Political column – December 10

It trips easily off the tongue, which is why politicians and union leaders love to trip it off theirs tongues so much. It is but a small jump to saying it is literally a matter of life and death – that is, people are literally going to starve to death this winter or literally going to freeze to death this winter.

Yet after posing the dilemma they never give their answer or even venture an opinion on the matter. Given it is one of the key issues for our straitened times, this is an enormous leadership deficit.

Why are they so ready to indulge in the cliched rhetoric while failing to give any advice on the issue?

So, faced with a stark choice of either staying warm or staying fed, what course should people take?

There are some statistics which give a helpful steer, although the pandemic has somewhat complicated the calculations and correlations in recent times. There are lots of different figures out there which you can peruse, but I think it's fair to say that in general being cold is a major killer in winter, leading to thousands, or tens of thousands, of deaths, with the elderly particularly hard hit.

The question of how many people starve to death each year in the UK appears to be much more difficult to quantify. One of the reasons for that is that deaths from malnutrition may well be due to medical reasons which are leading to malnutrition, rather than people simply not being able to afford to buy food.

People can, and sometimes do, die of malnutrition in hospital.

From what I've seen on the internet deaths directly attributable to malnutrition, caused by whatever reason, run into the hundreds.

The inference then is that if in the unfortunate position of facing a choice between heating and eating, choose heating, as it is relatively more advisable to be warm and hungry than cold and nourished – but obviously if you are both cold and hungry it is the worst of both worlds and double jeopardy.

At this time of year, and any time of year really, there is a moral dimension to the issue. Giving food for thought, so to speak, latest census information underlines the decline in the number of people identifying as Christian in England and Wales to a record low.

That means that not for well over 1,000 years has Christmas been so diminished as a collective Christian religious celebration.

It undoubtedly remains a cherished family occasion, and clearly thinking of others is not the special gift of those of faith. Nevertheless the traditional Christian Christmas message of "goodwill to all men," and so on, does give it a formal architecture and well understood code of compassionate conduct.

You only need to look at the telly adverts to see how important Christmas has now become as a consumer festival which is geared up to encourage people to gorge with plenty and to excess, with overflowing dinner tables laden with goodies.

After people have had their fill and can eat no more the leftovers may well go in the "food waste" bins.

I am old enough to have the phrase "think of the starving Biafrans" as a childhood memory. It was admonishment delivered to a generation of children to encourage them to finish off their plates.

The Biafrans were a starving African people and generally don't get invoked nowadays, but there are lots of starving people you can think about as sadly there is no shortage of them across the world today.

Objectively it will make no practical difference to their plight whether you finish your Christmas fare or not, but that was never the point.

What our "think of the starving Biafrans" parents were doing was encouraging us to think of the less fortunate, and implanting a sense of guilt about wastefulness.

When it comes to heating, quite apart from those struggling with their energy bills, there is an outside chance of power cuts this winter which would affect everybody.

In that case perhaps we should "think of the freezing Ukrainians" who, thanks to Putin, are going without power in a country in which inland areas have average winter temperatures below freezing, and not only that, currently have to contend with the prospect of being bombed or shelled in their homes.