Edwina Currie’s Cruel Jibe at the Poor

Edwina Curry

SUNDAY EXPRESS: FORMER Tory MP Edwina Currie last night provoked outrage by saying that ­people who use food banks waste their money on ­tattoos and dog food.

Her comments come as ­figures show that more than 100,000 people had to turn to food banks at Christmas. This is double the 2012 figure and a record number.

A million Britons, a third of them children, relied on food banks last year, according to estimates.

Last night Ms Currie was attacked for a “disgusting insult” to those living below the poverty line and for making “crude and outrageous generalisations”. Speaking on Radio Stoke last week, the 67-year-old said: “For the life of me I can’t see how giving someone a tin of soup when they are suffering from a mental illness or if they’ve got debt problems is going to contribute in any long-term way to solving their problems.

“If people have got into debt they should be asking themselves ‘Why did I get into debt and what did I do that was stupid to get into debt and what can I avoid doing in the future? How do I actually take control of my life so I am not in this situation?" » | Lucy Johnstone | Sunday, January 19, 2014

Margaret Thatcher's Revolution 30 Years On
THE TELEGRAPH: Her successors ruined the prosperous Britain she created. Now we must strive to re-build it, says Edwina Currie.

We should value Margaret Thatcher for what she did, not what she was. Photo courtesy of The Telegraph
She was a small, pretty woman with chintzy blouses and a nervous habit of clearing her throat. A stiff leather handbag hung like a weapon over her arm; if a wisp of hair escaped from the helmet of her coiffure, she fiddled with it anxiously. In mid-campaign, she was given a grubby calf to hold and didn't know what to do with it. Our first views of Margaret Thatcher weren't reassuring.

Yet it was la difference that underwrote her astonishing success. The unthinkable – a woman prime minister – had been made flesh. Suddenly anything seemed possible. I was a city councillor in Birmingham with two small children. I knew, with total certainty, that if she could do it, then so could I.

Mrs Thatcher learnt very quickly to turn her outsider status to advantage. Declaring that she didn't know much about economics but did understand a household budget was an election strategy of genius. It allied her with the victims of strikes and disruption, those who had to make ends meet, the "hard-working families" of modern parlance who had to put aside doubts if they were to vote for her. However bizarre it may seem to have a woman in charge, they reasoned, she talked sense and should be given a chance: she couldn't be worse than the men.

Within her first term the doubts vanished. The Iron Lady had seen off Galtieri and was preparing the same treatment for Scargill, so all one had to do was sound rather like her. I sailed into Parliament at my first attempt in 1983, one of 397 Tory MPs (some 200 more than now). It was not really a surprise to find myself the first maiden speaker of the new intake, treated as a representative of a new breed, and soon a minister.

It was a fantastic and terrifying experience. Come to a meeting not properly briefed and you'd be mincemeat, and rightly so. Get something right and she would praise you embarrassingly in public. With a blue-eyed stare that could turn men to stone, she would snap out orders and expect them delivered. Once, in a cold spell in January 1987, she insisted that no vagrant was to be found frozen to the pavements and I was given the job. We managed it, with the help of the charities and an open purse, a now-forgotten episode entirely to her credit; the Rough Sleepers initiative was the outcome. No inquiries, no reviews, no soundbites, no pointless legislation: just get on and do it. >>> Edwina Currie | Sunday, April 26, 2009