Bread of Life in Broken Britain

Charles Roding Pemberton

Description

Charles Pemberton draws on interviews with foodbank users and volunteers to defend and advance a Christian vision of welfare beyond emergency food provision. He suggests that behind the day-to-day struggles of those using foodbanks there are wider much concerns about loneliness, marginalisation and the wholesale fragmentation of society.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334058984
• Langue: English

Extrait

Bread of Life in Broken Britain
Food Banks, Faith and Neoliberalism
Charles Roding Pemberton





© Charles Roding Pemberton 2020
Published in 2020 by SCM Press
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Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction

1. Food Bank Lives
2. International Growth of Food Banks
3. Food, Faith, Food Banks
4. Coincidences of the Neoliberal and the Food Banks
5. Political, Ecclesial and Personal Participation
Conclusion

Bibliography




Acknowledgements
My thanks first to Dr Margaret Masson, Principal of St Chad’s College, Durham University, who was a sympathetic ear when I was an undergraduate, suggested the William Leech Research Fellowship when I was a postgraduate, and gave my wife and I a roof over our heads when we moved to Durham. Second, my thanks to Professor Robert Song and the members of the William Leech Research committee who are supporting excellent research into theology, church practice and poverty in the north-east of England, year after year, and who funded this project. Professor Song, along with my father Chris Pemberton, read the manuscript in its entirety and made numerous suggestions which extensively improved the final text; ‘staged a long-needed intervention’ would be more accurate than ‘edited the text’ if I was pushed to describe their contributions.
My thanks also to David Shervington, Hannah Ward, Christopher Pipe and Mary Matthews at SCM Press who have been prompt, positive and patient in equal measure throughout this process of simultaneously writing a book and for the first time becoming a father. The artist Adam Westerman provided humorous and humane illustrations for the final text as well as genial companionship along the way. My thanks also to my colleagues at the Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University, who have been good natured and supportive to a fault.
To Peter and Tina MacLellan and all the volunteers and clients at County Durham Foodbank my particular gratitude and admiration. This book would not be without your willingness to share honestly from your own lives and your conviction that things can and should be different.
Finally, to Irene, who has done so much to make the writing of this book possible and every day makes again the world worthwhile, my complete love.




Prologue
It’s June 2018, and one of the hottest days of an already hot summer. In Durham United Reformed Church’s community hall, three County Durham Foodbank volunteers sit at fold-out tables waiting for anyone who needs a food parcel, and one regular visitor sits at a table in the corner concentrating on a laptop. Her name is Jane and she is in her late forties. After 17½ years working in the care sector, up to January 2016, she was made redundant and she has been visiting the Durham city centre food bank two or three times a month since for a toastie, a tea and free internet access. Along with her job searches, she cares for her elderly mother and volunteers at two Durham charities. We are talking, intermittently, and she tells me that while she has never collected a food parcel from the food bank, she likes coming here, finding it a source of confidence and support. I ask her how she first heard of County Durham Foodbank.
The food bank was mentioned at the Job Centre, for job search support. I come for the PC access. I like it here, the food bank is good, I can talk with people, home can be lonely. From coming to the food bank I’ve got more confidence and now I’m doing some volunteering, at the British Heart Foundation and with the Sally Army (Salvation Army).
Jane has a history of working night shifts in residential care with elderly mentally infirm patients. When she was moved from night shifts to day shifts she struggled with the transition and was made redundant.
The night shifts had an impact on my health. I needed sleeping tablets to help me be able to do the day shifts when I changed over. But I was then struggling in the days, groggy, feeling confused, and that was part of me being made redundant ’cause I couldn’t do the job properly.
I ask her about her experience of being unemployed and searching for work in the north-east.
Unemployment has been horrible. I’ve done hundreds of applications for jobs and had 15 interviews. Nothing yet though. My confidence, it’s really brought me down, all the interviews. I do 16 hours a week volunteering and 19 hours a week of job searching for job seekers allowance. Last week, I was at the library writing an email, computers can be difficult for me, but a volunteer here showed me how to attach my CV and when I was at the library I put the CV into the email and it was great. It was so good, ‘I did it!’
I congratulate her on her computer literacy breakthrough and say that unemployment sounds like hard work. I ask her what she is hoping for, looking into the future.
I hope for a permanent job, not temporary work, I turned down a job at Sainsbury’s, a six-month fixed contract. I want something more secure, permanent.
She goes on to talk about her Methodist father and Church of England mother and reading psalms in church as a child. She’s now an intermittent member of a charismatic evangelical church in the Durham area, when time allows.
Evidently, Jane has aspired to live a selfless life for others. And what she has found, over the last two and a half years, is that that kind of life is not perceived to be deserving of trust or worthy of decent financial remuneration. The most basic contention of this book is that food banks sit at the junction of two roads that are orientated in opposite directions. One of these roads is primarily about profits and it sees people and nature as ‘resources’ or raw materials amenable to the realizing of its own ambitions. The second road, less prominent but always present, is walked by those who believe that the point of life is to love and care for those who populate this shared planet. It is, therefore, primarily concerned with understanding how we participate in each other and the world around us. In this book, the name given to the first road is ‘neoliberalism’ and to the second ‘participation’, a route that is explored and defended through the discipline of Christian theology. The problems Britain faces around food, work and ecology are multifaceted and will require the resources of many different traditions to be resolved adequately. 1 My hope is that this book will clarify one small contribution to that general task from one particular reading of the Christian tradition. And that, in doing so, it will add to the realization of a politics, an economics and a society in which people like Jane are perceived to be of infinite value and their discrediting is seen to be, as it really is, a denaturing of our very selves.
Note


1 For examples of ‘multi-criteria’ approaches to the problems present in the British agricultural sector/food industry and in theological responses to climate change, see Tim Lang, Erik Millstone and Terry Marsden, A Food Brexit: Time to Get Real (University of Sussex Science Policy Research Unit, 2017), www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=foodbrexitreport-langmillstonemarsden-july2017pdf.pdf&site=25 (accessed 30 May 2018); and Willis Jenkins, ‘After Lynn White: Religious Ethics and Environmental Problems’, Journal of Religious Ethics , Vol. 37, No. 2 (2009), pp. 283–309.



Introduction
There is enough food for everybody but not everybody is getting enough. 1 Since the great recession of 2008, the number of food banks in the United Kingdom and the number of people using them have grown exponentially. 2 The first UK food bank was started in the year 2000 and now there are around 2,000 of them alongside the legacy of soup kitchens, community cafes and breakfast clubs bequeathed to the people of the UK by its complex history of inequality and philanthropic generosity. The Trussell Trust, the largest food bank franchise in the country, has seen an increase in use from 68,486 food parcels in 2010–11 to 1.6 million parcels in 2018–19. 3
This growth has not gone unnoticed. The dominant political power in the UK over the last ten years, the centre-right Conservative Party, had consistently argued that the cause of increased food bank usage is not the reduction in local and national government welfare spending or a lack of stable work that pays well but bad life choices and the increased availability of free food. Senior Conservatives, like Ian Duncan Smith MP and Lord Freud, have defende