Know Your Enemy

"It’s incredible that a party which peddled notions of a Big Society now sneers when communities work together to be charitable, generous and empathic, to bring light, to stop hunger pains, to shove cheap tinned soup and budget brand cereal into the mouths of those without."

Grace Dent in the Independent, on "the growing, frankly shameful, vocal hostility" Tories are showing to food banks and those who use them. Lest we forget, it's the Coalition's swingeing cuts that are forcing people to turn to food banks for help in the first place. The truth many of us suspected lay behind the Big Society concept is becoming all the more apparent: rolling back state intervention so that voluntary, charitable and community organisations have to fill the gap and pick up the pieces.

The Tories would no doubt argue that the means of escaping the sort of grinding poverty that results in people relying on food banks is plain hard work - something the Coalition's own social mobility tsar is about to declare is no longer enough.