Please Mr Cameron, can we have some more?

Perhaps sarcasm and starvation can do what common sense and decency can't

Deep in Middle England there stands a church hall.

It is at the centre of a rural town, the sort of place where the wealthiest people are all outsiders who've made their money elsewhere and true locals speak with a bit of an accent.

There are houses with vast gardens which sell for £1million or more. There are spanking-clean Chelsea tractors everywhere you look. There's a Waitrose where all the best people shop.

Barristers live here. People who have a second home for the weekends. Newspaper editors, politicians, racehorse owners.

There are rolling green fields, a tourist trade, beautiful views, tea shoppes. This is, to anyone who looks at it, a nice place to live.

So why are people queuing up to use a food bank in the church hall?

The hard truth is that a rural town like this is the sort of place where you can't spend your whole life. If you're born here, you generally have to leave.

There aren't many jobs in the rural economy, and most are seasonal, low-paid and low-skilled. You could never afford to buy a house and stay forever.

The bus service is irregular and expensive. The petrol is pricey. The nearest A&E is miles away, the cheaper supermarkets just as far. If you don't drive - if you can't afford it, you're too old, too disabled, too young - you can't live here in any sort of prosperity. You pay more for everything, or you get out.

That means the only people who can afford life in this rural town are those who already commute, who earn more elsewhere, who want a rural house with rural views and hefty price tags. They come here from the city, and push the prices up even further.

And those people aren't immune from poverty. A barrister has used that food bank after he gave up work to care for his wife, victims of domestic violence who leave their home for the sake of their children's safety and find themselves on welfare, and those suddenly made redundant.

Even the wealthiest people in this rural town are just one pay cheque away from poverty - and they live alongside 1million rural poor who already live below the poverty line.

In those circumstances it's surprising the customers for this food bank in the church hall have only doubled in two years. Those 12 families a week are a tiny proportion of the 1million people who use food banks in the UK , or the thousands more who get Red Cross aid parcels in the winter.

On the edge of this rural town lives a man who has felt the need to visit that food bank just once.

He is one of those who wasn't born here, who moved in and helped to push up the cost of living for everyone else.

He earns £142,500 a year in his main job and gets another £60,000 or so every year from renting out a London house he owns mortgage-free .

For several years he got £21,000 a year from the taxpayer to help him live in this rural town, not because like the rural poor he found it hard but because it was on offer and he fancied it.

He visited the food bank at the church hall last year, secretly, after being told about it repeatedly. He spoke to the volunteer who runs it, but didn't want to talk to any of the people who felt they had to use it.

He wasn't particularly hungry. He wasn't particularly poor. And it didn't particularly make him think any differently about food banks.

Since that visit, he has claimed food banks were all someone else's fault. His friends have said hunger is a lie by nasty volunteers and charities.

He ignored a group of 27 bishops and 16 faith leaders who told him the need for food banks were down to his own failings at work, and when two priests tried to pass him a letter about hungry people his staff called the police.

He taxed spare bedrooms, he sanctioned the sick and the dying, and he said it was made up for by cutting income tax.

Then this man - this £202,500-a-year-plus-extras-with-four-houses-man-who-has-cut-his-own-rate-of-income-tax - said that he was a Christian.

He said that he was a man of faith, that this country was a land of Christian values. He said that he wanted to trumpet the idea of "responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility and love".

He even said: "I sometimes feel not enough is made of our efforts to tackle poverty."

The man is David Cameron, our Prime Minister. The rural town with a food bank in the church hall where twice as many people use it this year than in 2012 is Witney in Oxfordshire, the centre of his own constituency.

There are two ways to make more of his efforts to tackle poverty.

The first is for David Cameron, Prime Minister and local MP, caring Christian and man of faith, to help out at his local food bank. To spend a day there, talk to the people who use it, find out if they're really spending all their benefits down the pub as his constituency chairman has insisted.

At the very least he could donate a few tins.

Perhaps he might even go without a meal or two himself.

The second way to make more of his efforts is for every person who is hungry, every person who struggles to live in a rural economy without £202,500 a year in cash, every person who takes their faith seriously, every person who feels there but for the grace of God go they, everyone who feels let down, disgusted, appalled or ashamed by David Cameron and the things he says compared to the things he does, to ask him: "Please sir, can we have some more?"

Put it in a letter to his constituency office. Send it in a tweet to @David_Cameron. Write it on the Facebook page which he has paid people to like.

Include this link to the article about how Witney food bank has doubled its users in two years, tell him the Bible says you should love your neighbour and Jesus would be spinning in his grave if he had stayed in it.

Perhaps one, big, sarcastic thunderclap will do what common sense and decency can't - get him to realise just how appalling it is that anyone in this country has to beg for food.

This Mr Bumble is hungry for nothing but votes. So take a leaf out of his book - and tell him you'll starve him into action.



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