‘Our garden was our foodbank’: Tory MP Lee Anderson says older generations were ‘more resourceful’

Conservative MP Lee Anderson has said that people were “more resourceful” in the past, comparing his family garden growing up to modern food banks.

The outspoken deputy chairman of the Conservatives used an interview on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast to discuss his own experience of growing up, as he argued that there was a “different culture” when it came to work and earning money in the 1970s.

Mr Anderson, who represents Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, has previously attracted criticism for suggesting that people in the UK use food banks because they “cannot cook properly” and “cannot budget”.

“Things were more expensive I think back in the ’70s. Food was definitely more expensive, relatively speaking,” he told the podcast.

“We had one holiday a year, which was a caravan in Skegness. We had a garden full of vegetables, chickens at the bottom of the garden for the eggs. And that was our foodbank.

“Our garden was our foodbank. So if we were short of anything, my dad went into the garden or the allotment and got the food out.

He said that he did not think that his family were “impoverished or in poverty or dirt poor”.

“Perhaps if some people today could go back in a time machine and see how we lived, they’d probably think we were very, very poor. But I didn’t see that at the time.”

Pressed on whether such comments could strike a lot of people as unsympathetic or unrealistic for many, Mr Anderson doubled down.

“People were more resourceful,” he said.

“My parents were the children of men that had fought in the war, they’d gone through very, very difficult times.

“So it was a different culture, there was a different outlook on life. And they made do.

“My dad always said to me – if you need more money, go and work a weekend shift, do a bit of overtime.

“It wasn’t ‘complain on Facebook or Twitter or go and do a TikTok video or just complain to government’.

"It was your responsibility – if you want to have children, you pay for them. If you want nice things, you pay for them.”