Food Poverty, Vaccination Heroes, French and American Schools, Guns, Drugs and Money.

Charity (The Seven Acts of Mercy)
Bartolomeo Schedoni (1578-1615) (copy after)
Photo Credit: Blairs Museum [CC BY-NC-ND]

 ... Britain is a country where food poverty is an almost invisible national scandal. Although we see the food bank boxes at the end of the supermarket checkouts, the people who are going hungry tend to tuck themselves away. The shame of not being able to afford to feed yourself and your family means that people sometimes don't seek help and don't talk about their situation.

... In Britain right now it's about to get a whole lot worse. Figures released last week have trumpeted falling shopping prices but these are entirely based on non-food items. Fresh food prices are creeping up slowly and "ambient foods" - the stuff we put in our cupboards - are going up between two and three times the rate of inflation, jumping 2.8% in August.

It may not sound much, but to anyone already struggling to feed themselves or their family, that 2.8% means one thing: hunger.

... Ten million adults in England, Wales and Northern Ireland face food insecurity every year; 2.5 million young people in Britain are estimated by Unicef to live in "food insecure" households. "Food insecure" - it's such a sterile way of describing the disgusting reality that millions of us are afraid of going hungry.

... It should not be necessary for figures such as the footballer Marcus Rashford to fight on behalf of hungry children. It should not be necessary for charities such as the Trussell Trust to feed families via food banks.

Food banks are, at best, a short time fix. They shouldn't be a replacement for a decent support structure in our society. We need to implement long-term changes and fast.

Changes such as the increase in Healthy Start vouchers championed in the government's national food strategy, would transform lives overnight by giving more people more money for fruit, vegetables and milk.

We can support a living and livable income for people who are employed, between jobs or receive state benefits. Join the campaigns for paying living wages. If you're in employment, join a union, because organising against unfair working conditions is going to be crucial as the next wave of recession hits...

(Jack Monroe, The Guardian, 2020)

A national scandal that in 2020 there are record numbers of children and adults going hungry. Why isn't this broadcast more? Are there queues outside these food banks? How come only a few Tory MPs voted for the extension of free school meals? Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, to their credit, operate a different policy.

*Food aid charities have identified the emergence of Britain's "newly hungry" - a growing cohort of people who were previously in good jobs and with comfortable incomes who have been forced during the pandemic to use food banks and claim welfare benefits for the first time.

The Feeding Britain network said its members were providing food support to an influx of middle-income families. Typically with mortgages, cars and often self-employed or business owners, they had been plunged into crisis by Covid-related job losses and gaps in the social security system.

"We now see families at food banks who before the pandemic were able to pay their bills and still be comfortable enough to put food on the table. For the first time in many years, that is no longer the case," said the charity's national director, Andrew Forsey.

Before Covid-19, research showed the vast majority of people who used food banks were penniless. The widening demographic in recent months, however, is seen as an indicator of how the pandemic has affected those further up the income scale... They were typically younger people who were fully employed on a middle income and who are either property owners, mortgage payers or who rent privately...

The networks charities included: Bonny Downs community association in East Ham, London, which reported lengthy queues forming an hour before opening time. It gave out food parcels to 4,000 people between April and June, compared with 622 in the first three months of the year.

The Beaumont Leys food bank in Leicester, which went from providing food to 40 families to 500 a week since March. Similarly, the NewStarts food bank in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, said demand had risen over the same period by 700%...

(Patrick Butler, The Guardian, 2020)

Vaccination Heroes

Vaccination: Dr Jenner Performing His First Vaccination, 1796
Ernest Board (1877-1934)
Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection  [Public Domain]

Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sahin are rapidly becoming the most celebrated marriage in science since Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radioactivity.

The German-Turkish couple are on the brink of claiming the first effective coronavirus vaccine but, like their predecessors, they ride everywhere on their bikes, are not interested in the billions of pounds they could make from their discovery and are happiest working together in their white lab coats, even on their wedding day...

Their desire to find a vaccine, she explains, did not grow out of any competitive, financial or scientific impetus, but because they felt a "moral" impetus to help the world...

Does she worry about the anti-vaxers' fears?

"Our duty is to make sure our data is presented transparently for everyone to evaluate, to ensure that people can inform themselves about our and other vaccines," she replies before insisting that the vaccine is safe and effective. "I would have it, I would get my family to have it."... "I think the most noble thing you can use science and technology for is to serve the people."

Her husband, Dr Sahin ... explains that his motives are similarly altruistic. "I am driven by curiosity, I am always asking questions, I want to understand how things work," he says. "I work in a cancer hospital and I had to tell many patients that we can't help them any more. As a scientist I knew that we are not doing everything that is possible so we need to do more. That's what drives me on."...

Dr Sahin worries that rich countries will buy up all the batches, leaving the developing world unprotected... "The wealthy should not be able to jump the queue and pay to be inoculated privately," he insists...

Dr Tureci and Dr Sahin are not looking to profit from their discovery, though their company is now valued at £20 billion... 

(Alice Thomson, Rachel Sylvester, The Times, 2020)

What an amazing couple who seem to exude humility, goodness and a love for their fellow human beings.

French Schools

The Sick Child
Edward Munch (1863-1944)
Photo Credit: Tate  [CC BY-NC-ND]

France is to pay most of the wages of parents forced to stay at home to care for children whose schools are closed by outbreaks of Covid-19.

The government announced the measure after 34 schools and 500 separate classes were shut following the appearance of clusters of infection since schools reopened on September 1.

One parent in each household with children under 16 will be eligible to receive 84 per cent of their normal salary from the state. The scheme will be backdated to September 1...

(Charles Bremner, The Times, 2020)

American Schools

School is Out
Elizabeth Adela Forbes ( 1859-1912)
Photo Credit: Penlee House Gallery & Museum [ CC BY-ND]

The deaths of six teachers have cast a shadow over efforts to reopen America's schools and deepened disagreements about the safety of classroom education.

President Trump warned yesterday that if schools did not reopen they should lose funding.

... The American Federation of Teachers, which said 210 of its members had died in the last school year after being infected with coronavirus, has warned that schools should not reopen without "the infrastructure of testing" and safeguards including masks.

Paul Alexander, a Canadian professor who was a political appointee at the Department for Health and Human Services, appears to have tried to stop government scientists from advising that pupils should wear masks in class...

(Will Pavia, The Times, 2020)

Guns, Drugs and Money

Which sectors of our economy would you say have fared best during the pandemic? You can guess a few of them: pharmaceuticals, obviously, which saw output rise by nearly a quarter in the first six months of the year, even as the rest of the economy shrank at the same rate.

Another big winner was the chemicals industry which, among other things makes many of the products we're now reliant on for sanitising the country.

But while the vast majority of the economy crumpled during the recession there was another sector which quietly made hay: the weapons and ammunition sector.

There are not many fields in which Britain is an indisputable global champion but when it comes to making products that kill people (or "protect people" as the defence industry would put it) we are up there with the best. You don't hear much about this for obvious reasons but every so often it surfaces somewhere unexpected, such as Britain's economic statistics.

So it was that in the first six months of 2020 the output of the UK arms sector rose by just over 7 per cent.

... While Dominic Cummings may like to think that by ditching EU state aid rules Britain will be able to seed the next Facebook, it's just as likely that the sectors to benefit will be the ones we have always been particularly good at: guns, drugs and money. 

(Ed Conway, The Times, 2020)

*Britain has cemented its position as the world's second-largest arms exporter after sealing weaponry deals worth £11bn last year - the second highest figures for nearly 40 years.

UK defence firms signed contracts worth almost £100bn in the last ten years, placing it behind America but ahead of Russia and France.

The bulk of Britain's exports ... go to the Middle East with Saudi Arabia substantially the largest single customer for the UK defence industry. Aerospace technology, ranging from Typhoon fighter jets to missiles, remains the UK's most lucrative export sector.

... Campaigners argue that Britain's prowess in air-combat technology means UK-made equipment has been used extensively in the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen.

A United nations report last month said that countries supplying those in the conflict with weaponry could be " aiding and assisting" the committing of war war crimes in Yemen.

Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade, said: "These figures should be a source of great shame. Boris Johnson and his colleagues are always talking about 'Global Britain' and the importance of human rights and democracy, but they are arming and supporting repression around the world."

(Cahal Milmo, The i, 2020)