Why Baby Food, Baby Formula and Nappies?:

 

Between 2021 and 2023, the cost of baby formula increased by an average of 24%. Coinciding with the increase in price is an increase in shoplifting rates and baby formula being security tagged. This is an act of corporate violence. Parents should not be criminalised for shoplifting the basic essentials for their children to survive. Children should not be fucking hungry. 

The increase in formula prices is due to nothing but greed - reports show that supermarkets have increased prices far beyond normal inflation, and are reporting record breaking profits while a quarter of the population experience food insecurity. As parents skip meals to feed their babies, the CEOs of supermarkets are drowning in excessive wealth. Hunger is a political choice. We need to take collective responsibility for the children and other vulnerable people in our communities. Supermarkets should not make unchecked profits while people starve. This is an emergency situation - this demand is about survival. 

 

What is a Community Hub:

 

This is not to be just another government hand-out scheme, placing a band-aid over a gaping wound. This is about working with and for communities, building the resilience needed to survive. Community hubs are not means-tested and available to all members of the community.

 

Hubs are welcoming, dignified community spaces that work with existing community groups: where community food projects exist, they are properly resourced to be able to provide for their communities. Where no such projects exist, they are set up. We demand they are designed according to the needs of the community - consulting with existing community projects, not imposing a standard template on all communities, and created in collaboration with This is Rigged and our allied groups. 

 

Why Community Hubs?:

 

It is crucial that we continue to mitigate the worst of climate collapse, but we must also accept what we have already lost. The idea of security as we have known it previously no longer exists, so where do we go from here? When the current system is failing dismally to meet our basic needs, then we have no choice but to take collective responsibility for our survival. As the climate crisis intensifies, food shortages will increase - as will rampant profiteering and inequality in access to food, so long as we are at the mercy of corporations. We cannot afford not to do this. 

 

As it stands, social scientists would have us scrapping over the last loaf of bread in Tesco, starting bloodbaths in the Morrisons’ aisles, committing GBH over a pot noodle. This is not who we are - it doesn’t have to be like this. So, what could our future look like? 

 

Community is revolutionary: the Black Panthers’ free breakfast programme was called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” by the then-director of the FBI; the miners’ strikes were sustained by communities organising in hubs, making sandwiches for families that had gone months without income, ensuring no one went hungry; the chaikhana, or teahouse, is at the heart of the Rojava revolution. Food is revolutionary - community is a necessity. When our crops are failing, our water sources dry up, and the land on which we live is decimated, the real revolutionary thing is to take collective responsibility and stand with one another. To weather the coming storms, communities need resilience to survive. The current system if failing is - we must take our futures into our own hands. This is life or death.

 

Hubs will provide: 3 nutritious meals a day, and a cup of tea whenever. Meals should be vegan: this is the cheapest and most accessible option for nutritious meals and accommodates the widest range of faith-based diets. 

 

Why a Fair Transition?:

 

Our first demand of the “Scottish government vocally opposing all new oil and gas in the North Sea” has been met. Now our Government must make the moves to make sure that the transition is just. In Scotland, we are far too familiar with what an unfair transition looks like, from the mines to the shipyards. What we have to remember is that worker's rights, climate justice and fighting the cost of greed we have been catapulted into are all the same fight. At the heart of each of these crises is the exploitation of people and resources, the greed of corporations, the complacency of our world leaders. At the heart of these fights is a deep desire for peace, justice and eradicating unnecessary suffering. Those fighting for workers' rights are fighting for fair pay and good working conditions so they can afford proper housing and food. Those fighting for climate justice are fighting to prevent extreme crop failure, water resources drying up and our land being decimated. Those fighting the cost of the greed crisis are fighting for the basic, dignifying human rights of food and housing. We can not separate these fights.  

 

Let us remember no one is free until we are all free.

 

Click here to see what a just transition would look like.