Is this the country that you thought it would be, that you wanted to live in, when you grew up?
Figures from the Trussell Trust which reveal the food bank charity handed out emergency food parcels to more than 910,000 people in the last year make front-page headlines.
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It prompts the Daily Mirror to wonder how such a situation can arise in the world’s sixth-largest economy. And comedian Eddie Izzard writes in the paper: “I’ve seen food parcels handed out many times in my work with Unicef or for Sport Relief… But I never thought I’d even hear of them handed out in my own country.”
The Independent hears personal tales from those receiving help at the UK’s busiest food bank, in Coventry, some of whom say they had benefits withdrawn after making an error on a form. The paper claims the situation is “a matter of demand, not supply”. It points out that while the Department for Work and Pensions insists it’s the expansion of food banks that has fuelled demand, people can only receive emergency food if they are referred by a care professional, such as a doctor, social worker or school liaison officer.
The Guardian reports that 600 religious leaders – including 40 Anglican bishops – have called on the government to take action to tackle the “national crisis” of food poverty.
It’s poverty of a different kind that troubles the Daily Express. “Poverty of ambition that keeps families on welfare,” is the headline on the paper’s editorial column. “Despite strong efforts from the government it seems that some are still stubbornly choosing to live purely off handouts from the state,” it says.
It’s not referring to food banks but to the case of a mother-of-three who reportedly told her 19-year-old daughter to have a baby instead of getting a job, so that she would get increased welfare support and a council house.
Meanwhile, the Sun has good news for working families concerned about the cost of living, reporting a “nice little earner” as growth in average pay outstrips inflation for the first time in four years.
“The time has come for optimism,” says the Times in its editorial, although it warns politicians they cannot afford to forget the millions of households that “limped through a six-year wage squeeze on mounting debts”.
Maybe the mother advising her daughter to get pregnant was trying to get the girl out of her home (hotel and bank of Mum and Dad?), the daughter having little or no hope of getting a job and little hope of getting a place of her own otherwise. I am not condoning this advice, just living in a world where there are large numbers of grown up kids who – even when in work – cannot afford to live anywhere else, unless it is on the streets, and the figures for young homeless are apparently increasing month by month.
It was a muddle with a form that first made Craig, 31, lose his benefits. He had been looking for work in Coventry for nearly a year, diligently going to the jobcentre and trawling through adverts. Then he made a mistake that would leave him hungry for a month.
“I filled out a form saying I was searching for work from Monday to Friday and I was meant to put from Thursday to Thursday. It was just a mistake but I had my benefits sanctioned for four weeks. It was just before Christmas last year and I was panicking about presents for my kids, but the job supervisor said ‘you’re not paid to get presents, you’re paid to look for work’.”
Too proud to go to a food bank, the divorced father of two made it through the month surviving on the last few tins in his cupboard and limiting himself to one meal a day.
Craig suffers from severe depression and lost his job working nights as a courier a year ago because he had missed too many days to the illness. Last month he found out his mother had terminal cancer and his depression worsened. He went to the doctor, who said he was too ill to work and registered him as eligible for the sickness benefit employment support allowance (ESA).
That should have been the start of a time of respite, but bureaucratic delays meant the new benefit never came. Last Friday marked three weeks since he last received any money and Craig finally cracked.
His four- and seven-year-old sons were due for their monthly visit at the weekend and he had nothing to feed them, so he came to his local food bank in Hebron church.
“All I’ve got is a tin of peas in my cupboard and a bit of milk in the fridge,” he says, too embarrassed to make eye contact.
“I last ate yesterday morning and that was a bowl of cornflakes. In the last week I’ve had maybe six meals. I went to a benefit advice centre this morning and they sent me here. I’ve had to swallow my pride because I wanted to have food for my boys.”
Sitting in a cafe behind the church, he is handed five bursting carrier bags of food, including fresh vegetables, tins, pasta and bread. His hands shake as he packs the heavy tins into his rucksack and prepares for a wobbly cycle home with the plastic bags on his handlebars.
Coventry is now the busiest Trussell Trust outpost in the country. In the past year its network of food banks gave 17,658 people emergency food, up 41 per cent on the year before. The city has just opened their 14th distribution centre and a further two will open this year.
Food bank manager Hugh McNeil is a softly spoken churchgoer, and doesn’t look the tubthumping political type. But, when asked about the impact of the Government’s welfare reforms, he struggles to contain his fury. “Compassion has disappeared out of the welfare state,” he says. “There’s none any more. The way these benefits are being administered is just so punitive and nobody seems to be thinking about the children affected either.”
Hebron, an evangelical church in a converted bowling alley in the east of the city, is one of the trust’s newer branches. A mile or so closer to the city centre is The Hope Centre, the busiest of Coventry’s distribution points, which frequently gives food to dozens of families a day.
Louise Duffin, 35, has come to make sure she has enough food to make it through the school holidays with her children Nicholas, 12, and Natasha, 10. She has “practically nothing” left in her cupboards, beyond a couple of tins of beans and the dregs of a milk bottle.
“Being on benefits means that the kids get free school meals so in the holidays that means finding an extra meal a day,” she says. “ I dread the holidays because of it. Not being able to afford to do stuff is a problem too.”
Ms Duffin has epilepsy and recently transferred on to ESA after having to appeal against a medical assessment that she was fit to work. “I’ve only just won, and while I was fighting it my income went from £165 a week to £71. I have child benefit and tax credit on top of that but it was still tough.”
After filling out a form and picking up dried and tinned food, she goes to a shipping container in the car park, where fresh produce and hot cross buns are added to five overflowing bags.
In the centre’s cafe, a distraught mother with a five-day-old baby waits, hoping for food and nappies. She has five children and the new arrival combined with the start of the Easter holidays has crippled the family’s precarious budget.
Makadi Mulambela, 28, is one of the last to arrive. He has been struggling to feed himself after being hit with a month’s benefit sanction. “They sanctioned me because I made a mistake on the job search form,” he explains.
“The website I’d been using was direct.gov and I wrote that I’d been on direct.jobs, which was wrong. I had been looking on it, I just wrote it down wrong. It’s difficult because when they catch you on something like that you don’t get a chance to explain, that’s just it.”
Gavin Kibble, the food bank’s operations director, is adamant that welfare reforms are responsible for much of the rise in need. “ We’re seeing a lot of people coming through the food bank because of benefit sanctions. Around 43 per cent of our cases relate to a DWP issue, whether that’s a benefit change or sanctions. We could chop in half the cases we needed to help with if DWP sorted things out.”
Unfortunately the way our government – under any of the previous numbskulls, and any future incumbents too – act and rule over the populace, ably assisted by big business, food banks will be around for decades to come. When you have people who are unemployed, essentially under-educated, or depressed at their situation, trying to fill out forms where a single mistake means they lose their benefit for several weeks – with no recompense when the problems is solved (example: two years ago, me…unemployed…a letter informing me I had an interview at the job centre at the same time as I was there for a signing…yet the letter never arrived, I knew nothing about it and no one said anything when I was there signing. Result – I received nothing for seven weeks, had arguments with the benefits people since they insisted I still had to attend interviews that I couldn’t afford to get to: my wife was working, but that meant we could just make most of the bills and feed the kids. When I explained at the next interview that I was unaware of the previous, missed, interview I was told that, oh yes, the letter never arrived? Ah well, that happens quite a lot, never mind, see you next Tuesday…).
But when a proportion of the population survive from week to week on handouts from a food bank then doesn’t that feel like Britain is falling into third world status? At least we aren’t paying hundreds of pounds for a loaf of bread, yet, like in Germany between the wars – and we all know where that went, don’t we…?
So what is to be done?
By: John Green - 20th April 2014 at 12:06
Re 38
Silver Fox
Sorry. I did quote the wrong number ref. Now corrected. This contribution is wrong on so many levels. It is so utterly wrong that, to present detailed arguments in opposition to each canard would take more time and an impatient level of disbelieve and rising anger that anyone can produce such asinine statements as articles of faith, albeit far Left, Socialist/Marxist faith.
Call me what ever you like but, don’t call me a Tory. I am as emphatic in my rejection of that as I am of a Socialist label. I offer no excuse for Maria Miller. If you’re caught with your fingers in the till, you fall on your sword – that’s it ! The offence is all the more, if you are in a position of public trust. There can be no excuse.
Permit me to make one simple counter to one point of unthinking stupidity in No.19. Reference was made to the ‘destruction’ of the steel industry, coupling this event with the name of the then current Prime Minister; Margaret Thatcher. In other words, in the muddled mind of the deluded, she is responsible !
The steel industry as well as the coal industry was ‘destroyed’ because its production costs were too high and the output could not therefore be sold on either the domestic or, international markets. That is it. No more to it than that. Those same conditions ensured the loss of shipbuilding and other heavy industries. Domestic production costs were unsustainable if we hoped to sell the product in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Most of you know all this, but still, the embittered old Marxists in our midst insist on their conspiracy theories, blaming right wing politicians or, any politician for the leaching of power from the trades unions, when the fact was that these commodities and many more could be produced far more cheaply in other countries with the necessary expertise and even allowing for transport costs, arrive in this country at a price far below domestic production.
I can’t quite believe I am going to write this: In ny opinion there are some industries that are simply too important to the welfare of the country and its people to be left to the assaults of capitalism. The utilities come to mind including the heavy industries. So, if we are to exclude the very often malign influences of profit based capitalism – what other capitalism is there ? What is left ?
Statism. State based support via the taxpayer. State intervention. Like the French and the old USSR, we maintain vital uncompetitive industries becaue we think that it is better to keep vast numbers of people employed doing nearly useful jobs rather than paying them dole to sit around and become fat and an increasing liability on the NHS. Well, it’s an idea.
The point at which the stitching comes apart is when the workforce start nudging each other, it having dawned that they’ve got jobs for life (see dockers – father to son) they don’t really need to clock on at 8.0am, 9.0am will do, and that they’re taking Wednesday off to go fishing with their mates. And why not? They can’t be sacked. The job is for life. All they have to do is maintain some semblance of sloppy production (see car industry) and be there on payday.
That particular arrangement did not ever work because it relied upon the honesty and commitment of the workforce and if (impossible dream, they had all been like Caesar’s Wife) beyond reproach, it would still have failed due to expensively produced, unsold, stockpiled production. Just like Warsaw Pact aircraft production after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Think sixty year old design of still produced AN2 biplane. Once production of something was started it just kept going with no one to halt it. It kept the workers quiet !
By: silver fox - 19th April 2014 at 21:49
John
Which part of Snafu’s post did you not like?, I am very aware that you won’t share his opinions (or most of mine for that matter) love your shout at calling Snafu an apologist and attempting to show him as a Red Army storm trooper or such like.
Didn’t notice a single logical counter discussion point to support your opinion, simply the usual Tory attack dog rant, incidentally while we are all frantically looking for excuses have your crew settled on the excuse yet for Maria Miller, seemingly her constituents aren’t best pleased better make it quick.
By: charliehunt - 19th April 2014 at 16:37
Don’t begrudge him his pleasure, Trump!;)
By: trumper - 19th April 2014 at 16:19
I have read all the thread ,not quite sure which part John refers to in Snafu’s post.Everybody is entitled to their opinion and nothing is ever quite how it seems.
The newspapers for example–oh dear ,i don’t believe anything in them anymore-look how many times we would have hung someone suspected of a crime only to find they were innocent.Can’t remember the rest of the reply but i’m not sure about Johns rant.
By: charliehunt - 19th April 2014 at 16:03
You read it? All of it? Congratulations on your………….perseverance?
By: John Green - 19th April 2014 at 14:55
Re 19
If ever I commit some evil deed and find myself in a starring role at the Old BaIley without any answers to some stark questions from a prosecutor out to make a name for him/her self, I’ll call on you.
You will be my weapon of first resort. Your ability to conjure, invent and construct seemingly plausible excuses for every problem real or imagined on the face of this planet is beyond compare. How did you acquire this facility ? Were you born with it or, learn it on the way? As a writer of nonsensical fiction you have no rival !
Please, someone tell me that people like this bloke are not thick on the ground. Please, someone tell me that this kind of political hyperbole distilled straight from the pages of Das Kapital, is disappearing up the backsides of the ‘useful idiots’ who once comprised the Militant Tendency shocktroops of the far Left.
If you aren’t already a fully paid up leftie of the Socialist Workers Party then, the SWP are missing a major player of monumental inventiveness.
Power to the People. (Cue chorus of the Red Flag)
By: trumper - 19th April 2014 at 12:35
Unfortunately it ‘s the lager swigging crack heads we see queued up outside the offices .I really feel for those genuine looking and being stitched up -especially when we see those coming over to this country with no entitlement and never contributed being put first.
By: charliehunt - 19th April 2014 at 09:56
I follow most of that and some of which is an eye opener, EE, but it doesn’t explain why the vacancies are not filled, if as you say, most genuinely want to work.
By: EELightning - 19th April 2014 at 09:41
The statistics for those unemployed and speaking work should be set against job vacancies. I was often amazed at the enormous number if vacancies. If that is still the case why aren’t the jobs filled? And why aren’t benefits reduced if jobs are refused?
There’s so many jobs out there, even though I’m a full time worker in my normal day-to-day job and receive time-off for another travelling job I still have a little look on various job sites, Direct Gov (or Universal Jobmatch its called now), Monster Jobs, CV-Library, Reed etc. and there’s lots, a hell of a lot more available now to when I was signing on the dole a few years ago, which was for about 10 months, not ashamed to say it, people shouldn’t have to be if they’re willing to work. Finding and applying is the easy bit, it’s getting your foot in the door that’s the tough bit.
I remember one time on the dole, my “Job Seekers Agreement” stated I had to find and apply for 25 live vacancies per week which was fine by me, I could do a hell of a lot more than that, and in order to receive benefits you simply recorded those in your work diary, or note book as I had. There was one week where there was very little going but still [just] managed to get past the 25 figure, (sometimes that happens)… Some issues had occurred at home, mind got side tracked and I forgot to record 3 of those vacancies for that week that I applied for, which happened to be the second week, so anyhow… Goes to sign on, seen some snotty nosed b*tch, she asked for my work diary/notebook and noticed I was a few short… Result: Docked £65.something for that week, just because I simply forgot to write them down and bearing in mind I applied for something like 40+ vacancies the previous week which made up the overall tally over the fortnight. Later I got it back because I had proof elsewhere but I had to fight like a trooper for it… It’s a pretty nasty kick in the balls when things like that happen while you notice there’s a p*sshead next to you verbally abusing the staff and a foreign guy laying down the same old “Don’t understand nor speak English” card when asked on what they’ve been doing to look for work, and 99.9% of the time get sent on their way with a guarantee of payment in 3 days time regardless.
The question of; And why aren’t benefits reduced if jobs are refused? Well, that’s a question that depends on your nationality and how many cans of Carling you can consume before 9am.
Regards to the reduction of unemployment figures. No one really takes those “official figures” for granted, do they? Surely not?… Did you know that if the dole sends you on some crappy training course or a work programme of some sort, you are “officially” off the their records because you are now under another record [unofficially of course] that belongs to companies called Ingeus, Avantar or whatever they’re misspelt as, whom of which the Government does not take unemployment figures from, only from the Job Centre. So the next time the Prime Minister stands up in The Houses of Parliament, sticks his chest out and proudly states that ‘Last month the unemployment figure dropped by 440,823!’… Oh no… no, no, no… 440,823 have just been referred to a work programme, Mr. Prime Minister.
The majority of unemployed are genuine people, they don’t want to be on the dole as much as the next person… There’s just a minute minority that give the former a very bad tag. It’s a blasted shame.
By: charliehunt - 19th April 2014 at 06:12
CD – I do remember those times. State handouts were minimal and few thought twice about taking any job offered because it was always better to work. There was no ethic of materialism so no assumptions about what there was a right to have. You had only had what you could afford.
The statistics for those unemployed and speaking work should be set against job vacancies. I was often amazed at the enormous number if vacancies. If that is still the case why aren’t the jobs filled? And why aren’t benefits reduced if jobs are refused?
By: EELightning - 19th April 2014 at 01:34
There was a documentary on the other day about Romanian immigrants and how “difficult” is was for them to be living in the UK on an “inconsiderable amount” of benefits… £400 per week, signing on once a fortnight, not needing to show proof work is being looked for in your Work Diary and basically having the freedom to blast Eastern European music all hours of the day in their two-up-two-down privately rented flats for the whole street to hear… I can see how things are incredibly difficult for them while genuine families are having to live in poverty… It’s not much ‘Poverty in Britain’ but, ‘Total F*ck Up in Britain’.
Some things don’t add up, do they…
By: Creaking Door - 19th April 2014 at 00:21
More to the point, foodbanks are an utter necessity to those who have no other means of feeding themselves…
Yes, but are they just a temporary fix by a charity organisation to plug the inevitable gaps in benefit from an otherwise fairly generous State?
Even in the examples that you posted the necessity for food-banks seemed to be temporary (although the reasons for some of the benefit suspensions seemed petty in the extreme). Your examples also spoke of the ‘shame’ that people felt at going to a food-bank (or asking to borrow money from family); now I know there should be no ‘shame’ in being made unemployed (as it is beyond most peoples’ control when made redundant) but there was a time (not a time that I lived through but a time my parents lived through) when people were ‘ashamed’ to be unemployed (or at least reluctant to take money from the State)…..now, apparently, the ‘shame’ only extends to asking for handouts from family or charity?
I’m not advocating a return to the ethics of the past but perhaps it is time for all of us to rethink what jobs we would be prepared to do should we become unemployed and also how we live when we ARE employed…
…how much in debt we are? How big is our mortgage? How much have we got on our credit-cards?
By: snafu - 18th April 2014 at 22:09
Brooks, Coulson, all their predecessors, rubbish made up stories, panic-inducing headlines, hacking dead kids voicemails, The Sun on Hillsborough etc etc etc
You read that sort of rag you deserve to lose more than a few brain cells and believe what is printed.
Of course some of it is truer than you want to imagine, but a lot of it is utter this (anag). Brooks and Coulson both worked for Piers Morgan at one point or another, both came up through the sensationalist red tops, both found a hunger for gaudy stories. Both are the sort of people you do not ever ever ever tell them your names, if you really must talk to them – they’d have the watch off your wrist, your bank PIN details and your most secret kink just for kicks; they are like those soap stars who are keen to impress you by saying that they’d have to spice up a production of Hamlet before they’d star in it. They are low life scum.
But this story was also covered in the less ‘entertaining’, even serious, section of the media, the sort who don’t usually splatter panic-inducing headlines across their pages, haven’t been shown (yet) to have hacked voicemails, dead kids or otherwise, didn’t immediately take the cops word for it that it was Liverpool fans wot dun it. You go around thinking that because a story appeared in a red top then that story is complete hist (anag) wherever else it gets printed then you won’t believe much news at all.
Just because one paper used what it thought was an illustrative image that turns out to be nothing to do with the story but, even worse, foreign too (*gasp*) doesn’t make the actual story untrue, no matter how much you want it to be.
I’m fairly sure they aren’t untruthful. We have been through, and are barely emerging from, the deepest and longest financial crisis in memory. It would be surprising if many people weren’t suffering.
But…? (Go on, slag it off. You know you want to…)
The problem is highlighted earlier, that when the stories are dressed-up to pander to the LCDs, thinking people can’t help but question the veracity of the whole story. I don’t need to see a picture of a kid from San Francisco to ‘illustrate’ a story about food banks, any more than I need a TV news reporter standing on the pavement at night outside a locked and darkened building in Whitehall to ‘illustrate’ a story that involves the Foreign Office or whatever.
Bingo.
That front page was from a red topped rag.
Ok, if you drew up a list of red tops where would the Daily Mirror rank?
Beneath the Sun, the Star maybe? Under the Mail possibly? Its certainly not the paper it used to be, and it is probably hanging on to its readership only by dint of its political affiliation, not through its thorough and thoughtful journalism. Personally, I can’t remember the last time I even opened a copy of the Mirror – accidentally or otherwise.
But you don’t trust the story because of the picture they used.
Not long ago I believe the Mail illustrated an obit with an image of the old, late, BAe Mosquito T3; did that detract from the deceased’s rather full and very interesting life?
Food-banks are are a very obvious sign of something being ‘wrong’ in Britain but what are they actually a sign of? High food prices? Since we live in a global society how can this be controlled by the government except by subsidising food. Low wages? Again we live in a global society. Low benefits? Well maybe but if you could ‘live’ on benefits who would work (and we clearly have a small proportion of the population who choose not to work, or at least, feel that certain jobs are ‘beneath them’ or feel they would be better-off not working)?
I was laying in bed, thinking about this thread after posting my last message, and it seems to me that in the very near future there is going to be a major problem.
Food prices are comparatively low: Tesco pay the farmer less than its pays the supplier for each carton of milk, so that most farmers are making a loss on their dairy herd, for example. Low wages have always been present – its better than it was with the introduction of minimum wage, yet some employers have hit back with zero hour contracts (for those not in the know that means the employee doesn’t get paid when not working, but they don’t know when they are working until they contact their workplace and might be given just minutes notice that they are required; fine, you might say, but without a fixed income they miss out on certain benefits, miss out on others because they are employed, cannot get loans or a mortgage because their income isn’t guaranteed, and – not certain about this – won’t be classified as unemployed even if they haven’t been used at their ‘workplace’ for up to several months unless their employer specifically designated them not employed, which the employer can be loath to do due to certain tax breaks they get for employing jobless people…). If you are employed but not getting much money then you don’t have much of a stake in the future; admittedly more then if you are unemployed, but then that’s not saying much. Apparently there will be problems soon in London and other, popular and fashionable, cities in the UK since people will not be able to afford to live there; already some firms are busing in cleaners from the cheaper suburbs and charging nicely for the service (not that the cleaners get any recompense for the traveling, just minimum wage for the time they clean). But when the other low pay jobs have to commute – at their own expense – from where they can afford to live, then they will be ructions… And, apparently according to official figures, the number of people keen to live on benefits alone is negligible – much like the number of foreigners come to live off British benefits.
It is a difficult social engineering problem that no government has solved, so far, but food-banks are a godsend to those in opposition and to the editors of the tabloid press.
More to the point, foodbanks are an utter necessity to those who have no other means of feeding themselves. Of course they could always shoplift, get caught and live in prison for a while m- except the prisons are a little full at the moment and so they could end up back on the street… Government needs to do something about it, even it only to quieten shop owners and prison governors.
I wonder how has this compared to the pre war financial crashes where world wars soon followed.
It doesn’t. Not yet, but who knows what could happen if the common man gets fed up [no pun intended] and decides to become revolting man…
Another one that Charlie will not read!
By: trumper - 18th April 2014 at 13:18
Well ,the recession started in the USA all those years ago and spread around the globe,i daresay foodbanks are now common place where they are needed .I always thought the Germans had a better way of life and outlook on quality and looking after their citizens.
I wonder how has this compared to the pre war financial crashes where world wars soon followed.
By: charliehunt - 18th April 2014 at 13:07
We are not alone!!
http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-941661.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=
By: Creaking Door - 18th April 2014 at 11:50
I think your 40/60 split on households is a little off track if I remember rightly when that comment was first made it related to the population rather than households…
I suspect there isn’t that much difference between the two figures but it is a sobering statistic on the ‘fairness’ of British society.
Couple this with the number of ‘productive’ workers that actually work for the State, public and private employees, (so that their entire salaries are paid for by taxation on others) and I’m at a loss to understand how the whole edifice of the United Kingdom PLC stays afloat!
Food-banks are are a very obvious sign of something being ‘wrong’ in Britain but what are they actually a sign of? High food prices? Since we live in a global society how can this be controlled by the government except by subsidising food. Low wages? Again we live in a global society. Low benefits? Well maybe but if you could ‘live’ on benefits who would work (and we clearly have a small proportion of the population who choose not to work, or at least, feel that certain jobs are ‘beneath them’ or feel they would be better-off not working)?
It is a difficult social engineering problem that no government has solved, so far, but food-banks are a godsend to those in opposition and to the editors of the tabloid press.
By: Moggy C - 18th April 2014 at 11:08
I’m fairly sure they aren’t untruthful. We have been through, and are barely emerging from, the deepest and longest financial crisis in memory. It would be surprising if many people weren’t suffering.
The problem is highlighted earlier, that when the stories are dressed-up to pander to the LCDs, thinking people can’t help but question the veracity of the whole story. I don’t need to see a picture of a kid from San Francisco to ‘illustrate’ a story about food banks, any more than I need a TV news reporter standing on the pavement at night outside a locked and darkened building in Whitehall to ‘illustrate’ a story that involves the Foreign Office or whatever.
Moggy
The girl is not British. It was taken years ago (2009). And she is not weeping because she is poor. In fact, she is American, the daughter of a photographer, and was upset by an earthworm.
By: trumper - 18th April 2014 at 10:57
I daresay there have always been the low life scummy journalists but technology and demand from the people who read this crap has made it easier for them to become more powerful,instantly available and therefore control the people in power to a degree.
Good honest investigative journalists have become fewer.
Today they pander to the lowest common denominator-the public,money and those whose influence has led to mass corruption amongst those they should be weeding out,ironic really the weeding outers needing weeding out.
You have to dig amongst the mire to find the odd nugget which doesn’t mean that the stories about the food banks etc are untruthful.
By: Moggy C - 18th April 2014 at 09:47
This fixation with evil journalists…it is almost amusing. What is it, were you bitten by a snappy scribbler when you were a kid?
Brooks, Coulson, all their predecessors, rubbish made up stories, panic-inducing headlines, hacking dead kids voicemails, The Sun on Hillsborough etc etc etc
By: charliehunt - 18th April 2014 at 05:35
Yup – you said it in your first line, Snaf!! Yawwwwwwwwnnnn………
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April 16, 2014 at 6:19 pm