We should celebrate, in our very British manner, this victory over a societal problem:

Britain’s biggest food bank network has warned that reliance on charity food is in danger of becoming “the new normal” for low-income families in financial crisis.

The Trussell Trust, which oversees 424 food banks in the UK, said it gave out enough emergency food to feed more than 1.1 million people in 2015-16, a slightincrease on the previous year.

The main reported reasons for food bank use were problems with the welfare system, such as slow processing and payment of benefits, and benefit changes including sanctions. Together they accounted for 42% of all referrals.

Our societal problem being that, despite taking 40% of everything that is produced annually, the State is incompetent at one of the major tasks it itself has undertaken: to stop people starving in the streets.

Some part of Burke's little platoons were able to work out how to solve this particular problem. Let's mobilise both the charitable impulses of the people and also that food waste out there so that people with no food will have some food. We call this a victory.

We also know what we British do with a victorious unit. We form up the platoon and march it down to the Palace where gongs are given, followed by that after party with lashings of ginger beer for all. This is a victory, one we should celebrate.

What we don't understand is why people are not calling for this. Instead we keep being told that, having solved this problem without the State instead the problem should be handed back to that very State which failed the hungry. And we know very well from personal experience that there never was a time when there were not these gaps in the State provision of benefits. It's not that the State did once manage this process, it never has, not effectively. And we don't think it ever will.

Why is it that evidence of a problem having been solved is being used as evidence of there being a problem which needs to be solved?