A British national scandal: hunger, foodbanks, and the deployment of a Dickensian trope. Issue 1 (2nd January 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Howarth, Anita
• Is Part Of: Journal of contemporary European studies. Volume 30:Issue 1(2022)
• Page Start: 136
• Page End: 150
• Publication Date: 2022-01-02
• Subjects: Hunger -- foodbanks -- welfare state -- social imaginaries; Europe -- Periodicals; Europe -- Economic conditions -- Periodicals; Europe -- Social conditions -- Periodicals; Area studies -- Periodicals; Europe -- Study and teaching -- Periodicals; 940.05
• DOI: 10.1080/14782804.2020.1839395
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1478-2804

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The normalization of foodbanks in Britain has sharply polarized public debates around issues of hunger. Government supporters laud their presence as a timely revival of an earlier tradition of voluntarism able to offset an unaffordable welfare state or stigmatize foodbanks as new spaces of 'dependency'. Government critics view foodbanks as a consequence of ministerial indifference to growing hunger and a betrayal of the core values envisaged by the founders of the welfare state. The very presence of foodbanks in one of the richest countries in the world is denounced as a national scandal that violates an intrinsic quality of Britishness and signifies a regression to an earlier, more heartless era. In mooting this argument, critics have deployed a Victorian trope that evokes familiar figures and narratives from popular culture in a circular social imaginary of 'what we were' in the Victorian era as distinct from 'what we have been' in the post-war welfare state to 'what we are reverting to' now. The paper critically deconstructs the trope as a device to hold the government to account while also critiquing its nostalgia rooted in a mythic notion of the welfare state which was never as inclusive as popular imagining would believe.