I WRITE with regard to the increasing number of foodbanks. I must pay tribute immediately to the good intent of those setting up and running these centres, but my reservations and sympathy extends more to those reduced by circumstance to using them.

Can it be that in a comparatively wealthy 21st century western European country where we provide education, health care and look after our elderly through taxation that we cannot satisfy hunger except by charity?

We properly extend state aid to the starving of the Third World and cannot do as much for our own?

Would it not be better, and, indeed, expected that the welfare state would provide in such hopefully rare and temporary circumstances?

Could not those in qualifying need be given food specific vouchers as of right by the appropriate authorities so that they could at least satisfy their needs to privacy and with self-respect in common with their more fortunate neighbours?

As a widowed pensioner and a son of working class parents, I am not unfamiliar with need. I have had to 'sell.' without complaint, part of my home in order to raise the money to continue living in it.

My parents never had to resort to charity to put food on the table and considered themselves fortunate where others were not so blessed.

The givers of charity, and I make my small contribution myself, should remember the resentment it can produce in those reduced by desperation to seek it. I have heard this resentment in the poor referred to as being the result of 'pride.' But that is surely only what we more comfortably off called 'self-respect,' and we are not ashamed of that.

I will do what I can by writing to our politicians and I hope many others will too.

This cannot surely be what our young and rather wealthy Prime Minister means by the 'Big Society'; a return to the patronising of the deserving and the undeserving poor and the whiff of the workhouse?

Brian Martin

Broad Park Road

Bere Alston