[urlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/03/food-banks-lord-freud_n_3538747.html?utm_hp_ref=uk[/url

Nice to see that we have such intelligent and in-touch-with-reality Lords looking after our Work and Pensions Department.

The bloke sounds like a right fookwit, and I am being polite.

Yet another attempt to demonise those who are suffering the most as being to blame themselves.

I don't even think Thatcher's lot were as despicable and brazen as this lot.

You're not wrong there. I watched him intently for days on end in the HoL when they were thrashing out the disability/sickness reforms and (just like the rest of them) the guy doesn't have a clue. I wonder how his great grandfather would analyse him and his idiologies.

aka Lord Fraud in disability circles.

On another thread I linked to an article the other day where he was saying that the bedroom tax was necessary to keep interest rates low.
Not just callous but economically clueless.
Fits in well with this current government.

I clicked on this link expecting to think yes he's an arrogant Tory but reading his actual quotes they make sense. He is saying there's no evidence on whether the increase has been driven by greater supply or greater demand. There might have been unmet demand before but there wasn't enough provision of food banks and now there are more food banks the demand is being met.

Also he is right in what he says about free food having an almost infinite demand. If you supply it, its likely that people will use it. Probably not the rich, but anyone from a lowish middle income downwards will accept free food if you provide it as it helps the weekly budget.

When Clement Attlee's government introduced the NHS and healthcare became freely available I expect there was a large uptake in visits to doctors, use of medicines etc compared to before. But this wouldn't be a sign that the country was getting less healthy.

Now this guy may be an arrogant that has said other obnoxious things, but on this I think he's just made a reasonable point.

You are aware that food banks are not drop-in centres where anyone can just rock up and load their trolley with freebies?

I think he and you are wrong.

I doubt people who were not sick suddenly started going to the doctors just because it became free. People may have visited because they could now afford to get ailments treated they may otherwise have let fester but I doubt any increased take up of treatment was simply because the (free) supply created a demand.

Likewise I doubt people who aren't struggling to make ends meet visit food banks. It takes a special kind of selfish git to cash in on such charity and this is what you and he are ignoring because it is NOT a simple case of supply and demand. There are social factors to consider not just economic.

To that end any suggestion people who don't need charity will access it simply because they can does imply in this case an automatic abuse of food banks is taking place. He must have a very low opinion of peoples morals if he thinks that is widespread.

Someone should physically drag him by his ear to the nearest foodbank, sit him down and let him listen to the reasons why people are visiting, from the people who are visiting. He might just realise it's got buggerall to do with marketing

Thats not quite what I mean - I was referring to unmet demand, ie where there is a demand but the supply isn't there to meet it or its too expensive so some people can't afford it. In the healthcare example, the free supply would increase uptake not because people thought "oh, may as well go to the doctors because its free" but because before people that were ill couldn't afford it anyway, so they were just doing without healthcare.

It's plausible that its the same situation with foodbanks. The figures being talked about here are the rise in uptake of food banks in the last two years, but we aren't told if there's been an increase in supply or not. It could easily have been the case that two years ago (remember this was already 3 years in to a major economic downturn) there were far more low income families that would have benefited from food banks than could be met by the food bank supply at the time. So obviously when you increase the supply you get more uptake.

Now if the supply is fixed, and before there was unused supply, that is now being used, that is a sign of increased demand. But we don't have figures on supply and demand so can't make that judgement.

Any idea Sally how you get to use a foodbank? You don't just pop in on your way home from Waitrose for that salmon steak you forgot from your list.

I'm still uncertain whether you are on one of your usual trolling/flaming exercises, if so, it's in particularly poor taste, even for your levels. But [url=http://www.trusselltrust.org/resources/documents/Press/General_Foodbank_Appeal2012_NORDO.pdfhere's a guide to foodbanks[/url (pdf),please read it and then come back with more supply/demand bollox.

Camoron has made great noise about the growth of foodbanks under Labour being higher than since 2010. Not too difficult a point to prove when you consider that the first foodbank opened in 1999, so the growth under Labour could be described as exponential if you take a zero base

That is what I said but with the important caveat that they actually needed the health care. You are arguing people who don't need food banks will do so just because there is a supply of free food.



If you are now arguing there are more people in need of food charity than could be met by the previous number of available food banks but now these demands can be met due to more food banks, that isn't the same thing as what was being suggested is it?

Yes, I think that's the straw to which he is clinging to try and say it's not the benefit cuts that have driven the demand.
He seems to have missed the point that, if people were already poor enough to need food banks (but weren't getting them) then cutting their benefits was still a callous act.

Basically, he's a mealy-mouthed dissembling 2@.

When we get politicians, who are so far detached from reality that they think nothing of making statements similar to Freud's, it is obvious that they really are not serving the nation.

I propose a return of The Golden Shot and the public can phone-in (on a premium rate line obviously) to guide "Bernie the Bolt" and he can cull the offender live on TV

The daughter and I donated some food last week. It's hard for her to understand that some people dont eat like we can and I tell her she is very lucky

It would appear that Lord Freud has a counterpart across the pond.

[url=http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/07/09/2271841/wsj-homeless-people/?mobile=ncHomeless shelter volunteers are the real cause of homelessness[/url

The founder of multi-billion dollar Velocity Capital Management even derides his own son for volunteering at a shelter.

The caring face of capitalism eh?

Its fairly obvious that the bloke is mentally ill to the point of being delusional - I take my hat off to his son for his stance - why does that happen so often that the offspring feel a guilt for the self-interest money grabbing attitude of their "successful" parents, could it be that the younger generation experience more of real life in their school years than their delusional parents ever do ?

There's also a problem with the way that "successful" billionaires like him are reported with phrases like "billion dollar investment company" being used to put the owners of such businesses on a pedestal and an object to aspire to - whereas in reality we all know what happened to most of those billion dollar investment companies when the merry-go-round stopped working in 2007 and most of them were shown to be not just a smoke and mirror act but actually just made of smoke, one puff of wind and they were gone.

We currently have someone in this region, who was previously a customer of mine, who has built a business empire on property investment, been awarded various business "xxx of the year" type awards and held up as an example of someone to whom we should all aspire to in a TV's "Apprentice" sort of way - in a stupid decision a few years ago she decided to take on the local council in a high court action which she was advised at the time was unwinnable - she lost and the council successfully applied for a £2million interim legal cost payment against their estimated bill of £4mill, the highly prized, highly lauded property investment empire is now in the hands of administrators who are warning that no creditors will be paid - THATS the reality of what happens when the rug is pulled and multi-millionaires find that their reported fortunes were simply numbers on a sheet of paper with no relevance to the real world at all.


[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_FletcherThis Wiki article MAY be written by her former PR people, or HELLO! magazine[/url

[url=http://www.thebusinessdesk.com/yorkshire/news/372031-montpellier-estates-jan-fletcher-leeds-arena.htmlThis report shows falling values but still substantial "assets"[/url

[url=http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/latest-news/top-stories/leeds-arena-row-firm-faces-liquidation-updated-1-5824109This report shows the reality of building empires on sand[/url

Tories arguing against all the proof and from the people who know best??? Lord Fraud would do well reading this article and taking it in rather than being in denial. www.unemployednet.org/food-banks ... nefit-cuts

Tories arguing against all the proof and from the people who know best??? Lord Fraud would do well reading this article and taking it in rather than being in denial. www.unemployednet.org/food-banks ... nefit-cuts

Quote ="Hull White Star"Tories arguing against all the proof and from the people who know best??? Lord Fraud would do well reading this article and taking it in rather than being in denial. www.unemployednet.org/food-banks ... nefit-cuts'" Osborne has never been to one and in reality probably doesn't care anyway [urlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/11/osborne-food-bank_n_3578565.html?utm_hp_ref=uk[/url

Quote ="Hull White Star"Tories arguing against all the proof and from the people who know best??? Lord Fraud would do well reading this article and taking it in rather than being in denial. www.unemployednet.org/food-banks ... nefit-cuts'" Osborne has never been to one and in reality probably doesn't care anyway [urlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/11/osborne-food-bank_n_3578565.html?utm_hp_ref=uk[/url

I think you're right, Osborne will be perfectly sanguine about it and might even see it it as validation of his policies.
Watch out for spin about food banks being the cause of poverty.

In one sense, they are. For every sponging freeloader who starved to death instead, poverty would be reduced by 1, wouldn't it?

Aye, these bloody poor people, they shouldn't get made redundant in the first place if they can't afford it.