THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury wants us to eliminate ‘food poverty’ by chucking millions of pounds at the problem by taking Food Banks – currently a well-run charitable concern – into the aegis of the Welfare State.

Justin Welby isn’t a stupid man. But he should know by now that if money cured poverty it would have disappeared a long time back.

Only a decade or so ago Gordon Brown boasted that he would eliminate child poverty – mainly by raiding people’s pension pots.

He didn’t eliminate child poverty but he made a whole lot of futures bleaker than they might have been and the effects will have to be addressed in the future.

I know why the Archbishop and churchy types love this issue, though. It’s because of its Biblical simplicity – ‘I was hungry and you fed me’. What finer thing can we do for our fellow humans? Hand out some food. Job done.

But I also know the other reason why this issue has been shoved so violently into the foreground. It’s because it suits all those politicians for whom the next big event isn’t Jesus’ birthday but, May 7 2015 when there will be a general election.

The poverty bandwagon has been quietly gathering political pace and it’s now threatening to fly away. Earlier this week we had ‘funeral poverty’ as described to the House of Commons by Labour backbencher Emma Lewell-Buck, who claimed some people were so poor they were resorting to burying their loved ones in their back garden.

And that’s when I smelt a rat. Because – as folk who live in the pricier parts of the UK know – you’d have to be very wealthy indeed to afford a property with a garden. And if you rent, burial in the back-yard is completely out of the question because you don’t own the land.

Naturally, when challenged, she couldn’t provide one example of anyone she knew who had done this.

But I bet this ‘example’ will become part of the ‘evidence’ trotted out by the sort of folk who, if they’d paid attention 10 or 15 years ago, may have averted the mess.

The poverty report backed by Archbishop Welby quite fairly explains that ‘cheap alcohol’ betting shops, and smoking all eat into the budgets of these families. You can add to that expensive smart-phone contracts and Sky TV packages.

I’m not interested in them. But far more food bank users are people on the iniquitous zero-hours contracts, flogging themselves to death for a too-low minimum wage, or who have been the victim of the random application of ‘benefit sanctions’ which sound good in theory but are, like the Bedroom Tax, ridiculous to operate.

And for me THAT’S the real scandal. If honest work does not pay you may as well say goodbye to a civilised society.

But if you tackle this you’d have to publicly condemn those who had the chance to ditch zero-hours contracts and didn’t (The Labour government, the Coalition), who allowed the ‘light-touch regulation’ of the banks which allowed them to get away with financial murder (the Labour government), the people who thought it was a really great idea to relax gaming laws so that more people could gamble (the same folk who wanted to build a supercasino in one of the poorest districts of Manchester – Labour again), and those who have been content these past 20 years to see perfectly good food chucked away instead of given away to people who need it (Europe, most of our politicians).

Then you could also look at the biggest family cost of all - putting a roof over your head.

Thanks to the unaccounted-for influx of people into this country over the past 15 years (at least 2 million) property is scarce and prices are absurd. The Labour government started it by quietly opening the doors. And the coalition has done nothing to stop it by standing up to Europe.

The biggest joke of all is that this ‘All Party Report’ into poverty was commissioned by MPs themselves – the very people who have done seriously little to address the basic flaws.

Feeding the broke and the hungry’s the easy bit. It’s stepping up to plethora of issues which have lead us to this point which will take the doing. But, until we do, the hungry will always be with us. And those who helped cause their plight will be able to salve their conscience with a half-day’s food packing, or by donating a few tins from their Waitrose shop.

n ALCOHOL misuse campaigners are not happy about the government’s move to allow children aged under 16 to purchase chocolate liquers. Neither am I.

The very idea that an impressionable kiddie may purchase some of these is truly spinechilling. Because they might decide to give them to me for Christmas and I have to tell you that apart from Eccles cakes and pink wafers, they are the vilest foodstuff known to humanity.

HEARTBREAK FOR FAMILY ANNI Dewani is dead. Her husband, Shrien, walked free from a South African court, breaking the hearts of her family who hoped a full trial may bring them some answers as to why their daughter was gunned down in a dingy township on her honeymoon.

Because of the judge’s case dismissal, Shrien Dewani has not an official stain on his character. But because there is not a law in any land that can stop anyone from forming their own view of this matter, I suspect he will be judged secretly by everyone he meets, every minute of every day.

YES, IT'S WINTER...

THIS week’s so-called ‘weather-bomb’. Or ‘winter’, as I think my granny used to call it.

SURVEY JUST SO ABSURD ACCORDING to a ‘shock’ survey, one in five children thinks Jesus plays for Chelsea.

Really? Do a fifth of kids think that? Or, as I very much suspect, were they merely enjoying themselves winding up the mugs who devised this absurd piece of ‘research’?