Very few things irritate me more nowadays than these ‘how to eat well for less in times of austerity’ articles in newspapers; which seem to be proliferating. Invariably penned by people who will never face poverty. For instance, the Guardian has been running a series of articles about a single mum who was feeding herself and her child for something ridiculous like 15 pounds a week and blogging about it with recipes and low cost food options. All this ‘advice’ about how to survive on ever reducing benefits and low wages represents a dilemma. While it serves an immediate practical need by showing how, yes, you can make meagre earnings stretch, if you’re incredibly frugal and inventive like this women, but on the other hand it’s deeply de-politicising as it transfers the focus away from organising and resisting the attacks on benefits and wages to learning how to get by on next to nothing. It encapsulates another dilemma which is the extent to which people are so focused on just surviving that they are eschewing a political fightback thereby, paradoxically, more or less ensuring that conditions will worsen as the austerity brigade interpret the lack of resistance as tacit endorsement. Strangely, I have yet to see an article in any of the ‘liberal’ papers showing who workers could organise, join a union or otherwise work to improve their circumstances. There seems to be an acceptance by the ‘liberal’ press, such as the Guardian and the Irish Times, that the lower orders will just have to get used to austerity and lowered living standards as it’s just how things are from now on. This, meanwhile, in papers that regularly carry travel features for the Maldives, the Seychelles etc and feature restaurant reviews where some splashes out 60 quid for a lunch for two.
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