Why it's time to stop betting on food

If there’s such a thing as time travel, can you also experience class and culture travel?  If so I think I experienced it today…

This morning I travelled to the Conservative Party Conference with activists from the World Development Movement.  We were taking part in a protest calling on George Osborne to support regulation to stop bankers betting on food prices. Food speculation has contributed to food price spikes in recent years.

I left home (Croydon) at 5.am. Initially the dark streets were deserted, occasionally punctuated by the fluorescent strips of the street cleaners. Gradually the bus stops became more populated with people in normal clothes, many (I’m assuming) cleaners, going to clean the office blocks before the arrival of the suited city folk that I saw towards the end of my journey to Euston.  The delegates that WDM was leafleting as they entered the Conservative Party Conference completed the spectrum of the different social groups that wittingly or unwittingly, perform their roles in the theatrical production which is our global economic structure. 

We know that in the UK, it’s those poorer groups that I encountered first in my journey this morning who will have felt the food price rises the most. And if we look at the regions in the world, for example Africa, where some of these people have their roots, the reality of food price spikes can be devastating – leaving many families only able to eat one meal a day. 

That is why WDM wants George Osborne, who is actually meant to represent all those different groups of people I saw on the way to Birmingham today, to stop bankers betting on food and to use his position in the EU to stand up for the vast majority of fair minded UK citizens and not just the vested interests of the bankers.