The Labour government says it’s “on the side of working people.” Right?

On the other hand, its latest policies are hammering some of the most vulnerable in society—disabled people, children, low-paid workers—and risking an even greater surge in food bank use across the UK.

It’s a bitter irony – a party that once vowed to eliminate the need for food banks is now pursuing cuts that will almost certainly guarantee their expansion.

According to the Trussell Trust, 2.9 million emergency food parcels were handed out over the last year alone—a staggering 51 per cent increase since 2020.

More than a million of those parcels went to children.

Let that sink in.

This isn’t just the result of pandemic fallout or the cost-of-living crisis.

The latest spike is driven in part by Labour’s own March welfare cuts, which will see an estimated 250,000 people—including 50,000 children—pushed further into poverty.

And for what? A £5 billion annual reduction in the welfare bill, largely achieved by targeting Personal Independence Payments (PIP), a benefit not even tied to employment status.

These cuts won’t encourage people to work. They’ll just push more people—many of them already working—into hunger, debt, and despair.

As Sumi Rabindrakumar of the Trussell Trust notes, three in four food bank users are disabled or live with someone who is.

This Writer knows that the claim is accurate. I have a friend who works at the local Job Centre and he says the vast majority of Personal Independence Payment claimants he knows attend food banks regularly.

The idea that slashing their support will somehow reduce food bank use is not just naive—it’s cruel. It ignores the real drivers of hunger in Britain today: low pay, insecure work, and a shredded safety net.

Let’s be clear: work is no longer a guaranteed path out of poverty in this country.

One in five food bank users is employed.

When wages don’t cover essentials, and when benefits don’t fill the gap, families are left with nowhere to turn but charity.

This is not a “crackdown on scroungers.”

It’s a crackdown on survival.

Instead of relieving pressure on food banks, Labour is outsourcing the consequences of its economic policy to overstretched charities and exhausted volunteers.

It is an abdication of responsibility dressed up as tough love.

And it flies in the face of what Labour was founded to do: protect working people and the vulnerable from market failure and social neglect.

If Labour were serious about ending food poverty, it wouldn’t be cutting support.

It would be raising it.

It would commit to a real Living Wage, universal free school meals, rent caps, and fully funded local welfare schemes.

It would rebuild the social safety net until food banks become obsolete—not permanent fixtures of British life.

We don’t need to “manage” food banks better.

We need to make them unnecessary.

Labour is at a crossroads.

The decisions it makes now will shape whether Britain becomes a country where dignity and support are rights—or privileges.

If Starmer continues down this path, history won’t judge him as the man who rescued the country from Tory austerity.

He’ll be remembered as the one who legitimized it – in red.