Even before the endless years of Tory immiseration, there was a steady buildup of language around poverty that was depressing because it wasn’t honest. What does “child poverty” mean? Aren’t all children poor? None of them work, all they do is learn, eat and ask for weirdly expensive magazines. All it can conceivably mean is to be a child in a poor family, which is to say, adult poverty. What does “fuel poverty” mean, for that matter? Does it have its own currency, benchmarked against something other than the dollar, which you can run low on for reasons unrelated to the exchange of your labour? Because if not, aren’t we, in fact, talking about “stuff poverty” or, for brevity, “poverty”? And on and on: period poverty, funeral poverty, clothing poverty, the endless fragmentation of need, so that a problem that, actually, is very simple and widespread looks complicated and diffuse.
It’s only in the past 14 years, though, that we’ve seen the ever-expanding taxonomy of “banks”: food banks, baby banks, furniture banks, pet food banks. Last year, one in five students had to use a food bank, which should definitely be enough to get them their own classification, the “student bank”. Those of us who remember life with a social safety net would find that very confusing, and be expecting it to mean a £50 welcome deposit and your own chequebook. Students themselves, however, would understand. The president of Lancaster University students’ union, Cerys Evans, told the Question Time panel last week that she had people come to see her who hadn’t eaten for three days.
