Watch: Jack Monroe tells Tory MP economy is built ‘on the bodies of dead people’

Jack Monroe was as busy as ever yesterday. First, she appeared at the Work and Pension Committee, then she slammed a Tory MP on BBC’s Politics Live.

The food writer and campaigner told MPs that the impact of the cost of living crisis on the “millions of children living in poverty in Britain today” is “going to be, in some cases, fatal”, adding: “And that’s not a term that I use lightly.”

She told the Work and Pension Committee that the home situation of children living in poverty was “already untenable” and had been increasingly so over the last decade.

Monroe, who has argued that the increasing price of everyday essentials and decreased availability of value product lines had left poorer individuals seeing a higher rise in the cost of living than had been reported in existing inflation measures, said: “That then makes it difficult to identify that a £20 a week food shop a few years ago gets probably about two thirds of what you’d be able to get for that £20 now.

“And that’s not people deciding not to go to the theatre or not have legs of lamb or bottles of Champagne, that’s people deciding ‘we won’t eat on Tuesday or Thursday this week’ or ‘we’ll turn the heating off’ or ‘we’ll skip meals’.”

Bodies of dead people

She then went on the Politics Live show and.told business minister Paul Scully how austerity had impacted the lives of vulnerable people and accused his party of rebuilding the economy “on the bodies of dead people”. She said:

“I really have to take issue with the fact that you said the government are not going to recovery the economy off the back of the lowest paid people because that has been conservative policy for the last 12 years.

“Austerity led ideology has meant that people who have the least in this country have routinely been asked to shoulder the burdens of the bank bailouts and all of the policies that consecutive conservative governments have put in place to reduce welfare payments, to reduce the support that is available for the poorest and most vulnerable people in the lowest income households.

“The economy has been rebuilt, what little greenshoots we have has been rebuilt, has been on the bodies of the dead people who are no longer with us because they have been failed by the department of work and pensions.”