Cash-starved Poole families are going days without food while British supermarket prices rocket almost three times faster than the rest of Europe.You know, I think we are going to see a lot more of these stories as the year progresses...
The number of desperate people pleading with Poole Citizens Advice Bureau for help feeding their children has risen “significantly” since Christmas, say concerned staff.
CAB Poole’s Sue Bristow told the Daily Echo: “We are seeing families who have not eaten in days.A telling phrase, their 'wages or benefits'....
“One of the difficulties they are experiencing is that the price of food and utilities are going up, while their wages or benefits cannot keep pace.”
Mid Dorset and North Poole MP Annette Brooke is now calling for an investigation into why British prices are rising so fast, after a report published yesterday by the Swiss bank UBS, said food prices rose 4.9 per cent over the past year.An investigation? Is she serious?
The Echo spoke to small businesses and shoppers in Bournemouth town centre who said they had no choice but to spend more money.And yet it seems to me that the supermarkets are in a particularly vicious price war at the moment. Offers abound.
Pauline Hacipasaoglu, 55, from The Chippy, said the daily shopping run for supermarket provisions had gone up from £5 to £8 over the past year.
Chris Gallantry, 69, from Wallisdown, said: “Meat is up and the price of eggs is unbelievable, but they are essential items.”I know some vegetarians that would disagree with you, there.
Now, I'm as enthusiastic a carnivore as anyone else, but if I just couldn't afford meat, I'd switch to something else, or buy cheaper cuts.
Have you thought of switching suppliers?
Richard Knott, from S’Juiced sandwich bar, said the cost of bread from his supplier in Boscombe had increased from £1.02 to £1.12 over the past year.
He said: “Unlike the supermarkets we can’t put our prices up. We have to be loyal to our customers.”
13 comments:
Lidl?
Prices are going up because fuel is going up, yet I don't see how anyone can not afford to eat. Just drop the pre-prepared stuff and actually cook something.
Are these cash-starved families also going without fags, booze and Sky telly?
Poole is hardly the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
I agree with Henry ..
Poole must have undergone a dramatic change since I served there ..
Poole was always a very affluent little Town ..
You aint seen nothing yet, I suspect that the disaster in Japan is going to have a knock on effect on the price of imported electronics.
The 'must have' 42 inch TV is going to eat further into the budget than before.
@ Phiangle ..
And you can forget about buying Sushi for the foreseeable future .. ;)
Actually food inflation is a problem. OK, "the not eaten for days" thing is bollocks (aren't we always being told the poor are all obese anyway?) but prices are going up dramatically. Whether the UK is particularly bad here is an interesting point but somehow I suspect it isn't. Let me offer a nasty little theory of mine.
Part of the reason why food is globally more expensive is the insane rush to "biofuels". For a certain form of Green (Optimum Population Trust - that's you) biofuels artificially forcing a Malthusian nightmare is win/win.
If the Greens were serious about "feeding the world" (and buying Sir Bob of Geldof a hairbrush) they would be fully behind GM crops. They are not. I can only conclude starvation is part of their game plan. Well, it worked for Stalin.
But GM is evil capitalists. Er... Well I don't believe the likes of Monsanto are evil but it's not just capitalists. I knew folks working on GM cassava. Cassava is a very handy food crop for much of the third world - it grows where other stuff doesn't and is calorie rich. It is also toxic unless elaborately prepared over 48 hours. These folk at Newcastle University were trying to develop a poison-free cassava. Now you don't need to be a rocket scientist (or indeed a plant geneticist) to see what an enormous benefit that would be for people (mainly women of course) in some of the poorest countries in the world. Imagine the amount of time freed to do other things...
Oh, the project - funded by UKGov Overseas Aid budget.
"Better living through tinkering with things they don't understand". Of course scientists tinker with things they don't understand. That's their job. D'oh!
If you can't feed em, don't breed em!
@phiangle - I wouldn't worry about your 42" TV. Most electronics are made in China now or in the rest of Asia. Japan might have the companies that make the products, but the products are made elsewhere.
@blueknight - Yep, Lidl bread is way cheaper than £1 and still very good to eat. Even local markets can be cheap - 75p/6 free range large eggs.
£8/day on food. What are they buying? Smoked salmon? We (two of us) spend about £30/week on food at Leedel and it's not baked beans every day. Or she is saying how much she spends on ingredients for her shop?
Hate to be saying this Julia, but can't agree with you on this one. There's actually a limit to how much you can trim a food budget if you're already poor and not eating pate de foi grass or whatever it is.
Food prices are roaring up because of deliberate State inflation. That's a big issue. It's why particularly in the States there is a narrative of the "inflation tax" (e.g. among Paul followers). Just about the most harmful thing you can do to ordinary people is destroy the value of their money.
There's a somewhat mean spirited attitude here, presuming everyone in trouble is scrounging and ought to "actually cook something", a presumption that everyone is one of those nasty chavs and doesn't deserve any sympathy.
Well me, I haven't got much money, and food shopping is getting to be a real problem, and no I don't live on quails' eggs or spend any money at all on sins like beer and television.
The oligarchy are getting richer by a deliberate money transfer (via inflation) from "consumers". We're all in this together. Mervyn King and his ilk destroyed the economy for profit; the taxpayer bailed them out. He'll never be cutting his beans on toast ration.
There are better people to turn your rhetorical guns on, I think. Berating people for not cutting back when a rapacious oligarchy is deliberately destroying their income is close to the "let them eat cake" attitude.
"Just drop the pre-prepared stuff and actually cook something."
I know, it's easier to simply load up with crap. :(
"Part of the reason why food is globally more expensive is the insane rush to "biofuels". "
Absolutely! A plan so utterly insane it could indeed be part of a plot to reduce numbers around the world...
"£8/day on food. What are they buying? Smoked salmon?"
I know, I couldn't quite believe that.
"There's a somewhat mean spirited attitude here, presuming everyone in trouble is scrounging and ought to "actually cook something"..."
I've seen the trolleys in Asda and Tesco, piled high with all sorts of processed foods, and the only green things in them some garish processed drink full of sugar.
No, it's not 'everyone', but it is a lot.
"Berating people for not cutting back when a rapacious oligarchy is deliberately destroying their income is close to the "let them eat cake" attitude."
And yet - as Henry says - how many of them are truly poor? And how many are spending their money on other things?
Just because you aren't, doesn't mean everyone else isn't.
It was living beyond our means that started a lot of the problems, wasn't it?
Julia, if not living on cabbage water is "beyond our means" we're in desperate straits indeed. The "beyond our means" was house prices, mainly; something of a middle class fetish, not the stereotypical chav in a council flat.
I see also you've got the anti-modernity "processed food" narrative deeply imbedded. Bread is "processed" Julia. Most foods are processed. So, you're objecting to "manufactured" food. Okay. Please go and join the rest of the looney tunes in the organic movement
I'm sorry, the problem- and a real problem- you should be looking at is inflation, which is very real and roaring up right now. Taking a cheap swipe at the people hardest hit by it frankly isn't very productive; particularly as the sheer unmoderated greed of much wealthier people who wanted their houses to be magic money machines is the whole reason we're now in the financial mess that pushed the government into inflating the currency.
Still, much easier to have a go at poor people, isn't it? Them with their outrageous uppity desire to just have some fucking basic food to eat. They need a good slapping down, don't they?
*And now ladeez and germs, there will be the traditional "Puritan Four Yorkshiremen" in which commenters boast about how little they spend-
"TEN pounds? I feed myself, the wife, sixteen children and an aviary of rare tropical birds, all on 20p a week!"
"LUXURY!"
Ian B, as much as I agree with you on most things, this is one issue where we part company.
We are told, by the govt, that there are children living in poverty. This poverty is relative - a recent report defined child poverty as children who had never had a friend round for tea or who never had had a birthday party.
Come with me to South America, Africa and South East Asia. I'll show you poverty.
People in this country DO NOT live in poverty. Those that do, do so by their own choosing. "Poverty" - people in this country don't know the meaning of the word.
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