Miners’ Strike. Bint I was knocking about with organised food boxes for them. House she lived in was full of the stuff waiting to be sent off. Very proud of it, she was. I had a look through the boxes. Tins of beans, tins of processed meat, spaghetti in tins or packs, tinned vegetables, cheap biscuits… I asked the bint, gold plated N. London gravel drive socialist, whether she’d eat this shit? “Oh no” says she, “It’s for the miners & their families. Solidarity with the workers!” Look luv” I told her, “You ever been poor? This is what your beloved miners & their families are eating now. ‘Cos that’s all they can afford. You reckon they’re going to thank you for sending another load of it? Why don’t you send them what you eat? ”
It was not a relationship long prospered.
I remember coming home from two days in a soggy tent to watch the black&white TV news and some miner’s bint declared “ooo, it be hard, we’ll only be able to have one holiday this year”.
I usually put a tin or packet of something in the Food Bank trolley at Asda when I do my shop. Unfortunately friends of a Socialist bent think that Food Banks are demeaning to the poor and are a job that should be done by government, not accepting that it’s because government are so bloody useless at doing this sort of thing that Food Banks exist!
@ bis
Miners were highly paid: they were doing an arduous, dangerous and valuable job, so would not have been accustomed to eating that sort of stuff. I remember someone quoting a miner’s wife complaining during the strike that without her husband’s regular very large pay packet she “was having to feed the children on chops” …
The north London socialists didn’t know (or ignored the fact) that the miners were the best paid manual workers, ahead of, even, train-drivers.
I recall actually looking this up. It’s in Hansard. For 1976 I think. Miners were on twice median wage.