Hunger

I don't know what I found most shocking - the inquest verdict finding that a man with mental ill-health issues called Mark Wood had died of starvation in prosperous rural Oxfordshire - after his ESA was wrongly stopped following yet another botched Atos medical - or the fact that the story only made page 11 of Saturday's Guardian. 

Have we really reached a point where a man can starve to death in a first world country, due in large account to failings of our Social Security system, and it doesn't warrant more prominence and greater soul-searching in a major left-leaning newspaper than this? 

It's fair enough that the deepening crisis in Ukraine made the front page headline, but below it there was room for a poverty-focussed story - the proliferation of fixed-odds gaming machines in betting shops, especially in the most economically depressed districts.  But while we well-meaning, soft-hearted Guardian readers will have no problem seeing this as cynical corporations exploiting people with no other hope of riches, how many others will get no further than seeing the headline on the newspaper stand and interpret it as further evidence that the idle scroungers must have more than enough benefit if they can afford to gamble?  It's much harder to reason away the needless death of a desperately ill man, especially when it's a coroner not a campaigner making the analysis.

Too many have died falling through the holes in what was once a much sounder safety net.  Searching using the keywords 'benefits' 'cuts' and 'suicide' turned up the following headlines on the first page alone:

• Benefit cuts blind man committed suicide after Atos ruled him fit to work (Daily Mirror December 2013)
• Grandad shoots himself after finding out his benefits were being stopped (Daily Mirror January 2014)
• Sick nurse killed herself after disability benefits were cut (Daily Mirror November 2013)
• Dad of two killed himself because he was losing his disability benefits (Daily Mirror April 2013)
• Dad committed suicide after housing benefit cut (Wandsworth Guardian April 2011)

Unfortunately, rather than use these stories and others for a serious investigation into what is happening to our society, the BBC have hired 'Love Productions' of Benefits Street fame, to make them a new series on poverty.  Believing apparently that the only way you can get 'hard-working families' and viewers to care is by introducing the radiant glow of a 'celebrity' into the narrative, we're promised the spectacle of a benevolent Rachel Johnson living with real poor people for an entire week.  In the publicity, Johnson has been quoted as noting that the people she stayed with lived 'like animals' (she is supposedly expressing pity, not disapproval, through this comment) and the phrase 'Poverty Safari' has been used. 

'Poverty safari': words fail me.

Meanwhile, I'm planning some benefits training for a group of volunteers who didn't exist thirty years ago when I started doing benefits advice.  They run this city's network of Foodbanks. 

Sometimes it's almost impossible to believe it's 2014.