Since the formation of the Conservative-led coalition government in 2010, there has been a striking correlation between the intensification of Britain’s welfare cuts and the rapid expansion of food banks. This confluence of poverty and philanthropy is a combination not seen since the Victorian era.

Rather than support state benefits for the poor, the Conservative-led coalition government is promoting “social enterprise” solutions to societal problems and framing private philanthropy as an agent of social cohesion. As in the Victorian period, rich industrialists are being given the authority to determine the availability of public assistance and character of recipients.

It is against this historical backdrop that we must consider the rapid expansion of philanthropic food banks. Few philanthropists of that time were prepared to admit that their self-serving, paternalistic attitudes towards the poor had created the circumstances they then sought to remedy. The manner in which the rich dispensed their largesse reflected the classical liberal ideology of the age, which attempted to ameliorate poverty not via the state, but through a vast array of voluntary organizations known as “societies.”