Jack Monroe has expertly taken down a new ‘poverty tourism’ show featuring daughter of millionaire Tory peer Michelle Mone.
Monroe branded the whole thing “nonsense”:
https://twitter.com/BootstrapCook/status/1029446842080276486
Born Famous
The new Channel 4 programme will feature the daughter of millionaire Tory peer Michelle Mone.
Bethany Mone will star in the new show Born Famous in order to ‘confront’ her “feelings of privilege”. She’ll stay with a family in Bridgeton, Glasgow – where her mother grew up.
According to the Daily Record, research shows that Bridgeton is one of the poorest areas in Europe:
A child born in the area is three times more likely to suffer heart disease, four times more likely to be hospitalised and 10 times more likely to grow up in a jobless household than a child in Glasgow’s prosperous western suburbs
Michelle Mone, who came from nothing to an estimated net worth of £20m, voted for tax credit cuts in 2015. The cuts subsequently thrust some of the poorest people in the country even further into poverty.
Monroe’s experience
Monroe is a best-selling author and “actual expert in food, poverty and food banks”. They slammed the show, and shared their in-depth article on everything that’s wrong with such exploitive programmes. After relating a powerful personal account of living in poverty with an infant son, Monroe wrote:
Slipping into our scarred and malnourished skins for a day, knowing full well you are heading back to your mansion at the end of it, stuffed to the gills with all the freebies and luxury that most people can only dream of, is insulting, and cruel.
Hundreds of people agreed with Monroe, echoing frustration at the compassionless and exploitative programme:
https://twitter.com/JohnBaker1975/status/1029447803175661568
https://twitter.com/that_jodi/status/1029462063775707137
Some are infuriated that Mone will profit from the misery her mother voted for:
Mone has a neck of solid fucking brass.
She literally voted in the Lords to remove working tax credits from the poorest of the working poor.
Chutzpah of the first order.
— ℝ𝕠𝕤𝕤𝕔𝕠 𝔸𝕝𝕝𝕒𝕟 (@IATET) August 14, 2018
Michelle Mone’s daughter, a part time model and Instagram influencer is making a poverty safari type programme about how poor people in Bridgeton live, the same mother who voted to stop tax credits for working people in Bridgeton who do real jobs.
— Linda Ryan – Seans Trust (@Seansfanclub) August 12, 2018
Heartless vanity
As Monroe puts it:
Austerity is killing us in our thousands, and it is not a hunger game for the privileged to opt into for a day so they can pretend to have an insight.
Austerity and poverty have fatal consequences, and the depths of suffering and misery cannot be realised within a day or a week or a month of an “ego boosting challenge“.
To many, the programme will come across as another vain publicity stunt – one that will do nothing to help the millions who have to actually live in poverty day in day out thanks to Conservative austerity.
Get Involved!
– Contact your local MP telling them to stop and scrap Universal Credit.
– Support the Living Wage campaign.
– Read more by Jack Monroe.
