How are local groups preparing to help people this winter?

Archie Sykes on 29 October 2024

The famous line from Game of Thrones ‘Winter is Coming’ is more and more becoming an appropriate description of how the United Kingdom must prepare every year. Within my lifetime it has become commonplace for every winter to see the headline ‘NHS in Crisis’ and read that the pressures of winter diseases and colder weather will push the service over the brink.

Meanwhile, across the country, people are struggling to cope not just on a seasonal basis, but on a weekly basis. Inflation, affecting both food and energy, is creating new and bigger challenges for everyone. Food prices are now 20% higher than they were in May 2021 meaning people are paying more for the same, whilst wages, and importantly benefits for those struggling the most, have lagged behind these rapid increases in prices.

Recent inflation trends have gone hand in hand with longer trends that have seen growing levels of poverty and even reports by the Resolution Foundation of destitution across the country. This poverty problem has been demonstrated in the rise in parents (now ¼) struggling to put food on the table and an estimated 3 million children struggling to get sufficient food.

Longer-term trends in the levels of poverty mean that despite inflation being brought down and being ‘back to normal’ (as Rishi Sunak claimed during the election) planned rises in the energy price cap are going to be the third nail in the economic coffin that drives more people into crisis.

The multi-faceted nature of the economic pressures on people means that people from all across society are having to seek help from the community. Warm Spaces (and their accompanying Community Shop) run by Hyde Park Methodist Church in Leeds, has people from babies (and their parents) coming, to homeschooling families, and people in their 80s.

With this economic situation developing and no major government intervention being planned (or implemented in previous years), many communities have sought their own solutions to these growing problems and to mitigate the impact of winter. These have manifested themselves in the development of food banks and, in more recent times, warm banks.

Food banks have become an icon of the community filling in where the state has failed. Although for people of my generation, it may seem hard to believe, food banks are a relatively new concept being largely unheard of before 2010. However, since 2010, the food bank has slowly developed into an almost integral part of the British social security system. This growth has not slowed and in the last 5 years, the Trussell Trust (the biggest foodbank provider in the UK) has reported a 94% increase in the number of emergency food parcels they had to deliver. Here in Yorkshire, the increase has been even more rapid with there being an increase of 157% meaning the area has the second fastest-growing food bank sector in the country behind London.

Meanwhile, in more recent years the UK has moved on from just needing food banks and has begun to move into the warm bank sector as well. These new institutions have developed as a community solution to deal with rising energy prices and therefore the increasing problems in keeping homes warm. With the supply of a warm room and often warm drinks and food, these sites have become important for people struggling particularly in winter. Today there are over 3,000 warm banks across the UK according to the World Economic Forum with them being run by councils and community groups alike.

However, warm banks are evolving to do more than simply meet the needs of those who can’t afford to heat their own homes all day. A growing crisis across the UK has been the rise in loneliness particularly among elderly people, but among all generations as well. According to one of the leading charities providing warm banks 7% of the population suffer from chronic loneliness and this has been replicated in the reason for people coming. Warm Welcome have reported that the main reason for people coming to warm banks is because of loneliness.

This is something that the Warm Space has also noticed, Sharon (one of the people helping run the service) described how “As months have gone people have started sitting together” showing how the service is helping people make friends and find a new community. This impact has been so great that the church has rebranded the site a Welcome Space recognising it’s “not just a space for people to be warm, but also for social interaction”.

Warm banks are fast evolving in the new social environment to meet changes in demand. No longer are they hubs just to help keep people warm, these community spaces are now helping tackle other problems in the loneliness epidemic.

Across the UK major economic and now social issues are beginning to be countered by community groups. In areas where state support has failed to keep people properly afloat, it is the charitable work of people within our community which is helping to tackle hunger, cold and loneliness across our communities. And with budgets in government departments being squeezed and large increases in benefits a long way off, it may be fair to say that the UK is now a society dependent on the community.

Words by Archie Sykes

Retroactive remedying: How can depictions of Blackface be torn down?

Owen Frost on 15 October 2020

After my weekly comfort viewing of Community the other day, I was alerted to the fact that Netflix had purged one of the comedy’s most absurd yet revered episodes, ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’. This episode featured Community regular Ken Jeong’s Spanish teacher Chang, who starts the episode dressed up in full-body Black makeup with an accompanying white wig. Despite Community’s plaudits for being a ‘woke’ show and criticising the obvious parallels between Chang’s “dark elf” and the historically abhorrent tradition of Blackface, the episode was axed. ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons’ is widely considered one of the best episodes of the series, and currently has a 9.5 rating on IMDb. The removal from Netflix sparked a Twitter war, where many users pointed out the diverse show’s main focus during the episode is suicide awareness. Is full erasure a necessary step? 

Fans of Community were rocked by the removal of the celebrated episode containing alleged Blackface – Pictured: (l-r) Danny Pudi (Abed), Yvette Nicole Brown (Shirley), Joel McHale (Jeff), Gillian Jacobs (Britta), Alison Brie (Annie), Donald Glover as Troy – (Image credit: NBC Universal via Getty Images)

Over the last few months, episodes from numerous other big hit broadcasts such as 30 Rock, The Golden Girls, The Office, Scrubs and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia have all retroactively succumbed to the editorial chopping block. Subsequently, many white actors also quit their voice roles as Black or mixed-race characters, including Family Guy’s Mike Henry and Central Park’s Kristen Bell.  

In a Radio Times interview in July, Idris Elba dismantled these acts of censorship, arguing “viewers should know that people made shows like this” and that to “mock the truth, you have to know the truth.” Viral Success Munya Chawawa agreed, saying that “racism in Britain has always been more subtle and insidious – we need those blatant examples to remind us.” He argues that this removal is just a new form of gaslighting for Black people and people of colour. 

Similarly, television writer Alanna Bennett, believes it is “just trying to Band-Aid over the history.” Bennett asserts that these purifications are only effective at erasing mistakes rather than acknowledging them. She goes on to state it “feels like trying to protect the legacy of those creators instead of actually trying to address what those episodes did.”

Stand-up comedian and writer Dane Baptiste equally illuminates the issues of representation which emerge from these incidents. Baptiste declares that the main problem “isn’t just the fact that you have things like Little Britain and Come Fly With Me… It’s the fact that two white men have been able to depict Black people in two shows and the BBC won’t even give one Black person a show.” 

One potential lesson from these now outdated shows is the dearth of opportunities for emerging Black stars in British television to portray diverse, complex characters. Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You is an excellent example of the latest step in this beneficial direction – a step well over 20 years in the making. 

Coel’s I May Destroy You examined multiple contemporary issues, including Black identity – (Image credit: BBC)

Certain shows such as AMC’s Mad Men appears to have taken a different approach in light of the Black Lives Matter movement. Recently, I came across the series 3 Mad Men episode where John Slattery’s Roger Sterling is in obvious Blackface. The solution the creators took was to disclaim ahead of viewing: making audiences aware of the racist content. In an official statement, Mad Men’s production company Lionsgate stated that they chose to leave the scene in as they want to expose “the injustices and inequities within our society“. 

HBO Max also initially came under fire for removing infamous epic Gone with the Wind due to its racist characterisation of Black Americans. However, HBO Max then re-uploaded the film with both a disclaimer about the racist content and a supplementary historical documentary where scholars discuss the film’s impact. 

One way forward is not outright censorship. The questionable content instead needs either an apt preface which educates audiences on the wrongful history or an accompanying apology. Now more than ever, these incidents are showing the need for us to expose the flaws and racist stereotypes manifest in numerous artistic industries. Past events instigate activists to keep sight of goals of greater representation and attainment of an increasingly diverse world of television and film.

Image Credit: Variety