We are all in favour of clothes banks to follow food banks

It's not just that we're in favour in fact, it's that we cannot find anything wrong with the idea at all:

Louise Cooke, a 46-year-old ex-teacher and community worker in Nottingham, has never been elected nor is her work funded by the taxpayer – but she is filling in the gaps left by the government.

For the past two years, volunteering out the back of her local church, Cooke has been running Sharewear – what, in austerity’s language, we could dub a “clothes bank”. This isn’t packets of pasta or boxes of veg but winter coats and children’s shoes. Cooke describes the people who come through the doors as in “crisis”: anyone from job seekers to Syrian refugees, from low-paid workers to people on benefits (“We have people coming in on disabled people’s behalf because they’re housebound,” she adds).

As Cooke says: “No one should have to walk around in smelly clothes just because they haven’t got enough money. No child should have to go to school in ripped clothes.”

We entirely agree with the sentiment: Britain is a rich country and those are things that can be solved in a rich country. However, it is important to note what the problem is: incompetent government. And this is not a new incompetence: government has not become more incompetent as the result of the election of the Conservatives, or the Coalition, or the defeat of New Labour. Government has always been this incompetent if not worse. As is the case with food banks: no one with a couple of decades of adult life under their belt is unaware of the manner in which the benefits payment system has always had great gaping holes in it.

That is, there is no new and sudden need for these charitable activities. Rather, it's that we've now this new technology (and yes, a method of organisation like a food bank is indeed a technology) enabling us to solve these problems. For which, of course, a rousing Hurrah!

But we need to note the important point about these solutions. It is the little platoons sorting out the incompetence of government that is working here. Given that this is so yes, most certainly, why not have more of such little platoons working to solve this problem but don't, whatever we do, try to hand over the solution to that government which is the original cause of the problem.