A view about the cost of living crisis by Alison

Alison B Fisher is our guest blogger this week, and she has written powerfully about how the cost of living crisis is affecting her. Huge thanks to Alison for her honesty and bravery in putting together this article. Alison is a community commissioner on the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission.

I have struggled to find the right point of departure for this blog piece about the cost of living crisis in Morecambe and how it is affecting me personally.

After deliberating for a long time about how much detail to give on the background to the crisis, it seems more fitting to simply say that European unrest caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine has hugely affected gas supplies due to sanctions and that the post Covid recovery has significantly impacted the global markets.

The price of gas is likely to cause massive issues for vulnerable people as well as many others who are made vulnerable by the crisis, such as those who cannot afford to eat and keep their homes warm simultaneously.

Morecambe is situated close to the Irish Sea and the wind from the promenade is bitterly cold. Anecdotally, a friend recently told me that having lived in Colorado in temperatures of minus 20 degrees below zero, the chill winds sweeping over the bay and damp make it feel colder still. I am very concerned about the ability of myself and others to achieve a sufficiently high body temperature and maintain it.

Young children, the elderly and those with extra physical health needs are likely to suffer worsening issues and the financial deprivation has the potential to be enormous. I have already spent £70 in less than a fortnight and still I am struggling. I woke up with the cold last night and ultimately resolved to sleep in my coat. I have peripheral neuropathy, fibromyalgia and an underactive thyroid amongst other conditions and my body, particularly my arms, go numb with the cold. It is very painful whilst it is happening and extremely uncomfortable. I have heating so I can warm the room, but I can't have it on for more than about 20 minutes, just so that the room reaches a bearable temperature and I can literally loosen up. I have medication to help with the horrible, electric shock-like pains that pass through my body but they are aggravated by the cold and it makes me feel really unwell.

Looking for help this morning, I went to ask for a benefit advance. I was told that as I had a Budgeting Loan from earlier this year in connection with a relationship breakdown, I was told I couldn't have a loan.

I had checked before I visited and explained that it was in connection with a change of circumstance because my son has been staying with me one or two nights a week, so it would have been available as a loan to cover changes of circumstance.

Her manner was rude and she evidently wouldn't help me. She began telling me about how the Citizen's Advice Bureau could help with my bills and other household outgoings, which is a fabulous service, but she knew that I needed money and she refused to help.  I would never have gone there if I had other options. She essentially sent me off to beg at the Town Hall. I still have some dignity left and I was not going from one government body to another looking ill and tired with tears on my face.

Do such people have any semblance of how it might feel to spend one's life trying to hide poverty and at least look as though some contribution to society is being made? Can they relate to the shame of a life full of illnesses and tiredness and the unspoken 'try harder' which many people have endured for decades? Or of the shame of knowing that your child is 'odd man out' because the goods they require are prohibitively expensive?

I suspect they do and endlessly invoke the Nuremberg Defence of following orders, and blame the lumpenproletariat, better known as the underclass, and rather than see their vulnerabilities, fears and issues, they instead conceptualise them in the same way as Karl Marx described them, as the dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass of the lowest layers of old society. It is most unfortunate that instead they cannot adopt an equally old but far kinder maxim such as the poor are always with us, or a beatitudinal 'blessed are the poor'. Even a sympathetic use of 'the poor are always with us' would be a good start, but this seems unlikely. 

This attitude is arguably contagious and some of the solvent among us are using the plight of the poor to create, keep or justify a distance from those suffering economic hardship. Those looks of acknowledgement that pass between onlookers when a fuel voucher is passed or a basketful of reduced products is bought serves to shame and degrade that person further. Obviously, it creates an attitude of belonging between the observers, in addition to a sense of relief that they aren't like those people. 

This winter, we may all meld into a mass of need if the cold and food shortages begun to cause  real issues. That would indeed be levelling up.

I watch people in Morecambe and I feel worried. The irritation of others at the plight of people suffering is a particular issue. I had to ask for help for the gas last week. Actually using the voucher was very challenging because my gas card is lost, although I still have the numbers from the card so that I can still top up my gas meter The shop assistant had no experience of using a fuel voucher and it took her 3 attempts to be able to process it. A queue had formed behind me and one person even asked to pay for his goods while my transaction was going through,  with no sense of apology. The shop assistant gave him an understanding look and I felt so ashamed. As I left the small local supermarket the understanding laughter between customers and shop assistant were audible.

A further concerning incident occurred when I was shopping in the market during the summer. I was walking behind a woman in late middle age who was bemoaning the Cost of Living payments to those on Universal Credit. She was angrily relating to her companion how 'these people' were 'getting £320 each for doing nothing!' She then launched into a diatribe against these 'lazy buggers', who were getting extra money when she'd worked all her life. 

For anyone reading this and unable to understand, the term lazy is one used subjectively and the woman concerned was fortunate to have had the opportunity and the good fortune to have been presented with a realistic model for lifetime employment and sufficiently good health to be able to emulate it. The bitterness and resentment towards those in the greatest level of economic need is palpable and far reaching.

Unfortunately, giving vulnerable households financial support is not the problem, it is that the economic support does not reach far enough, particularly those that are likely to be made vulnerable because of the Cost of Living crisis, rather like the woman in the market. Unable to communicate the monetary issues to the government, the poorer classes turn on each other with the result that the poorest and most disadvantaged in our community are presented as the problem with labels such as feckless, workshy and scroungers in abundance. 

I anticipate that before this crisis is over, those in poverty will be posited as having had more help than others and a 'crackdown' of some kind will begin. I fear that the visible use of food banks, being asked (loudly) whether I pay for my prescriptions, nonverbal aggression when people use fuel vouchers combined with urban myths about people using food clubs whilst flaunting their modern technology will produce treatment of those in poverty, of stigmatising cruelty on an unprecedented level.

However, some seeds flourish in this type of environment. The Poverty Truth Network, the Good Things Collective, Grace Ministries and employees in many public facing roles, particularly through the Citizen's Advice Bureau and the Community Hub attached to Morecambe Town Council are heroic players in this tragic saga of poverty and Putin's hubristic war. The best aspects of our characters are rarely formed in times of content. With that in mind, despite the obvious hardships, there is hope for the future.