Why Are One In Five British people Struggling To Put Food On The Table?

Britain intrigues with its portrait of continued policy mismanagement. But is it a consequence of dramatic policy changes from the Thatcher years?

Nearly 10 million adults and 4 million children of the UK population, who number a modest 67.5 million (67,508,936), and have a per capita income of $47,334 (World Bank -2021), are malnourished. Some are struggling to buy the food they need. Others are actually going hungry without a meal for the whole day. One in four households with children have experienced food insecurity in the last month alone, as per a Guardian newspaper article dated 18^th October 2022. Everyone who is not well-off, even in the middle class, is feeling the pinch.

Many of the ‘food insecure’ are more recent immigrants, that do not qualify for welfare benefits as yet.  But the state welfare system itself has been drastically downsized from 2010, under the so-called ‘austerity’ measures, with the British government refusing to rule out further cuts as it struggles to stabilise the economy.

This means that many others too have turned towards non-government charities to put food on the table. A recent joint statement by more than 2,000 UK food banks said they were facing unprecedented demand. The UK’s largest food bank charity, the Trussell Trust, has documented a 5,146  percent increase in emergency food parcels distributed between 2008 and 2018.

Schools that still provide them, report on children that come in hungry, dependent on the one free hot meal they receive there. 

By way of contrast, India at 1.44 billion people and a per capita income of a mere $ 2,277 is eating well and is food surplus. It has recently overtaken Britain in GDP.

India distributed free rations to over 800 million people during the Covid pandemic. It carries out massive welfare programmes for lactating mothers, babies, child nutrition. It benefits its millions with the Gareeb Jan Dhan Yojana, MNREGA, amongst a plethora of other welfare programmes. India has been able to export wheat and rice to countries affected by disruption in supply lines caused by the Russo-Ukraine War. Its economy is growing at between 6% and 7% per annum post-Covid, and is expected to carry on doing so for a decade and more going forward. IMF projections see it as the world’s 3^rd largest economy by 2028.

But then, we are mindful because India’s electorate is at the bottom of the pyramid to a significant degree. All politicians do their reckoning from the bottom upwards.

But what is the matter in Britain? Why can’t they feed their lower income groups who are desperately juggling between housing and heating costs plus that of food? And indeed, with the EU and the US, almost as badly affected. All of the West is undergoing a tremendous economic crisis they were not prepared for, hit by the double whammy of Covid and the Russia-Ukraine War.

The near collapse, but for widening fiscal deficits and yet more borrowing to stave it off, is a consequence of decades of reckless borrow-and-spend economics, starting from the 1980s, rather than revenue driven ones. Now, with the growth all but gone and recession looming, with untamed inflation provoked by high energy and food prices, the multifarious bills have come home to roost.

At one time,  in the first general election after WWII, Socialism ruled in a Labour Party government. Churchill, a Tory, was quickly ousted with his party after the war, and the elected representatives of the proletariat took over. The state owned all the utilities and services. Every place of work was unionised, and wage increases were  regularly negotiated with the  private sector owners and the government itself. Strikes, go-slows, work-to-rule were all fashionable and prevalent. The days of Empire were over and many industries and port cities that dealt with it went into recession. But Socialism powered on, untainted by upper class leadership, with all its many welfare benefits showered on the working classes. All seemed eternal, even if the books did not balance at all, till the time of ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher.

She reversed all this, selling off government ownership in railways, airlines, and companies alike, and taking on the unions. The most dramatic was the coal-miners union that she broke despite hunger strikes to the death. The proxy rule of the British working class was over.

It has stayed much that way ever since, even through Labour governments, because 80% of the population and the voter list is not working class, even though the upper classes had been decimated in two world wars.  Prosperity of the post-war years saw to that, before it all got a bit too top heavy, ideologically driven, and statist. Without the subsidies on everything day to day cost of living soared. There was inflation. The Pound Sterling was devalued.

The White working classes started diminishing in numbers though, almost straight after 1945 as the class barriers broke down. This went on till the British had to import black and brown people from the former colonies to do the grunt jobs. Hordes of the erstwhile poor, including the famed Cockneys of East London, moved up to the middle classes taking advantage of education and white-collar jobs on offer.

Looking back, the structures and mores built by Socialism gave the poorer citizens a three-decade ascendancy after the War.

But today, things are looking grim. UK GDP growth forecasts for 2022 is 3.3%, 0.2% in 2023 and 1% in 2024. Inflation will peak at 13% in 2022 alone. The cost of living continues to soar. Inflation is at a 40 year high as of September 2022. The value of the British pound has fallen substantially, putting it almost at par with the US dollar, and political instability is writ large, with four Tory prime ministers and their cabinets coming and going in short order.

The ruling Tories are threatening to further cut public spending and may raise taxes. This will, in the absence of growth, aggravate the problem. The rival Labour Party is demanding a snap poll as their popularity has risen substantially, and Scotland is once again asking for a second referendum, this time on leaving the United Kingdom.  Protestant Northern Ireland too is quite interested in merging with Catholic Eire to get back into the EU.

Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded the UK’s economic outlook from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’. 

But food insecurity in Britain has been neglected and goes back a while in recent memory. Food inflation in Europe began to aggravate in late 2006, got worse after the global meltdown in 2008, and became a long-term hunger problem for the British poor, a decided minority.

In 2014, 8.4 million British people, were often going hungry according to Food Foundation thinktank that put out a report. Frank Field MP, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on hunger at the time, is quoted in a Guardian article of 6^th May 2016, ‘We now know for the first time the scale of the challenge confronting the nation to ensure all of us can afford to buy and eat a decent meal without needing to rely on food banks’. 

The UK imports almost half of its food and 84% of its fresh fruit, showing up glaring vulnerabilities in its food supply chain made worse by Brexit and Covid-19. There are various subsidies given to British farming particularly in the meat and dairy sector. But can these and others last under the economic squeeze the UK is facing? Is the worst yet to come?

Food insecurity in UK households receiving ‘Universal Credit’, the combined social security payment claimed by around 6 million people on low incomes or out-of-work, was four times higher than households not receiving it. Besides the Universal Credit payments have decreased in real terms over the years with rising inflation taking its toll.

In the 2015 general election season, right wing commentators, mostly much better-heeled, expressed scepticism with hunger figures presented by church groups and the leftists.  Given the overall population numbers reflected in the voter lists, it appears that the poorest do not have the leverage to dominate the polls except in working-class constituencies.

But if Labour comes back to power, because of general disenchantment with the bumbling Tories, does it have the wherewithal to reverse the trend of cutting back on welfare and subsidies?

Leaving the EU via Brexit has added pressure to British food imports from the Continent by way of duties and levies. It has also put barriers against British exports. Not being food self-sufficient is probably worse than the other supply chain problems of globalisation, but it is something Britain has in common with China. China too imports a great deal of its food.

 Having spent long years pointing fingers at the Global South for not looking after the needs of the poor and relatively impoverished, it is now the turn of the erstwhile rich economies to eat humble pie. Also, the West is no longer a  magnet for immigrants from India and elsewhere. As life and livelihood continues to steadily improve in India, they are getting decidedly worse in the West. However, if you are a Pakistani or a Sri Lankan, Britain must still appear to be the promised land.

Food insecurity may be much talked about in Britain, but it is prevalent for many of the same reasons, in Europe and America as well now. Manufacturing sundry items has been all but exported to China. Services account for 80% of the economy in Britain and other parts of Europe and America, but jobs, even there, are not growing in a near recession. Perhaps the greatest sting in the tail of a high-cost economy with high per capita income, is its inability to cope with the economic basics of self reliance, aatmanirbharta, in times when resources are tight. There are also not enough able-bodied people to pull the cart out of the mire. The ones that are there are mostly old, and most of the worthy are not having children. It is the story of a declining population curve aggravated by hostility to letting in more immigrants who promptly demand welfare support. The Catch-22 is evident.

 A low per capita economy like India, that has also doubled its number from about $ 1400 over the last couple of decades but with an explosion in population alongside, is saved by its substantial and rising working age population. About 65%  are between the ages of 15 and 35 years. It makes us cost competitive, with a little skilling and more education. This too is not permanent and will begin to age in about three decades. By then we would have grown to around $ 30 trillion in GDP. We will have enormous pent-up domestic demand from 1.70 billion people, and substantial exports. It is a projected ten-fold increase in GDP to help us cope.

What is sure is that when we get there, we will still be feeding all our people, our valuable voters, and be food surplus in 2050 too.

(1,831 words)

October 22^nd, 2022

For: Firstpost/News18.com

Gautam Mukherjee