There Are More Food Banks Than McDonald’s In The UK

This week the British public will head to the polls for the third general election in four years amid plenty of Brexit uncertainty. The Conservative Party are leading in the polls while Labour are hoping that changing who traditionally comes out to vote will lead them to victory. 

There have been many scandalous moments that should have sunk the Conservative Party, such as rebranding their Twitter account into a fake fact checker during an election debate, editing an interview with Shadow Brexit Secretary, Keir Starmer, in a bid to mislead voters on his answers and their promise to recruit 50,000 NHS nurses, when it was revealed that nearly 19,000 of those won’t be new nurses, they will be retrained from other areas of the NHS instead.

Tories have been the party in charge since 2010 and further evidence detailing the extreme levels of poverty in Tory Britain has come to light, and it is devastating. There are now more food banks than McDonald’s restaurants in the UK. Currently, there are around 1,300 McDonald’s fast food restaurants compared to around 2,000 food banks, which may actually be an understatement as official figures don’t count instances in which schools create food banks for their students, which is unfortunately becoming more and more prevalent. 

This claim has been independently verified by British fact-checking charity, Full Fact. 

The excuses the Conservative Party have given for the sharp increase in food bank usage has been appalling. Conservative MP Dominic Raab suggested that the most frequent food bank users are just those that “have a cash flow problem” instead of due to being in poverty. Another Tory election candidate, Darren Henry, recently claimed that food bank users “cannot manage their budget properly”. A few days before Henry’s ludicrous claims another Tory MP, Guy Opperman, also claimed that food bank users should “get better at handling their money”. 

The number of food banks and food having to be given to those in poverty has risen sharply since 2010 and continues to rise despite Boris Johnson’s recent remarks that “no one should have to use a food bank”. The Conservatives seemingly haven’t worked out that when you don’t pay people enough money to survive on, when you are extremely ruthless at cutting the benefits of the most vulnerable people and when people are unable to find steady employment due to the prevalence of zero-hour contracts, this is the end result.