Lee Anderson (right): he wants to starve the children of people on Universal Credit who can’t afford to feed them properly, it seems.
Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson has made a fool of himself yet again.
In a Westminster Hall debate on the cost of food, he claimed it is a myth that people on Universal Credit are in poverty – as an excuse not to provide free school meals to everybody on the benefit.
He said some had “household incomes of over £40,000 a year” and “loopholes” in London allowed them to “top their wages up” by a further £30,000.
Maybe it’s true – but I doubt it. Universal Credit is paid to people on low incomes. For every pound earned above a defined allowance, 55p is removed from the amount a household receives.
With UC set at £334.91 a month for single claimants aged 25 or over, or £525.72 a month for joint claimants with either aged 25 or over, it is impossible for people to bring in £40k a year and still be on the benefit.
(It is also worth noting that the DWP stuck its own departmental foot in its spokesperson’s mouth when they said benefits are designed to ensure that “working always pays more” – because government policy for the last 13 years has been to push wages below the poverty level.)
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Sadiq Khan: he’s feeding London’s school pupils. Isn’t it a shame the Conservative government can’t think up policies that would help the families of London afford to do the same?
What a sad pickle for a country as rich as the UK – that its people can’t even afford to feed their children. Who has all the money?
Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced an emergency package of free meals for all primary school pupils in London, to help poverty-stricken families through the Tory-caused cost-of-living crisis.
Here’s the Evening Standard:
210,000 primary and secondary pupils in London … live in households on universal credit but miss out on free school meals – because their household income, excluding benefits, is over the threshold of £7,400 a year.
This low threshold applies irrespective of the number of children in the family and is causing deep hardship among families struggling with the spiralling cost of living.
Some hungry children were so desperate, they were stealing food from the school canteen and supermarkets to eat.
Sadiq Khan’s £130 million scheme will fund the 270,000 state primary school children in London who do not already receive free school meals, of whom an estimated 100,000 live in poverty.
The Mayor, who has repeatedly called on Government to extend free school meals to all children in poverty, said his scheme will be funded out of higher-than-expected business rates and council tax collections and will be for the 2023/2024 academic year only.
So it isn’t permanent, and it looks like it’s only during term time – so we’ll still need the Marcus Rashfords of this world if matters get so tight that children end up starving during the holidays.
And of course it doesn’t help the 100,000 secondary pupils in London, or the 600,000 school pupils outside the capital, who are also facing poverty-triggered hunger.
And I doubt if councils in the UK’s poorer areas will have higher business rates and council tax collections on which to rely.
Interestingly – once again – we are being told that the Tory government’s failure to ensure that our school pupils are properly nourished is harmful to the economy that they still claim to be best-suited to safeguard:
Research by accounting firm PwC published by the Evening Standard has shown that investment in free school meals would yield a net economic benefit to society of £2.45 billion over 20 years.
PwC calculated that the cost would be £6.44 billion over two decades but would lead to benefits in educational attainment, mental and physical health impacts and productivity of £8.9 billion – a net benefit of £2.45bn.
So the Conservative government, once again, has been shown to be deliberately – let’s remember – harming not only our children, but our future livelihoods.
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School meals: Boris Johnson’s Brexit means these are soon to become a rarity.
The Brexit-prompted HGV driver shortage means school canteens are going to run out of food, it was revealed – just as English schools reopened for the autumn term.
Now, why wasn’t this ever mentioned before?
HGV drivers are chronically low-paid, which is probably why there was a shortage of 60,000 even before all the EU-national drivers – 25,000 of them – were told to go home by Boris Johnson’s gang of xenophobes (you call them the government).
There were plans to train up 19,000 new drivers but they were foiled by Covid-19.
So that’s 104,000 HGVs that aren’t servicing our supermarkets and schools. It must be terrific for reducing pollution but it’s not so good for your child’s nutritional needs.
This pathetic excuse for a government can’t even get food into school canteens. https://t.co/qt8RbBqXfS
Farmers are struggling to get workers to bring in the harvest, meaning much of the food they have grown over the last year may spoil.
The palaver to get a seasonal workers permit is not worth the hassle or expense as they can get work far easier in EU countries. Why would they want to return to this plague ridden, 3rd world, nonentity Torydom when all they're met with is xenophobic abuse from Brexiters/NF/EDL. https://t.co/wCjFegSAhn
Formerly people came from the European Union but “post-Brexit, that is a problem”.
Apparently 70,000 seasonal workers are needed but only 30,000 seasonal work permits are available to people now living in the EU. And there aren’t enough UK workers to fill the gap.
Either the Tories didn’t think about this when they were setting the number of seasonal permits available… or they deliberately planned to sabotage the harvest. Neither alternative is particularly palatable, is it?
This Writer will be charitable and suggest that the Tories didn’t think. There’s a precedent for this: they didn’t think the withdrawal from Afghanistan would be the mess they made it and they didn’t think giving Covid-related contracts worth billions of pounds to their inexperienced friends would do any harm, after all.
So this is probably just another symptom of Boris Johnson’s spectacular – nay, stellar – incompetence.
I’m sure you’ll take comfort from that when you look at your empty plate later this year.
And by the way, that’ll be partly due to a knock-on effect of all this: food prices are going to rocket:
the shortage of lorry drivers and more regulatory checks on imported food [will] combine with rising prices for fuel, freight and raw materials, experts have warned.
So that’s even before the effect on the harvest is taken into account!
For example – the BBC. The omission that Peter Stefanovic mentions below is just symptomatic of the Corporation’s efforts to safeguard Boris Johnson and his Tory gang from any responsibility for their stupid decisions:
How the hell is it possible that @BBCNews are this morning reporting on checks & controls required on goods entering Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK without pointing out Boris Johnson sold his “oven ready” Brexit deal to public & Parliament on the promise of NO CHECKS!👇 https://t.co/y5QlsCwmwL
And – inevitably – they are helped in this by the utter failure of Labour MPs to highlight the harm and the reason for it. Anyone would think they had faults of their own to hide:
Labour MPs who voted for Johnson's Brexit deal complaining about Johnson's Brexit deal.
Journos & celebs who enabled the election of a lazy, self-serving, bigot complaining about the lazy, self-serving, bigot.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic.
— Prof Gayle Letherby 💙 #PeaceAndJustice (@gletherby) August 30, 2021
The silence from @UKLabour and @Keir_Starmer is a dereliction of duty. The determination to support this govt at the expense of all of us as the food chain collapses. Inaction from both labour and govt is criminal but the party I once loved, the party we conce relied on has gone
Perhaps it’s time people were reminded that they voted for this fiasco. Given a choice between a leader who would have ensured that there was food on our plates and Boris Johnson, the UK’s people voted for starvation:
You can call Jeremy Corbyn a “national security risk” all you wish, but you can bet your bottom dollar you would’ve still been able to get a milkshake with your extra value meal.
For some, this will be the hardest part to swallow.
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The difference between sustenance and starvation: will medical staff step in and point out to families who fear the stigma of claiming food vouchers that there is no shame in feeding their children?
It’s a curiously British phenomenon, this – the mass idiocy that encourages us to say we’re managing (when we’re not) rather than accept help from the government.
Government help is in short supply under the Tories. Anybody who has the chance should seize it with both hands.
But people who can – and should – claim food vouchers aren’t doing it, according to Marcus Rashford, whose campaign for the government to provide free school meals during the holidays saved thousands of your children from starvation over the last year.
The BBC’s report is garbled regarding who can benefit, as it mixes Rashford’s school meals scheme with one for pregnant women and low-income families with children aged under four. Perhaps this new campaign is for both.
Rashford himself, writing in the British Medical Journal, said the food voucher scheme has helped 57,000 parents, but expressed concern that it was “plateauing”.
He said more than 40 per cent of people who were eligible had not registered, and suggested that this was because they came from communities with “no internet, no high street, no word of mouth” – in other words, no way of learning that the scheme even exists.
He called on health professionals to do more to ensure everybody knows about the scheme who are entitled to apply, “especially given the planned digitisation of the scheme this autumn, which will disproportionately disadvantage those without easy access to the internet”.
He asked staff to use an online eligibility calculator and “consider collaborating with us on communicating and educating people about the scheme when possible”.
Crucially, though, he also acknowledged that some people may have been shamed out of applying, in fear that they would be labelled (perhaps as the “undeserving poor”?) because they have been pushed into a position where they have been prevented from being able to feed their children.
He said more needs to be done to end any “silly” stigma and to persuade people to register for support.
I hope doctors and other medical staff pay attention to this.
It would be shocking if children starved because people who have sworn to do no harm found it awkward to do a little good.
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Brazen: Ford’s false claims are disproved by her own voting record.
How brazen can these Tories be?
Children’s Minister Vicky Ford has told Good Morning Britain viewers that she – not Marcus Rashford – was the person who got the government to extend free school meals into the holidays during the Covid-19 crisis, and who created lockdown meal vouchers.
She said she was not influenced by Rashford’s campaign at all.
Her claim has been ridiculed by those of us who can read Hansard, which shows that she voted against demands for such schemes – twice.
I want to know what Marcus Rashford – who received an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List last year for his services to vulnerable children in the UK during COVID-19, has to say about Ms Ford’s claims.
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Marcus Rashford: he wins campaigns against Boris Johnson’s government (unlike Keir Starmer’s Labour Party) so it is welcome that he is spearheading this call for an all-encompassing review of government policy on child food poverty.
After the second ‘Free School Meals’ scandal in three days, This Writer feels sure I was among many people who wondered why Marcus Rashford – now generally accepted as the Opposition to the Tory government in such matters – had not spoken up.
Now we know.
Rashford, who was instrumental in forcing the government to provide free school meals during Covid-19 lockdowns and during holidays – including Christmas – when the Tories wanted children to starve, has not confined himself to a single FSM-related issue.
Instead he has joined with celebrity chefs and campaigners to demand a full review of Tory policy on child food poverty which they rightly say is not fit for purpose.
They have written a letter to Boris Johnson and his trained-ape-serving-as-Education-Secretary, Gavin Williamson, here:
We are writing to you to express our concern that the issue of Free School Meals risks once again becoming divisive, and to encourage the Government to undertake an urgent comprehensive review of Free School Meal policy to reform the system for the longer term. We are ready and willing to support your Government in whatever way we can to make this review a reality and to help develop a set of recommendations that everyone can support. It is only by working together that we end child food poverty.
We know that all political parties agree on the outcome that we are aiming for – ensuring that all children have access to enough health, good-quality food to fulfil their potential. Last Autumn, the Government announced several very positive new measures to help combat child hunger, and we strongly welcomed those announcements. This week, we were heartened to see the Department for Education’s swift response to reports of inadequate Free School Meal food parcels being provided by private companies. The robustness of the message from you and the Secretary of State on this issue was very welcome.
I can only assume the last two sentences of this paragraph were included to butter Johnson up, as most of the nation was horrified that Johnson had contracted out responsibility to provide £30 food parcels to private, profit-making firms who did what came naturally – skimmed off five-sixths of the cash in profit and provided £5 worth of food to cover children’s meals for 10 days.
Some Tories even went on the record to say they couldn’t understand the fuss as this was only supposed to provide for a single meal in the day – without realising that their right-wing policies have stamped on families so hard that this may be the only food those children see in a day.
Despite these positive commitments, we strongly feel that now (following the series of problems which have arisen over school food vouchers, holiday provision and food parcels since the start of the pandemic) is the right moment for you to step back and review the policy in more depth. The signatories to this letter urge the Government to conduct an urgent comprehensive review into Free School Meal policy across the UK to provide recommendations for the next Spending Review.
This would allow the Government to provide strong national leadership on children’s food so that our nation’s most disadvantaged children and their families, already disproportionately impacted by Covid-19, don’t continue to bear the brunt. In the first lockdown (March-August), 2.3 million children experienced food insecurity and during the 2020 summer holidays 850,000 children reported that they or their families visited a food bank. Free School Meals are a very important part of the safety net that protects children from impoverished families from hunger and poor nutrition.
We believe the review should be debated in Parliament and published before the 2021 summer holidays. The process will require collaboration from politicians in all the devolved nations with responsibility for school food in their regions, and must involve close consultation with children and young people, as well as teachers, charities, NGOs, frontline catering staff and school meals service providers. It should draw on evidence of food insecurity and health inequalities. We stand ready to provide our full support to the review process.
And experience tells us that the only people Boris Johnson’s government likes to consult are those who are likely to agree with what he wants to do; dissenting voices are ignored. This will make it very difficult for the Tories to devise a strategy that works for any group wider than the Conservative government of Boris Johnson.
We recommend that its scope include:
1. The current eligibility thresholds for Free School Meals. The Government should seek to ensure disadvantaged children are not excluded from Free School Meal eligibility (in line with National Food Strategy recommendations) and to work with the Devolved Administrations to eliminate disparities between the nations. Current estimates show 2 in 5 UK children under the poverty line are missing out. The ongoing eligibility for children from No Recourse to Public Funds should be address explicitly.
2. How funding for Free School Meals can deliver the biggest nutritional and educational impact, supporting children’s learning and well-being throughout the school day and during the school holidays (including breakfast provision and the School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme). This should include whether the current allowance for Free School Meals is adequate and whether funding for national breakfasts adequately covers all who would benefit from access to provision.
3. How schools can be supported to deliver the best quality school meals which adhere to school food standards and which ensure the poorest children receive the best possible offer. This should include introducing mandatory monitoring and evaluation on an ongoing basis of Free School Meal take-up, the quality/nutritional adequacy of meals, and examining how the financial transparency of the current system can be improved.
4. What we have learned from Covid-19 and its impact on children in low-income families and the implications of this for school food policy for the next 5 years, as the country recovers.
5. Ensuring that existing school food programmes (such as Free School Meals, holiday provision and breakfast provision) eliminate experiences of stigma for the poorest students. Review the impact that Universal Infant Free School Meals has had on stigma, health, and education.
6. The role of family income (wages and benefits) in enabling families to afford quality food in and outside of school time and during the holidays with choice and dignity.
The Tory response to this should be interesting. Tories habitually say families should be able to provide for their own children, despite the fact that their own policies have squeezed family incomes beyond breaking-point. It’s no good saying people should be able to afford things when you are responsible for ensuring that they can’t!
This review would provide the Government with the opportunity to future-proof its policy on school food, and to carefully consider how best to support low-income children and families in the aftermath of the pandemic. It would also demonstrate the Government’s commitment to tackling child food poverty in the longer term and be a significant step towards a comprehensive long-term plan.
I foresee difficulties.
Already the Welsh Government – which is run by the Labour Party – has taken to Twitter to let people in Wales know that the problems created by the Tories in England do not affect them:
You may have seen stories regarding half term #FreeSchoolMeals across the border.
We'd like to reassure parents in Wales that this is not the case here and we will continue to provide them throughout the holidays for our children. https://t.co/52N4Dv0VcS
— Welsh Government #StayHome🏠 (@WelshGovernment) January 15, 2021
The Tories are hardly going to want to work with organisations that are merrily scoring points off them.
School food is essential in supporting the health and learning of our most disadvantaged children. Now, at a time when children have missed months of in-school learning and the pandemic has reminded us of the importance of our health, this is a vital next step.
The letter is signed by Rashford, Jamie Oliver, Emma Thompson, Tom Kerridge and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and by representatives of Food Foundation, School Food Matters, Chefs in Schools, the Children Society, Children’s Food Campaign, Children’s First Alliance, Feeding Britain, Soil Association, The Bread and Butter Thing, Mayor’s Fund for London, The School Food People, Meals & More, Poverty and Inequality Commission, Independent Food Aid Network UK, Impact on Urban Health, The Fair Education Alliance, the WI, ASSIST FM, Magic Breakfast, Turn2Us, Buttle UK, Greater Manchester Poverty Action, End Child Poverty Coalition, TACT, Scottish Qut of School Care Network, Khulisa UK, The Mighty Creatives, The Equality Trust, One Parent Families Scotland, End Furniture Poverty, Family Action, USDAW, Child Poverty Action Group, Biteback 2030, Just Fair, Rose Hill & Donnington Advice Centre, Oxford, Co-Op Retail, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, The British Psychological Society, British Association of Social Workers, Association of School and College Leaders, King’s Cross Academy, Academies Enterprise Trust, Cabot Learning Federation, Co-op Academies Trust, The Shared Learning Trust, The Eden Academy Trust, LDBS Academies Trusts, National Governance Association, Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and Teach First.
I include the whole list because I think it is important for us to understand the sheer number of organisations that now exist to address children’s food poverty – or have to address it as part of their wider activities.
This has only become such a major issue because the Conservatives have forced so many families into food poverty.
So it seems worthwhile to raise the issue of whether we should stop allowing Conservative Party members to form governments that inflict such misery, such starvation, on so many millions of us, just so a tiny minority can live in the kind of luxury that most of us cannot even imagine.
There’s only one question left to ask:
Why is Rashford doing the Labour Party’s job? If Jeremy Corbyn was still party leader, Labour would be all over this.
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Scandal: only two days ago, the Tory government came under attack for letting an outsourcing company skim £25 in profit from the cost of a £30 food hamper FOR CHILDREN. Now the Tories are trying to confuse parents by forcing them to apply to their local council for food vouchers over half term week. Is it all a big distraction from something else they don’t want us to see?
Isn’t it incredible?
Days after they were found to have been starving children by outsourcing £30 ‘free school meal’ hampers to a company that provided only £5 worth of food and kept the other £25 to itself, the Conservative government has announced a plan to starve schoolkids during half term week.
They say they won’t allow schools to provide free meals to pupils who usually get them; instead, local councils have been given responsibility to provide food under the Covid Winter Grant Scheme.
This scheme provided £170 million to councils in December. Under it, families have to apply to their local council for help, and will get a £15 voucher for each qualifying child.
It seems a deliberate attempt to cause confusion by switching schemes just when families need clarity.
And how much of that £170m fund has been spent already? It’s not a lot, divided across the whole of England (other UK countries have equivalent schemes, according to the government).
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, warned that switching schemes meant “yet more disruption to free schools meals could lie ahead in half term”.
He said that rather than allowing schools to carry on providing food it would cause an “unnecessary logistical nightmare”.
He said ministers should now “hang their heads in shame” for threatening more “chaos and confusion” over providing food.
“These are battles which should not have to be repeatedly fought,” said Mr Courtney.
But they are.
And both the media and the public tend to focus on recurring issues like this, to the exclusion of other matters happening at the time.
School meals don’t cost a huge amount – in government terms – and it won’t cause too much upset if the Tories are forced to capitulate again.
So This Writer is left to ask what else is happening that the Tories don’t want us to know?
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Let’s not beat around the bush: your lovable Conservative government led by cuddly Boris Johnson deliberately starved schoolchildren by outsourcing free school meals to a very expensive company – because it was part of the so-called ‘chumocracy’.
The government had promised to provide £30 to feed children for periods lasting 10 days.
But rather than giving vouchers to parents so they could buy the food themselves, or even tasking local authorities to do it, the Department for Education outsourced the job to private, profit-making firms.
£30.00 food voucher direct to family for £30.00 of food to feed starving kids = socialism = bad. £30.00 to private Co. to provide £5.00 of food to starving kids and pocket £25.00 for shareholders and CEO = Capitalism = Good?
I call it disgusting.
— Tom. Just wear a mask, FFS! Esq. 🇪🇺🇬🇧 (@tominfrance) January 12, 2021
One of these firms is called Chartwells. It seems it won the contract as part of the so-called ‘chumocracy’ – it is part of the food service giant Compass Group whose former chairman, Paul Walsh, was once a member of David Cameron’s business advisory group.
Chartwells have always been ridiculously expensive. When hosting visitors in my last university they charged exorbitant amounts for vacuum pump containers of really awful ‘coffee’. The whole system stinks.
Instead of putting all £30 into food hampers for hungry children, it seems Chartwells provided just £5.22 worth of food and kept the remaining £24.78 as profit.
Food parcels have been brought in to replace £30 vouchers given to parents to spend in supermarkets as schools close for remote learning. But one mum valued the contents of her parcel at no more than £5.22, if bought from Asda.
She was given two jacket potatoes, a can of beans, eight single cheese slices, a loaf of bread, two carrots, three apples, two Soreen Malt Lunchbox Loaves, three Frubes, some pasta and one tomato.
Chartwells has protested that it followed Department for Education guidelines – which throws the blame back towards the Tories – but has also admitted that details of the contents of its hampers do not conform with its own specifications.
Whichever way you slice it, someone has been creaming cash from this scheme and allowing children to starve – and the only reason they’ve managed it is because of the Tory obsession with privatisation.
The Tories are starving children & have been for a long time. We cannot ignore this. pic.twitter.com/wpe5cwKEto
It is a ridiculous state of affairs. Everybody in the Tory government, from Johnson down, knows that giving a contract to a private company means it will keep some of the cash for itself.
So a claim to be providing £30 to feed children is a lie. They were always providing £30 to their friends in food companies.
Sadly, many of the parents whose children are now being forced to starve on pennies-worth of food per day actually voted for this treatment in December 2019.
An awful lot of people will say that the food in the right hand photo is all that poor kids deserve, /because/ they are poor. They’re the same people that watch Benefits Street and other shows demonising poor people. https://t.co/3UzaEtGC1P
The question has to be asked: why weren’t vouchers provided to parents?
Was it because another Tory – Ben Bradley – put out a false claim that they would squander the money on “crack dens” and “brothels”, even though the vouchers that existed at the time specifically prohibited their use for such purposes?
This Tory MP spread this story and refused to apologise. The effect was to fix in people's minds the idea that food vouchers were being exchanged for crack, thus justifying lucrative contracts to companies to leech our tax money. Again. #ToriesStarveKidshttps://t.co/cD0kI8WCE8
— CrémantCommunarde#ActivistLawyer 🕊️⚖️ ✋💙 (@0Calamity) January 12, 2021
It only takes a piece of fake news like this from one influential source to influence large numbers of people into believing the lie, and I wonder whether this was what enabled the Tory government to starve children in the way it has.
Think of it this way: Isn’t it odd that many people get outraged at the (faked) possibility of someone spending a fraction of a food voucher on alcohol (more likely than Bradley’s choices but still impossible) – but don’t bat an eyelid when private firms take 80 per cent of food vouchers for their own profits?
Perhaps the most pertinent comment on this whole shabby affair is the following:
I think we all agree that we want a government that can turn a £5 food voucher into £30 worth of food rather than the other way around?
Sadly, it would have been necessary for millions of people to have voted a different way in 2019 for that to have happened. And something stopped them:
When I see hundreds of tweets expressing understandable outrage over the latest #FreeSchoolMeals fiasco, I just think of the hundreds of Labour MPs, staffers and grandees who worked their socks off to destroy Labour's electoral chances under Corbyn! They are more vile than Tories
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After the Tory Environment Secretary defended his government’s determination to starve poverty-stricken children during the school holidays – including Christmas – people in his Cornwall constituency have retaliated with a “Banksy”-style graffiti criticism.
The text reads:
“Georgie Porgie pudding and pie,
“Starved the kids and made them cry.
“#endchildfoodpoverty”
The artist even painted it onto a board that was then discovered attached to the front door of his constituency office:
Tories like Eustice thought members of the public have short memories and would forget that the decision to starve children at Christmas had been made by them.
Responses like this make the point clear:
They thought wrong.
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Money, money, money: and none of it is for hungry children. The £63m fund mentioned so often by Boris Johnson and others was not for that purpose and was all spent before they even started talking it up.
You know that £63 million fund Conservative ministers like Robert Jenrick, Nadhim Zahawi, Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson keep saying is available to feed poor children over school holidays?
It was all spent weeks ago.
It came to only a few hundred thousand pounds per council.
When they Tories provided it in July, it was with a proviso that the money had to be spent within 12 weeks.
And it wasn’t specifically for feeding hungry children anyway.
Here’s Peter Stefanovic:
This has to stop!
Truth twisting Gov’t Minister Robert Jenrick still citing £63m allocated in June to justify his cowardly decision to vote down a motion to prevent more than a million kids going hungry during the holidays
Next time a Tory minister turns up on the media peddling this lie, complain.
Complain to that minister personally, and also to the media outlet, be it the BBC, Sky News or some local radio station operating out of a Portakabin.
Let’s expose these liars and child-starvers for what they are.
Note: This Site has been reminded that a handful of Conservatives voted in favour of feeding children during the school holidays, in rebellion against their party’s line that called for your kids to starve. Obviously they should not be targeted during protests. The are:
Caroline Ansell( quit Government post)
Robert Halfon
Jason McCartney
Anne Marie Morris
Holly Mumby-Croft
No doubt there are perfectly good reasons to criticise the above-named people as well – they are Tories, after all – but this isn’t one of them.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
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Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
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