Food Bank in Bury Saint Edmunds.
In todays East Anglian Times (not on Web) there’s a story about the Food Bank in Bury Saint Edmunds.
“Community groups in Bury St Edmunds have shown their support for establishing a food bank in the town.” There are “already food banks in Newmarket, Haverhill, Ipswich and Cambridge.”
The Bury Free Press quotes a spokesperson,
Calls for the food bank were made by Howard Estate resident Ernie Broom after he was approached by people in need of food and basic amenities.
Mr Broom said: “We did a survey and found there were some people really going through hard times and short of food and I thought this is wrong in an affluent town like Bury St Edmunds, this is wrong. The idea behind our scheme is that nobody should fall through the net.”
Food is donated to the charity through churches, individuals and drives at local supermarkets.
While Suffolk benefit claimants do not get enough money to buy foo, tonight Channel Four Dispatches reports on further tax avoidance schemes.
The Daily Mail says,
Tax chiefs at Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs were last night accused of having links to companies engaged in potential tax avoidance.
An in-depth undercover investigation alleges that senior directors of HMRC were connected with companies that may have been involved in limiting tax bills.
The claims come after Chancellor George Osborne condemned tax avoidance as ‘morally repugnant’, even though it is legal.
The investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, Secrets Of The Taxman, to be broadcast tomorrow, alleges:
- HMRC ethics chief Phil Hodkinson earns more than £125,000 a year from a company based in the tax haven of Guernsey.
- John Spence, until recently the Revenue’s audit committee chief, is the chairman of a major estate agents chain whose staff offered advice on avoiding stamp duty.
- The Revenue has awarded a contract for collecting millions of pounds of unpaid tax to a firm owned by a group based in Guernsey.
Last night, HMRC denied any wrongdoing, saying there was no conflict of interest in the directors’ other work
Dispatches, which is not accusing any of the HMRC directors of breaking the law, says Mr Hodkinson, who earns £35,000 a year for his part-time job as HMRC’s ethics committee chairman, also works for insurance giant Resolution, which is incorporated in Guernsey.
Ipswich Unemployed Action. 
http://www.elimsalisbury.org.uk/content/what_we_believe/
That’s the ethos of the people running all this (their name is on the referall slip that’s shown as a specimen on the tressell trust website.
Shame their king of kings can’t just feed the five thousand directly, instead of providing shit quality food for only a few days worth of meals.
Ghost Whistler
July 9, 2012 at 1:35 pm
Good idea! Why not give people MONEY (that all new singing and dancing) means of currency exchange which they can trade directly for good-quality, nutritious food NOT go begging every few days for a sack of artery-clogging, ill-health inducing nutritionally-bereft sack of shit.
Outraged from Ipswich
July 9, 2012 at 3:33 pm
It really is a disgrace when people have to depend on the charity of people. As you say Ghost, it will probably be cheap stodge.
Andrew Coates
July 9, 2012 at 3:18 pm
What the tressel trust offer in their parcels is a matter of record. No fresh fruit, mostly dried crap. Carbo stodge. Ridiculous.
Ghost Whistler
July 9, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Goodness gracious me, it is not food at all – it is processed muck! It will fill a hole in your belly until your next serving, that is all. In fact, I would flush it straight down the toilet!
"Dr" Gillian McKeek
July 10, 2012 at 2:31 pm
There is estimate to be £42 billion lost in tax avoidance for 2008-09. That is 9% of total tax liability – google HM Revenue and Customs ‘Measuring Tax Gaps 2010’. That estimate is a quite solid lower bound. A larger figure of £100bn comes from for example, “thetaxexperts dot co dot uk” who claim “The Tax Experts and our other partners in the industry make use of UK tax avoidance schemes to legally shelter an estimated £100 Billion each year.” It could quite conceivably be much higher than this. With large multi-nationals the accounts are extremely opaque – they all have tax havens as subsidiaries (for example about 60 News Corp subsidiaries are incorporated in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands). Newscorp Investments (the holding company), has paid no net corporation tax within these shores over the past 11 years. This is despite accumulated pre-tax profits of nearly £1.4bn. Payments were made in some years, but in others rebates were claimed.The figure of £100 billion is quite proudly boasted of by those in the tax avoidance industry.
I always think it worth putting figures in perspective:
Known loss through tax loopholes £40 billion annually. Suspected total loss £100 billion annually.
The cost of bankers bonuses last year were £7 billion roughly a crate of vintage champagne per UK adult per year – (they were hard times).
The total cost to the UK of participating in the LHC project is about £108M per year – roughly the price of one pint of beer per UK adult per year for a rather more worthy pursuit.
Total UK bailout to the banking sector: announced at the beginning £600 billion, actual official cost £850 billion (source NAO 2011). This represents more than 50% of UK GDP ‘lent’ to banks with little chance of ever seeing it returned. The figure is now closer to £1 trillion following the recent round of ‘quantitative easing’.
There are about $360 trillion in LIBOR based derivative contracts and about $50 trillion in loans. Suppose Barclays’ action shifted the LIBOR rate by the smallest amount possible, 0.01% (and it was certainly out by far more than that). What would be the change in interest payments per year? Answer $41 billion. That’s $41 billion that was paid which should not have been paid. (Note the figures are in dollars not pounds). By artificially lowering the interest rates the banks are also able to make money through quantitative easing, since the money lent to them through this mechanism is at an artificially low rate.
Of more direct concern to us, unemployment benefit £7 billion (of which income based JSA cost £3.6 billion in 2010 – sorry I don’t have the latest figure to match against the £7 billion.)
Cost of the Work Programme £5 billion – though I think that is spread over a number of years.
NHS spending £123.8 billion
Defence spending £47.3 billion
Education £93.3 billion
Pensions £129.3 billion
Total welfare budget £111.7 billion of which housing benefit is £52.8 billion which is mostly a direct subsidy to private landlords as councils housing has be almost abolished. The total housing spend was only £1.6 billion though I don’t know how much of that was new building and how much was repair and grants.
The total cost of imprisoning someone is £49,200 a year – a lot of this is due the knock on effect on families. With a prison population of about 80,000 that’s £3.9 billion. So it cost more to imprison 80,000 than to keep millions on the dole.
Anton
July 9, 2012 at 3:31 pm
I have never found a charity like Dayton Donations before. they took my Family to the grocery instead of just handing us a bag of food. They even Fixed our toilet. Thank you http://daytondonations.com
Sam
April 9, 2013 at 1:01 am
Well If you live in the Dayton Area Check https://daytondonations.com
Adam
April 9, 2013 at 3:00 am
Reblogged this on Ipswich Food Banks.
Universal Jobmatch
January 1, 2015 at 5:23 pm