Food bank charity told to stop criticising benefit system or face shut-down – by the government

First topic message reminder :

The chair of the Trussell Trust has said that the charity made a decision to tone down its criticisms of the benefit system after someone in power warned them that they could get shut down.

Chris Mould, chair of the Trussell Trust, was giving evidence to the Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector yesterday when he said that the charity, which aims to tackle poverty, had been criticised by the government for raising awareness of the need for food banks.

He said that he had seen several examples of how “people in power do pretty inappropriate things at times to try and curb and curtail independence of a voluntary organisation when it proves to be inconvenient to them”.

Mould, who made it clear that the charity was not a campaigning organisation, told the panel that most of these examples had arisen in private conversations with those in power.
'Government might try to shut you down'

He said that in a face-to-face conversation in March 2013 with "someone in power", he was told that he must think more carefully otherwise “the government might try to shut you down”.

Mould said: “This was spoken in anger, but is the kind of dialogue that can occur. It exposes the way people think in the political world about their relationship with the voluntary sector when things are getting difficult. What can we do?”

The charity then took the decision to tone down its criticisms so that the government would maintain its contact. Mould said that this decision was a response of a “positive nature”.

http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/governance/news/content/17632/trussell_trust_chair_told_the_government_might_try_to_shut_you_down

Smith and his cronies are nothing more that two-faced sniveling chancers in a government that is full of them. Get these clowns out.



Greed Cameras outside food banks will be next.

I have already explained at least twice some of the reasons why. Starting with whether the graph is produced by a neutral monitoring agency (no) you move on to how accurate it is, followed by whether the rules claimed (3 times in 12 months) are rigidly enforced. Then there is the matter of baseline - does it measure against the actual number of food banks operating (no). This last one is kind of important - if you have an area without a food bank and one moves in and gets used then how long have the people who are using it been "needing" it before it opened and what were they doing to survive before it opened and could they go back to what they were doing before it opened.

In fact if a graph of the number of trussell food banks open was the same shape as the graph of number of people using them it would actually make the number of people using them graph meaningless because all it would show is if a food bank is opened then people use it.