Someone asked me the other day why I volunteered in foodbanks. They also wanted to know if we got many ‘chancers’ appearing. The truth is of course there are some who try to overstep the mark by demanding more than they are due. Usually they are spotted and set straight but unfortunately the majority are truly needy.

They are most commonly in such dire straits because of sanctions to benefits. This means no money, no money at all from no one. What would you do?

I see the serious consequences of harsh and unjustified benefit sanctions on a weekly basis at the foodbanks.

Statistics show well over half of all sanctions are reversed during appeals but in the meantime when a benefit claimant is sanctioned for...being late to sign on or if they are missing a CV submission deadline, who do you think suffers the most?

Wee babies, wee toddlers, young children who stand beside their parents and help to carry the bags of food they are given. The children of the claimant. They suffer most.

When a benefit claimant has their benefits stopped how do you think they buy food for the weans? The answer is they can’t. They have no income. That’s why foodbanks have become an essential life-line for many sanctioned claimants.

Iain Duncan-Smith, the minister in charge of slashing benefits and introducing the brutal sanctions regime, has put the benefits staff under enormous pressure to meet arbitrary sanctions targets and the real fact is that the victims in the whole sorry process are children in already poor households.

Worryingly too is that the number of suicides among sanctioned claimants has also reached such a frightening level that many welfare groups now call for Mr Smith to face a manslaughter charge in England.

Ironically last week it was revealed, on the back of a Freedom of Information request by Welfare Weekly, that an expensive PR campaign by the DWP that featured two claimants, Sarah and Zac, speaking positively about the welfare changes and cuts, including the oppressive sanctions regime, was in fact completely false and fictitious. Departmental deception paid for by the taxpayer.

After being found out the bold Mr Smith announced yesterday that it was “quite wrong” to publish such false accounts from false claimants and that an investigation was underway. Meanwhile we are all supposed to believe it was a rogue incident and believe everything else his Department says about all his welfare cuts.

Mr Duncan-Smith and his Department have been caught telling a whopper here and if he had any decency he would resign in an act of contrition.

Imagine a claimant told a whopping lie of this magnitude on an application form and was found out? They would be sanctioned. Well what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Mr IDS should be sanctioned. Sack him or make him live for a month on the £71 a week Job Seekers Allowance he thinks is too generous. Then he would understand why over a million families are relying on food banks to survive every week.

The independence trail 

Talk about the ‘Road to Independence’ and we’re off on our travels again around our beautiful country. From Edinburgh South’s YESCafe tonight to the Old Kirk, Kirk Wynd in Fife on Thursday night and then all the way up to Skye on Saturday to speak in the Portree Community Centre followed by Aberdeen and Dundee the week after that. I naively hoped all the independence campaigning would be curtailed after the last election but no such luck. Tommy has been asked to speak in all of these places. My poor car will be knackered by the end of the month.

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