Cooking with Tories

 The latest trend I'm seeing from Conservative representatives is that if poor people knew how to cook properly they wouldn't be facing the cost of living crisis. The Tories that are saying this are clearly living in a High Looking down on the plebs with displeasure.

They have clearly never been in a situation where when you are paid the bare minimum you can get towards the end of a month and face a regular panic. You scrape together all the change you can find to maybe buy enough food, and basic provisions at that, to last until pay day. Or maybe it is to go unto your electric key or gas card for you prepayment meters, or maybe to see if you can afford to get to work. This is not a new occurance it is something I faced at times around 2008.

It was not caused my me not being able to cook. In fact I was not purchasing pre-cooked meals as it was cheaper to buy ingredients to cook. I had a selection of all the dried pulses you could imagine and ate a largely vegetarian diet as meat was so costly. In fact when I was forced to live like this I did spend longer before going to the shops working out how to balance my diet, and within my budget, that at times when I had more disposible income on which to life.

Currently the sitution is dire. There are people whose fuel bills have gone up so much that they are having to ask their energy companies for credit, which is actually debt, to tide them over. This they will have to repay and therefore there is a further hole in their weekly budgets.

There food shop is already going up and the fact that there are now more food banks across the UK than McDonalds restaurants should tell anyone looking at those figures that we are heading towards Dickensian disparities between the rich and the poor.

So Tory MPs telling people how to economise or that they don't know how to cook are not aware of how much scraping around people do when they live on the edge. Food does not get thrown out it is used up, somehow. Basics are there and yes sometimes there is survival with basic bread and basic baked beans. However, when even the prices of the stables, bread, pasta, cooking oil are all subject to price rises due to the war in Ukraine affecting supply, along with a removal of the cap on energy price rises, pay is not keeping up to costs.

Yet in the Queen's Speech provided yesterday there was no major statement about how to help those in need now, nor how to prevent more slipping into a poverty trap.