"Food poverty isn't really a thing,
there's no absence of food in this country there's an absence of money..."
Hi Alison how are you?
I'm fine thank you.
Thanks for joining us for this conversation,
obviously you've been the Chief Exec of Child Poverty Action Group for, I think, almost exactly
10 years now, campaigning to end child poverty, so I just wondered how you felt, what you thought in the
the summer when you heard about Marcus Rashford's campaign?
Well, it was a fantastic intervention, wasn't it?
I mean, who expected it? That this amazing young man, young, charismatic
authentic, speaking from the heart, could actually raise the issue to such a level.
He really appealed to so many members of the public, I think, and we've seen that with most
recently a petition - he's got over a million signatures to campaign around this issue
and I think one of the reasons it was so powerful, like you say, is because it really
came from the heart, and he talked about his mum, he was so proud of his mum and how she worked so
hard to support the family, and how difficult that was, and that kind of positive representation
of families doing the right thing, trying to support each other, isn't always one we get in
the media. So to get this young black man talking about his own experience in such a
powerful, positive way, I think really resonated, and it would be be great to hear more of those kind of voices.
It's fantastic isn't it? It's the voice of lived experience, and that he can,
in such a matter of fact way, authentically pinpoint how awful it is not being able to feed
your kids and what a struggle that is, because the temptation in parts of the press and some
politicians is to immediately go to, "well why aren't these parents feeding their children?"
as if it is some kind of wilful refusal to feed them. Marcus Rashford just cut through
all of that and I think that's the key word isn't it? 'Cut through' - that his
charisma, his celebrity, his authenticity means that people just couldn't not listen.
We know from the statistics that it's something like 4 million - I'm sure you've got them up -
4 million children in poverty at the moment, it's about 30% of children, 50% of Black
British children are in poverty, so there is this additional element around race and ethnicity that
he has really brought to the fore and we've just got to try to think about and tackle really urgently.
Actually sometimes that's quite hard to talk about because you don't want to
stigmatize people, so for someone from that community just openly talking
about that experience just cuts through all of that and it's really great that we've got that side of things.
I think one of the things you'd have to say though, is why? Why have we arrived at this point?
Child poverty has risen by 600,000 since 2012 and there's an easy explanation for that -
this year we will be spending £36 billion a year less on social security than we were in 2010.
And that's when Marcus Rashford really came in wasn't it? And he says that he's getting frustrated
because there's not a lot of action, and I imagine you must share some frustration, as a campaigner,
how do you keep going as a campaigner? How do you achieve change on whatever scale
it is - a relatively small win or the bigger picture, the bigger change that we might want to see?
Well public opinion is incredibly important and this is where Marcus Rashford comes in. This campaign has come
at just the right time so that public opinion can ride, or can identify something, and
something very concrete like food, that they they feel there’s something that can be done.
For campaigns, our problem is that the main issues are really structural issues, that 72% of
poor children have working parents, we know who they are now, we've seen them in the pandemic -
the care workers, the nursing assistants, people working as porters and cleaners
and all the rest of it - we know who they are, they've kept the country going.
The levels of support people have, the level of income, just isn't enough to make ends meet, not just around
food but also in terms of having technology so that young children can participate in online
learning and just having a roof over your head or heating the home, all those kinds
of things are so important and that bigger picture, food poverty is absolutely key
but there's there's a broader aspect to this isn't there that campaigners need to kind of engage with too?
One of my concerns is that we're going down the road of in-kind responses,
that the answer to food poverty is food. Well, food poverty isn't really a thing,
there's no absence of food in this country, there's an absence of money,
and it's not just money for food, it's money for other things too and no amount of food charity is
going to end child poverty, but nevertheless this creates a fantastic opportunity to
surf the wave and get all those other issues in, so I wouldn't knock it for a minute.
I think Marcus Rashford has done an amazing job to get this issue on the agenda, to get it
discussed publicly in such a positive way and there's so much more we can talk about and we
need to tackle, but it's really got that there and captured the public imagination so I hope
he continues, and we can work with him and others to try to end child poverty.
Absolutely.
ESRC Festival of Social Science - Society from your Sofa.
Watch parts 1 and 2 in the series at birmingham.ac.uk/black-celebrity-activism.