Eat or heat in 'A land of plenty'?

Ironically next week when Howard Quayle MHK, Manx Chief Minister, gets to his feet and delivers a ‘State of the Nation’ in Tynwald address will coincide with the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (Oct 17th).

It's debatable if any new initiatives to tackle poverty in the Isle of Man will be announced we will probably have to wait for Treasury Minister Alf Cannan MHK to conclude his great budget ‘talkathon’ with the masses and even then I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Of course poverty is relative and in some parts of the world there is extreme poverty. However sticking closer to home it is clear that here in one of the foremost performing economies on the planet (if COMIN are to be believed) we have need and deprivation and its growing.

Chief Minister Howard Quayle was alluding in a recent MTTV debate to all that has been down. There are more people in work. There’s a minimum wage and talk of a living wage. This however has not contained either food or fuel poverty and as winter wears on this is sure to become worse.

When punters like me write critiques of government on social media you often get some knob of a Minister saying we need ‘action not words’. But at the end of the day the only folk who can take action are the government and yet they seem quite happy to have what they term ‘the third sector’ picking up the broken pieces of society.

I’m often flippant but in truth I’m more despondent about the direction of travel over income inequality in the Isle of Man than I have ever been.

There does not seem to be a collective voice that speaks out for the marginalised, those on fixed incomes and the low and middle income worker. The government has turned its back on the people - don’t take my word for it ask around. There is a negative perception of this current regime and indeed the one glimmer of hope is that some I have heard voice discontent are those I would describe as comfortably of. Obviously such folk are not concerned for themselves they simply not comfortable with the indifference they see displayed by those with their hands on the levers of power.

Bernard Moffatt