Or it will be when the caring sharing Tories watch
the Panorama programme about food banks.
Truly shocking.

Holocaust deniers appear to be reasonable compared to IDS and that Currie woman.

Its very simple - they have to toe the party line, they have to follow the rhetoric, they are not free to express their own personal doubts.

To admit that government policies are causing hardship and even starvation to the point where families are having to rely on charity to feed them would be political suicide, so they barricade themselves behind lies and scorn and they try and blame the people who are in need for their own problems.

Lets put the lies to rest before the snipers and cheerleaders arrive with the party line flags and banners - food banks are not free supermarkets, they are a place of referral by various agencies, you can't just walk in the door and ask for a food parcel and you can't get referred every week for the rest of your life.

They are emergency relief centres.

In the UK.

PS, Edwina Currie is simply a mouthpiece for the far right of the Conservative Party, a pantomime villain to snipe and shout down anyone who does not go along with the far right agenda regardless of facts or truth, all political party's have them and she should be dismissed as irrelevant by the media other than the fact that she makes good copy for them.

Unfortunately, Currie still gets forums on which to spout her lies.

A few weeks ago in the [iSpectator[/i, she penned a piece on food banks that claimed, among other utterly stupid things, that food bank use was damaging small, local shops and seeing them close. She repeated this fiction on that [iBenefits Street Row[/i or whatever it was called.

In the following edition of the [iSpectator[/i, the publishers gave a vast amount of space to the Trussell Trust to rebut her claims, including making the point, at length, that you can't just walk in off the street and get free food.

The response of most of those who posted after was ranting, spittle-flecked hatred (no exaggeration) – ignoring the fact that Currie had been lying in her original piece, but concentrating on how all those people doing the referring of those in need to food banks are obviously sucking off the teat of the state and are themselves parasites etc.

There was a piece in The Times yesterday which was obviously pre-loaded from the Panorama content and which attracted a fairly balanced view of respondents some of whom just repeated the propaganda of "Why should government fund food banks", erm, because there is a need ?

What you tend to find after answering some of the more ridiculous correspondents and pointing out the actual reality (rather then the Currie/IDS ideology) is that when they have run out of Central Office soundbites the underlying truth comes out, one commenter ended with "I don't want my tax to be spent on alcoholics and drug addicts" - there is no answering that sort of attitude but its all too prevalent and its seized upon by the current incumbents in government who love the divide and conquer style themselves.

Margaret Thatcher was a free thinker before her time, her famous quote of "There is no such thing as society" was actually a prediction and a true one at that - someone should rename Mother Shiptons Well...

Tories and basic humanity.
They are just not compatible.
Is it any wonder that being called the nasty party is so apt.

This graphic showing the reasons for attending food banks makes interesting readinghttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bh1XY0PCEAA12FA.png" >

The column for child holiday meals made me wonder, if a family is so impoverished that the kids' require free school meals, what provision is made to feed the same kids during school holidays?

Well if they do then at least they will have done one good thing in government.

The thing that got me was when Currie criticised the bloke in charge of a foodbank for providing Super Noodles in one of the food packages as it wasn't proper food in her eyes. When you're that hard up and starving food is food.

It's been in the loacal paper recently that food banks are now putting together special packages for people which only need them to add boiled water as they cant afford the gas/electric to cook a proper meal, don't have access to a cooker or don't have the cooking skills.

The likes of Currie don't live in the real world.

There is truth in all of this including the fact that Currie has a very skewed version of reality in her head, or maybe she deliberately ignores reality to stick to the party line that its not their fault and not really their job to address issues such as poverty and unemployment because they are mainly caused by the individual and a lack of individual control - its a mantra that is used in America by Republicans all the time so its not a new one, just its application during this term of government.

For instance - a 5lb bag of potatoes in your foodbank box or a couple of packets of instant Smash (or similar) ?

Currie would immediately point to the potatoes as being the healthy sustenance and in this she may well be correct, she'd point to the fact that potatoes are very versatile and can be used in many ways to feed a family and a 5lb bag would last for quite a few days, and in this she'd be correct too.

Where she would start to fluster and divert attention (a job that she is VERY skilled at) is when the recipient points out that his/her electricity is on a meter, their cooker is electric and they have no cash for the next five days with which to top up their credit, so with the last remaining couple of quids worth of electricity in the house do we boil a kettle of water to make some Smash or do we boil a pan of spuds for 20 mins or bake the potatoes in the oven for half an hour - the politicians answer would be "Why have you no money left for credit, what have you spent it on, you've probably got booze in the cupboard and fags in your pocket and is that a new tattoo there" none of which answers the question "How the fook am I going to eat these potatoes raw ?"

By the way - although the title of the thread is not literal, it could be literal very soon.

According to the Sunday Times today "a panel of experts" have advised the government that the BBC should not be funded via a licence but from subscription instead and that this should happen from 2020 onwards.

The Centenary Review is a bit of a talking shop for ex politicians and ex media bosses but it is an official government review and apparently the BBC are looking to charge for digital downloads of programs in the near future in what will be their equivalent of iTunes.

Its also suggested that £20 a month (£240 a year) would be a level to aim for against the current licence fee of £145.

I use a lot of the online functionality of the BBC and watch very little live TV because of other distractions in my life and would probably subscribe if the full array of radio and TV services were still maintained in their present form, however popular it is to b1tch and whine about the BBC it is still a bloody good product.

The Tories HATE the BBC for pointing out the truth and not being biased. That woman and here cronies did despicable things to broadcasting in this country but her inbred hatred and the way she gerrymandered her people into positions at the beeb was disgraceful.

While huge chunks of the left see it as biased the other way – in its reporting (or lack thereof) of the privatisation of the NHS, for instance.