Feed the Movement: The UK Right to Food Commission
In an article originally published in Tribune, Tom Williams reports from the first of a UK Right to Food Commission hearings in Liverpool and Knowsley.
‘The Right To Food campaign is powered by a few people doing huge amounts of unpaid grunt work. Joining the dots of the right to food and addressing other needs will necessitate fighting on multiple terrains; we will need to build political power to take over local authorities and use their funds to help ordinary people, but also community organising to deliver tangible collective goods like creches and school holiday lunch clubs to free up time and give people the stamina to work collectively for change’.
A Pragmatic Radicalism
At the Right To Food Commission’s conference in Knowsley, the effects of nearly five decades of neoliberal capitalism were demonstrated by a conveyor belt of academics, community representatives, medical professionals, and one of the tiny number of politicians prepared to be honest about the situation Britain finds itself in. Earlier this year, Ian Byrne MP sat on a panel on the outskirts of Liverpool, listening as one speaker after another concretised many of the issues that the Left tends to talk about in the abstract: crap pay, crap public transport, no time, a Kafka-esque benefits system, injustice after injustice, and struggle after struggle. As such, the Right To Food goes way beyond the right to food.
The campaign’s objective is to make access to food a legal right for all by having the right to food enshrined in law, aiming to end hunger and food banks. This would be a radical step, and a pragmatic one. As Autonomy’s Will Stronge told me, ‘The Right to Food is not merely a moral imperative; it is a sound economic policy in our age of crisis.’ Once we stop looking at it through the ideological lens of the treasury, it’s not hard to see how. Reducing long-term healthcare costs, stabilising household incomes by taking a cost away, and giving families basic mental security, the Right To Food would deliver measurable fiscal returns. ‘Embedding food security as a legal right shifts the state from crisis management to preventive investment,’ Stronge says. ‘In doing so, it builds a more resilient economy and a more efficient public sector.’
Hunger is a Trade Union Issue
It also makes sense for trade unions. The campaign has found it difficult to secure much in the way of funding from the best resourced institutions of the labour movement, but as Sarah Woolley of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) asserts, ‘When workers don’t have to worry about feeding themselves or their kids, they’re empowered to stand together, take action, and demand better and that’s why unions must be at the heart of it and why the BFAWU is proud to be involved.’
The barriers to change are monumental. This does not mean they are insurmountable. A sclerotic state and crumbling infrastructure mean that it would require governmental and municipal intervention (perhaps involving the ‘public-commons partnerships’ proposed in the recent book Radical Abundance). It would also require rank and file activism, mobilisation, and organising — another area in which the trade union movement could help, given the talented and experienced organisers they have at their disposal.
As Woolley says, the Right To Food is absolutely a trade union issue, given the obvious connection to the need for shorter working hours. Meanwhile, as Right To Food commission member Alex Colas has written, ‘The relationship between work and food security cannot be seen in isolation from wider socioeconomic and political structures. Housing, transport, free time, health, care, education, energy and the environment are all connected to the food system, and so the right to food and associated struggles for food justice don’t stop once we clock off.’ Time — or lack of it — be it leisure time or time for social reproduction (particularly the time needed for good nutritious meals) is a material need for millions of people.
Articulating the Campaign
The Right To Food campaign is powered by a few people doing huge amounts of unpaid grunt work. Joining the dots of the right to food and addressing other needs will necessitate fighting on multiple terrains; we will need to build political power to take over local authorities and use their funds to help ordinary people, but also community organising to deliver tangible collective goods like creches and school holiday lunch clubs to free up time and give people the stamina to work collectively for change.
Support for the campaign transcends party membership. It also demonstrates the potential for collaboration across the left on specific issues that don’t lead to untenable compromises from any party. The Left has some institutional power now: a nascent party of the left, a Green Party controlled by the left, and in Byrne, we even have a Labour MP delivering for his constituents and perhaps showing his ineffectual colleagues what a true community representative can achieve. Even as a Marxist who is dubious about popular frontism and sceptical about coalitions that involve liberals and apolitical do-gooders, I can see, through the lens of the Right To Food, the need to ally with people to my right on certain things.
The shredding of the postwar consensus has seen a return to something akin to the Gladstonian liberalism of Victorian Britain, as part of a network of socialists prepared to take action to shift things to the Left. The Right To Food and other, ideally articulated projects can expose the internal contradictions of capitalism — capital needs workers to exploit, but these workers aren’t productive if they are malnourished and generally unhealthy. With adequate funding and people power, this kind of collective action could act as a portal into what Ralph Miliband called a ‘world of labour’: an ecosystem of trade unions, tenants unions, left parties, NGOs, community organisers, anti-fascists, Palestine activists with the capacity to stand in solidarity with one another where appropriate. However, this would require a much stronger social base.
In a conversation about the Hillsborough Law, Byrne talked to me about the need to ‘rewire the state’. The links between these seemingly separate campaigns are obvious; the state is a complex set of social relations, and the understanding of it as such must be incorporated into left strategy. The two projects complement one another, and there must be many more with scope for association and articulation. A new world of labour could facilitate better ways of living, and even prefigure a transition away from capitalism. There are many daunting obstacles, opponents and enemies to overcome, not least our own prejudices and sectarian impulses — but we’ve got to start somewhere.