This article titled "I took £10 to Iceland to feed a family for a week and nearly pulled it off" from @kentlivenews is a joke, at the expense of low income families and that joke just ran aground here. 🧵
@AdamMcGroarty went to do a shop for a family of 4, and his first best idea was frozen ready meals? Does his mother know he is outdoors unsupervised? Not even the entry level, infamous "£2 chicken"?
Here's the tell that this had nothing to do with home economy and everything to do with pissing downward and calling it rain.
The premise was to try and do it without using brands. Why? Because the poor are rats and don't deserve 'em. Budget my arse. The aim is punishment.
And what's our intrepid Ex-poor-er come home with?
1/2 slice of toast for breakfast still won't last the week
1 fishfinger each & half slice of bread for lunch (only most days)
A burger, 1tsp of veg & a 3-4 chips on Sun
1 and 1/3rd nuggets each other days, 1tsp veg, 3-4 chips
71ml of milk per person per day isn't even as much as pub double measure of gin
There's some calcium in (almost a whole slice of) white bread, but your kids will be slowly dying from starvation anyway, so who cares about their bones?
This is the ethics policy of @kentlivenews. Editor is @lukemjacobs, therefore the complaints email is luke.jacobs@trinitymirror.com. Kent Live are owned by Reach PLC and they answer to press regulator @IpsoNews
For the sake of not leaving the thread incomplete, here's where I'd be directing the lawyers if I was working at @IcelandFoods and my brand had just been set up and promoted as the recommended route to abuse children.
The go-to name for how far the weekly food budget can stretch safely is @BootstrapCook, who can just about get a family of 2 done on £20, ideally with some luck with yellow stickers.
A family of 4 does not eat for a week on £10, except via a foodbank!
This article, and the brutally cruel joke it makes, at the expense of children's health, and parents sanity, heaping further gaslighting upon the poor, as if to eat is a luxury we have no right to demand, is unacceptable in the extreme.
I never thought I would see the day that the health and indeed survival of children in this country was more callously mocked than that abomination by Chartwells, but direct congratulations to @AdamMcGroarty and @kentlivenews team lead by @lukemjacobs 🎉
The mental contortionists of this hell site have today decided I’m a massive racist because I personally didn’t make a crusade to “investigate” Depher. It’s because he’s white and so am I of course, they said so. The levels of hoop jumping and delusion are fucking amazing.
Literally had a whole fucking investigative journalism good to go forward, approved for payment and all, from. @TheCanaryUK, on the subject of social work referrals being inherently violent. I’d made a poll with hundreds of respondents ready for stats, conducted interviews, etc…
@TheCanaryUK Because if you even remotely suggest that stalking the actual fuck out of hundreds of people is grim, wow, it’s you, you are the next criminal mastermind, racist, grifter, cunt.
Did you want me to fucking work myself to actual death?
If you had a mind to go through everything I ever tweeted, you’d find where I had a spat with James from Depher a long time ago… because he was routinely reporting every family he dealt with for poverty to social services.
That’s violence.
Looks like that’s not come to light?
That would have been on main, for all to see, I then said nothing further publicly, assuming as most did, that the charity (or CIC) was doing some good.
I hated the sad old people posts. But I didn’t yet see much other criticism of it and I didn’t want to get mired in a fight.
And also because everyone (absolutely everyone) on the internet who writes about poverty, has ever fundraised, has ever had complaints about how they can’t afford something, every single one, including me, gets called a “grifter”. Frankly, the word has no fucking meaning anymore.
Never in my fucking life have I felt like I should make sure I am clamming every single possible benefit I fucking can, by tooth or claw, and have it all damnit, stockpile the lot… but all of a sudden I get it. I am angry enough to get it. Something has snapped today…
I was hauling myself up out of my fucking wheelchair (that I didn’t get paid for by the state) into a hairdressing chair (that also wasn’t paid for by the fucking state) to get the first haircut I have had in probably a year (thanks very much to the neglect of the state)…
Chatting away about how I met my boyfriend, as one does, with hairdressers, and my car gets a mention in this story (tell you another day, maybe)…
I remember when the worst of the crisis hit. Seriously ill and still in the initial cope stage, I was both unable to work and not recognised as such for benefits. I had 2 kids in primary school and we suddenly couldn’t remain in our home, so had to rent another immediately.
I moved into a completely empty house with a table someone had found in the back of their garage, some borrowed 1970s hard plastic chairs even Church wouldn’t use and one borrowed air mattress (which we quickly punctured). I had a microwave, a kettle and a slow cooker.
I’m too sick to be here tonight, but we need all hands on deck for the call to #ExposeME now.
I’m not allowed to give blood because it is known that M.E can be transferred in plasma (it is a cellular level physical illness) and at the same time I am told it’s all in my head?
1/
I’m told I am not sick I just don’t have the balls to stand up for myself as a woman. I just don’t want dick, or kids, or domestic chores and don’t dare say so lest you think me not nice!
I’m a working class, bisexual, Gen-X battle-axe. This is a ludicrous stereotype on me!
2/
It’s all about the “secondary benefits” they say.
Today I have been helped to the toilet once, given a slice of yesterdays quiche, 2 coffees, asked to mediate 4 kid conflicts as I cried in pain and replied by email to a telling off from school for a kid in the wrong trousers.
For 40 years Drs have insisted ME patients are mad & medically tortured us. Refusing to be tortured gets you locked up. The torture injures or kills >80% of patients subject to it.
Today a study dropped proving ME is what science proved it was in the 80s: virus damage to cells.
They wanted to do the torture to me. It goes by the name of GET. It causes you to damage more and more of your cells until you lose key abilities, like walking.
I don’t mean like I have issues walking most days, I mean at all, never walk again levels of harm. Or bedbound…
Twitter saved me. Other people with ME said, listen, you need to know about this, this is not what it appears to be.
When it was clear to me that this was the way the “ME specialist” was going I “forgot” forms, missed calls and gave vague answers, until they tired and gave up…