In praise of … Chris Mould, the food bank manager

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/26/chris-mould-trussell-trust-food-bank

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There are very good reasons to be sceptical of food banks as a policy solution. It is surely a basic function of any kind of welfare state to ensure that no one goes hungry, and to outsource that duty to private charity introduces a moral hazard to governments who need no longer feel responsible for the consequences of their own failures. But at the same time, people are hungry through no fault of their own. Something must be done. And Chris Mould of the Trussell Trust is one person actually doing something.

He’s doing quite a lot, actually. The trust, when he took it over in 2007, was feeding fewer than 30,000 people a year. This year it will feed more than a million. Most of the credit for this belongs to other Christians than Mould – if any one Christian is responsible for the food bank explosion it’s Iain Duncan Smith, whose catastrophic remodelling of the social security system has left countless children of hard-working parents to go to bed cold and hungry. And the work of distribution is done by 30,000 volunteers, not all of whom are Christian or even religious, while the food is donated by people who may have been carried out of church, screaming, after their baptism, but would never dream of returning now.

That’s not the point. There is an extraordinary skill to getting out of the way so that the work of an organisation goes on unhindered by the leadership and this is what Mould very clearly possesses. He’s is a man doing very well a job that should not need doing at all. Those are sometimes the most urgent jobs of all.