POVERTY can happen to anyone. You’ve only got to talk to the wonderful people at York Food Bank to know that.

Time was when it first began that we had some people of a certain political persuasion in this city saying there was no such thing as poverty and that food banks were just another grab-it-and-run tool for scroungers, whingers and single mums.

And instead, they should switch off Jeremy Kyle on their 62-inch flat screen on-the-never-never tellies, stub out their cheap fags, swig down the last of their corner shop cider, get up off their fat backsides, and be out there, finding jobs, working hard and looking after themselves instead of relying on the state to do it for them.

Then we started hearing things about our foodbank being the fastest growing in the UK, which was a shock to people’s perception of York as a historically rich, wealthy seat of learning and ecclesiastical importance – a sort of dreaming spires of the north.

It pulled us up short to realise that there’s a significant number of people in this city for whom poverty is a way of life that isn’t self-inflicted.

But judging from Edwina Currie's insulting behaviour last week to anyone who is struggling to make ends meet despite their truly best efforts and through no fault of their own, those on their uppers are “pretending to be poor.”

She took a mean narrow-eyed pot shot at one of them, A Girl Called Jack whose blog on how to produce meals for a week on ten quid has proved to be a hard-hitting social commentary on how millions of people are currently living their lives.

Jack Monroe, she said insultingly, was a rich girl playing at being poor when, if you believe the measured no-holds-barred, telling-it-how-it-is story of Jack’s life over the past couple of years, nothing could be further from the truth.

For some bizarre reason Currie also referred to Jack’s grandfather's obituary suggesting he wasn't badly off so what was she doing making out she was living in poverty? Currie and her ilk really do need to get their well-to-do blinkers off and stop poorer-people bashing. Mind you, it does have its spin-offs.

Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail – who seems to be more to the right than Genghis Khan – had his usual vituperative go about tattoos, lack of a wedding ring and scroungers generally, when writing about Jack Monroe. And the fact she’s a left-wing lesbian to boot just gave him more lighter fuel to chuck at the flames…

In response she calmly answered his criticisms point by point and then thanked him for the extra 9,000 Twitter followers she had won as a result of his odious insults.

But whether or not Jack Monroe is fast becoming the voice for those struggling to make ends meet in a climate of cutbacks with even more on the way, all of this demonstrates we are still a nation with a great divide. And I do wish Edwina Currie had carried on doing whatever it was she was doing with John Major and kept her mouth otherwise occupied…


TALKING about the haves and the have-nots, a million quid for a flat? Sorry – apartment, if we’re being posh.

It would appear that the developers of the Bonding Warehouse site on the York riverside (I won’t say what we used to call it – at least not in a family newspaper…) have experienced a rush of interest in the city’s first flat with a six nought price tag.

But they would say that wouldn't they?

Maybe in the marketing-induced stampede of curiosity there may be a handful of people who can actually afford to dole out a million notes on a top-floor flat where you can relax and watch flood waters rise at your leisure, but I bet the majority are those who are simply being curtain-twitching nosy about how big the bang is for your buck.

And why not? It’s a similar sort of voyeurism that compels thousands of us to tune in to telly programmes where you can snoop into other people's houses from the comfort of your sofa without the risk of being caught sliding your eyes sideways and peering into someone's living room as you walk by.

For we’ve all done it and perhaps still do. I know I do. I try very hard not to but it’s really, really hard when you see a window with a light on and the curtains yanked back to bare all and sundry to the world at large.

I suppose it’s the household equivalent to flashing your knickers.