I was interested to read this
debate, which began with Labour MP Zarah Sultan bemoaning the fact that
“There are more food banks in Britain
Until today, I didn’t
know that there are more food banks in Britain than there are McDonald’s
restaurants, but it’s a very interesting fact, because if you laud McDonald’s
as a capitalist success in providing thousands of jobs and thousands of hungry
people with cheap fast food, then you should laud food banks as part of
capitalism’s success in providing Brits with so much opportunity to voluntarily
donate food to those in need of a helping hand.
It’s true we should lament
the fact that there is so much reliance on foodbanks; but that is no more the
fault of capitalism than headaches are the fault of paracetamol or wounds are
the fault of bandages. Quite the reverse, capitalism is to poverty as
paracetamol is to headaches - it generally makes the problem better, not worse.
If we all agree that
hunger is bad, that no one should be hungry, and that if plenty of people are
using food banks there must be plenty of hunger, then it’s absurd to identify the
solution to a problem as the thing that’s wrong in the first place. Food banks
are a triumph, they provide a way for volunteers to help others in ways that
the government fails to help them. But they are mostly a way for humans to
volunteer to help each other. They are one of the successes of the free market.
