MurielSnark
VIP Member
Hello
I've been reading the Jack Monroe threads for a while.
My Jack story is this:
I've known about and tracked Bootstrap Cook since the beginning. My own life was thrown into upheaval around the same time as JM came into public consciousness as I had to leave my job due to a very stressful situation that compromised my health. Since then, I've been on the rollercoaster of living on a very low income just as this coincided with the austerity era.
Over the last 10+ years, I've experienced it all --- going through the invasive benefits assessment processes, being wrongly removed from the system without warning, being migrated onto the (initially bureaucratically disastrous) Universal Credit, losing a long-term, happy, private tenancy & being thrust into the temporary accommodation hellscape. All while trying to obtain ongoing therapeutic mental health support (which doesn't really exist in the NHS) and experiencing both my physical and mental health getting worse and worse.
Currently, I'm in middle age, with no savings left, living in insecure, sh1tty temporary accommodation with no hope of a secure council tenancy in London, and years away from the carefully curated and busy career I once had.
I became interested in Jack because I was having to turn to food banks and looking for ways to live within the constraints of a meagre benefits income. Over the last decade, I've become much more knowledgeable about poverty in Britain, from a systemic standpoint alongside my so-called lived experience. Jack Monroe was an appealing public figure who initially seemed to be successful in getting media attention on the issue, especially as so much of the poverty discourse in this country seems to focus on food security, and food banks were proliferating.
Since then, my understanding has deepened and I've become so much more alert to the shadow side of the -- for want of a better phrase -- "poverty industry", namely the influence peddlers, profiteers, dodgy charities and carpet baggers who are drawn to the sector like moths to the perverbial flame.
I have tried engaging Jack Monroe several times. Occasionally in the early years, she'd put out requests for information or signal a potential collab and I emailed or DMed her about this, out of interest in possibly also writing about what I was seeing and to potentially boost the local, independent food bank I had used and now support. She never once replied, even just with a holding message or an automated acknowledgement. That was the first black mark against her name.
Gradually, I got tired of the constant hystrionics and internet feuding on Twitter, the unrelenting posting of her private life and celeb-type nonsense which seemed at odds with being a serious campaigner. She looked more like a TOWIE schlebb than anyone trying to change the world for good. I hated her Oxfam junket to Tanzania -- I have a long association with international development and I hate the f*cking poverty tourism of those organisations (getting better in recent years but still ....). Second and third black marks.
It was the Covid-era begging, in parallel with obviously lucrative brand collabs, that finally did it for me. I spent 2020 running a local mutual aid group that supported and fed all sorts of people totally cut adrift by the shutting down of local services due to lockdown. I did this from my sofa using just my phone, while recovering from a serious health incident of my own in Feb 20, and I was furious that Monroe did f*ck-all to actually make things better for people in poverty during that period. Her constant complaining just did my head in.
Then Awfully Molly laid everything out and filled in some gaps in my knowledge and I found my way here.... In the meantime, I've tried challenging her on Twitter and been blocked. The black marks have now all melted together in a massive, indelible stain that's just tainted her forever.
I long for the day when there's some public dismantling of the whole Jack Monroe edifice. It's already happening, brick by single brick, I suppose, but I really long for a properly scandalous, tabloid-esque, controlled implosion. Or a lovely big, bureaucratic public enquiry, with forensic, ahem, scrutiny by trained legal eagles (a person can dream).
So.
I've been reading the Jack Monroe threads for a while.
My Jack story is this:
I've known about and tracked Bootstrap Cook since the beginning. My own life was thrown into upheaval around the same time as JM came into public consciousness as I had to leave my job due to a very stressful situation that compromised my health. Since then, I've been on the rollercoaster of living on a very low income just as this coincided with the austerity era.
Over the last 10+ years, I've experienced it all --- going through the invasive benefits assessment processes, being wrongly removed from the system without warning, being migrated onto the (initially bureaucratically disastrous) Universal Credit, losing a long-term, happy, private tenancy & being thrust into the temporary accommodation hellscape. All while trying to obtain ongoing therapeutic mental health support (which doesn't really exist in the NHS) and experiencing both my physical and mental health getting worse and worse.
Currently, I'm in middle age, with no savings left, living in insecure, sh1tty temporary accommodation with no hope of a secure council tenancy in London, and years away from the carefully curated and busy career I once had.
I became interested in Jack because I was having to turn to food banks and looking for ways to live within the constraints of a meagre benefits income. Over the last decade, I've become much more knowledgeable about poverty in Britain, from a systemic standpoint alongside my so-called lived experience. Jack Monroe was an appealing public figure who initially seemed to be successful in getting media attention on the issue, especially as so much of the poverty discourse in this country seems to focus on food security, and food banks were proliferating.
Since then, my understanding has deepened and I've become so much more alert to the shadow side of the -- for want of a better phrase -- "poverty industry", namely the influence peddlers, profiteers, dodgy charities and carpet baggers who are drawn to the sector like moths to the perverbial flame.
I have tried engaging Jack Monroe several times. Occasionally in the early years, she'd put out requests for information or signal a potential collab and I emailed or DMed her about this, out of interest in possibly also writing about what I was seeing and to potentially boost the local, independent food bank I had used and now support. She never once replied, even just with a holding message or an automated acknowledgement. That was the first black mark against her name.
Gradually, I got tired of the constant hystrionics and internet feuding on Twitter, the unrelenting posting of her private life and celeb-type nonsense which seemed at odds with being a serious campaigner. She looked more like a TOWIE schlebb than anyone trying to change the world for good. I hated her Oxfam junket to Tanzania -- I have a long association with international development and I hate the f*cking poverty tourism of those organisations (getting better in recent years but still ....). Second and third black marks.
It was the Covid-era begging, in parallel with obviously lucrative brand collabs, that finally did it for me. I spent 2020 running a local mutual aid group that supported and fed all sorts of people totally cut adrift by the shutting down of local services due to lockdown. I did this from my sofa using just my phone, while recovering from a serious health incident of my own in Feb 20, and I was furious that Monroe did f*ck-all to actually make things better for people in poverty during that period. Her constant complaining just did my head in.
Then Awfully Molly laid everything out and filled in some gaps in my knowledge and I found my way here.... In the meantime, I've tried challenging her on Twitter and been blocked. The black marks have now all melted together in a massive, indelible stain that's just tainted her forever.
I long for the day when there's some public dismantling of the whole Jack Monroe edifice. It's already happening, brick by single brick, I suppose, but I really long for a properly scandalous, tabloid-esque, controlled implosion. Or a lovely big, bureaucratic public enquiry, with forensic, ahem, scrutiny by trained legal eagles (a person can dream).
So.
)
comments club 
myself but fingers Kerridge will be at an event I’m attending this week.
