Marcus Rashford: Natalie Elphicke said he should have stayed out of politics after he missed a penalty in the Euro 2020 final last year. Now Elphicke’s fellow Tory Liz Truss wants footballers to be involved in politics after all. These Tory hypocrites just want the rest of us to do whatever suits THEM best, at any particular moment.
Confused?
It’s a little more than seven months since Tory MP Natalie Elphicke said footballer Marcus Rashford should concentrate on his “day job” rather than become involved in politics.
She was attacking Rashford after his campaigning ensured that the poorest schoolchildren could avoid malnutrition by forcing the government to continue providing free school meals to them during school holidays at the height of the Covid-19 crisis.
After he missed a vital penalty in the Euro 2020 final, she said he should have focused on his football rather than “playing politics”.
Elphicke later apologised – after her comment became a matter of public knowledge.
It later transpired that Elphicke herself wasn’t entirely focused on her own “day job”, after it was revealed that she earned almost £100 per hour as chair of the New Homes Quality Board.
How opinions change when it’s expedient for them to do so!
Here’s Elphicke’s fellow Tory – Foreign Secretary Liz Truss – urging English footballers to become political and boycott the Champions League Final in St Petersburg, Russia, if their team manages to win a place in that match:
Her comments were motivated by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, of course.
But they expose yet another vein of hypocrisy in the words of UK politicians: they want footballers out of politics when it disadvantages them, but then they want footballers to make political decisions when it suits their own purposes.
People like Liz Truss want to have their cake and eat it – all the time.
As it happens, This Writer would have supported a boycott of the Champions League final, if it was to take place in St Petersburg. But UEFA has stripped Russia of that privilege and the even will take place in Paris.
My own stance is not hypocritical, of course: I have always supported Marcus Rashford’s intervention in politics.
If more of us took active control of our political lives, we might have fewer hypocrites like Truss and Elphicke running our country into the ground.
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Marcus Rashford: he has done far more for the United Kingdom than Natalie Elphicke.
Natalie Elphicke should have learned to keep her opinions to herself after she tried to influence senior judges after her husband was convicted of sexual assault. Clearly she didn’t.
That breach of the MPs’ code of conduct resulted in a pathetic punishment – just one day’s suspension from Parliament. Clearly it wasn’t enough to teach her the lesson she needed to learn.
Earlier this year, she criticised Marcus Rashford – the footballer whose campaigning ensured that the poorest schoolchildren could avoid malnutrition by forcing the government to continue providing free school meals to them during school holidays at the height of the Covid-19 crisis.
After he missed a vital penalty in the Euro 2020 final, she said he should have focused on his football rather than “playing politics”.
What a hypocrite! It turns out that she is among the legion of Tory MPs who have a second job.
The Mirror has the story:
Natalie Elphicke earns almost £100 an hour as the chair of the New Homes Quality Board.
She was handed a one-off £12,000 in November 2020, and since January has been paid just under £700 per week for eight hours’ work, on top of her £81k job as an MP pic.twitter.com/FB8LcNuZdS
Ms Elphicke later apologised, saying: "I regret messaging privately a rash reaction about Marcus Rashford's missed penalty and apologise to him for any suggestion that he is not fully focussed on his football." pic.twitter.com/DtbkU3bBKz
Perhaps Ms Elphicke was distracted from her responsibilities as an MP by the demands of her own second job?
In any case, since she is clearly averse to the idea of people having occupations that distract them from their main work – and therefore must disagree with the Tory claim that it brings a “richness” to their Parliamentary experience…
Will she be resigning her £100-an-hour second job any time soon?
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Starmer: his policy chief tells him to focus on the middle classes rather than the “undeserving” poor – so he sits there in his best suit and haircut waving the flag at us. Meanwhile thousands starve because they’re afraid of being labelled by this posh psychological bully.
Earlier today (August 5) This Site published a piece commenting on Marcus Rashford’s concern that people weren’t claiming food vouchers for their children for fear of the “stigma” that would be attached to them if they did.
Connected with that, I see that advice given to then-interim Labour leader Harriet Harman in 2015 – by that party’s current strategy director – advised her to ignore the needs of the “undeserving poor” and focus on the desires of the middle class.
There is a strong element of bullying in this.
You can bet your bottom dollar that Keir Starmer is wholeheartedly buying into that strategy today – you only have to look at where his priorities lie to see that he couldn’t give a fig for anybody who doesn’t work in a suit and earn a six-figure salary.
And people who don’t have white-collar jobs and huge salaries – the vast majority of us – are aware of this, even if we haven’t been told explicitly.
“Don’t ask us for help because you won’t get it.”
“You are a sponger.”
“You are a scrounger.”
“If you had the slightest value, you would be lifting yourself out of poverty.”
We’ve heard those lines many times before – and others like them.
The fact that Labour endorses those via the policies put forward by its strategy director means people know there’s no hope for them if they admit poverty.
So they do the British thing: stiff upper lip, keep up appearances, pretend to be “managing” even when they aren’t.
And they avoid schemes set up to help them, even to the point of letting their children starve.
(And this feeds in to the policy demands of both the Tories and StarmerLabour, because they can then claim that such initiatives aren’t needed.)
It is insidious and it is evil. Perhaps Starmer should sack Deborah Mattinson and hire Marcus Rashford instead?
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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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Not only did a Tory minister make false claims to Parliament about racism in the Labour Party, but the official record of the debate – Hansard – was doctored to make it seem that she did not.
Worse still, Victoria Atkins had already added to her party’s tally of racism by telling a fellow MP who happens not to be white to know her place and not be uppity with her betters (although she didn’t use those exact words).
Her shocking abuse of her position has sparked a demand for the Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, to take action – not just to correct the record but to save the reputation of the House of Commons.
Here’s just one complaint to Hoyle, from Twitter, with follow-up messages to show the issue:
Hi @LindsayHoyle_MP Victoria Atkins MP lied to the House yesterday during her little two-minute-hate against Corbyn. Luciana Berger had no special protection. It's a lie. When do you start taking control of the House? When is Atkins required to correct her statement?
Hansard has inserted three words into her speech that she did not say. The effect is to cover up a mistake (or deliberate falsehood) that she stated, which was to quote the remit of the EHRC as if she were quoting its conclusions. pic.twitter.com/jCWmWTdsQE
— leftworks #WeAreCorbyn #IStandWithJeremyCorbyn (@leftworks1) July 15, 2021
You can see that Leftworks is absolutely correct by watching this video (ironically posted by a fan of Atkins).
Victoria Atkins not taking any lectures from Jeremy Corbyn about online hate. pic.twitter.com/LRy2WcWeXn
She did indeed quote the EHRC’s remit as though it were that organisation’s conclusion – it was not – and Hansard did indeed insert three words to falsify the record.
The effect of Atkins’s words at the time they were said, and in that place, would have been to negate Jeremy Corbyn’s argument – she was effectively saying that he was a racist and therefore had no right to accuse others.
Furthermore, of course, her claim about Luciana Berger needing police protection was false.
Right-thinking people are up in arms about this – and rightly so:
One of the many tragic consequences of the cynical Blairite smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn is the sight of racist Tory scumbags cheering on Victoria Atkins as she berates and patronises a 72-year-old anti-racism campaigner who was opposing fascists before she was born.
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥🥀🇵🇸 (@WarmongerHodges) July 14, 2021
Ms Atkins, who was standing in for her racist boss, Home Secretary Priti Patel, was in the Commons to answer an urgent question on what the government would do to stop racist abuse on the social media.
Patel had been – rightly – accused of “stoking” such abuse by Tyrone Mings of the England football team, whose teammates Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho were victims of it.
When she was tackled on the racism of her own prime minister by rising Labour star Zarah Sultana, Atkins treated her as if she were a black housemaid in the pre-Civil War American south, warning her to “lower” her “tone”:
Priti Patel was too cowardly to come and answer questions. So she sent her tone police officer Victoria Atkins. Lovely flare of classist “don’t dare speak like that to me.” pic.twitter.com/SWwwESNekc
I make no apologies for adding in this tweet, which includes much of the same video material, for the sake of Seema Chandwani’s observation about the way Ms Sultana was treated:
🙄 @zarahsultana is an amazingly intelligent and articulate woman.
But she’s non-White so her confidence and assertiveness is viewed as aggression!
— Seema Chandwani #BLM (@SeemaChandwani) July 14, 2021
Shall we have a think about racism by the prime minister – that’s Boris Johnson, by the way – and by Atkins’s boss Patel?
Let’s start with Priti Patel, who locked asylum-seekers from foreign countries into filthy concentration camps where overcrowding caused hundreds of them to catch Covid-19. How many of them died? We haven’t seen the figures.
She wants to bring in a new law making it an offence to help refugees into the UK – even by saving them from drowning in the sea off the UK’s coasts.
Another Bill passing through Parliament at the moment will target the GRT community – Gypsies, Romanies and Travellers – by assuming that they are committing crimes simply because they are Gypsies, Romanies or Travellers. This is classically-defined racism.
The Home Office at which Atkins is a minister destroyed the records showing that members of the Windrush Generation were UK citizens – and then pursued an aggressive policy to deny them services they had spent decades funding, like NHS healthcare and state benefits, while taking action to deport them. One may conclude from this that Atkins is a racist herself.
Need I go on?
As for Boris Johnson, Twitter has been full of commentary on his racism:
— leftworks #WeAreCorbyn #IStandWithJeremyCorbyn (@leftworks1) July 15, 2021
The changes to Atkins’s speech change the meaning of the words and are therefore not permissible.
As Commons Speaker – the MP who chairs sessions of the House of Commons – Lindsay Hoyle needs to act to save its reputation.
How many other changes are being made to Hansard, that nobody catches because they happen surreptitiously?
And why would Hoyle – or anyone working in Parliament – wish to support or enable these Tory racists?
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Hypocrite: Patel chose to side with racists who opposed the England team ‘taking the knee’ against racism – then tried to take the moral high ground when the same racists heaped abuse on team players for missing penalties. Tyrone Mings was right to tackle her.
Kudos to Tyrone Mings for correctly singling out Priti Patel and the Tory government as the cause of the wave of racist abuse against members of the England football team after Sunday’s Euro 2020 loss.
Readers of This Site will know I have been writing about Patel’s racism for a considerable period of time, but Vox Political doesn’t have the following that Mings has. He will get the message to millions, while I only reach thousands.
He correctly identified Patel’s dog-whistle racism as the cause for which the attacks on his teammates Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho were symptoms.
She denigrated England’s decision to ‘take the knee’ in support of the fight against racism as “gesture politics” that she would not support – encouraging a certain type of ‘fan’ to shout abuse when the team did it. I called her out over it in an article on June 15.
Other examples of Patel’s racism include her Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that advocates prejudice against the Gypsy/Romany/Traveller community.
And her immigration policy locked hundreds of people into a concentration camp together at the height of the Covid pandemic, causing hundreds of them to be infected with the disease. She is pushing a law through Parliament that will make it illegal for refugees to come to the UK, and anybody helping them to do so – even if it is the RNLI rescuing them from drowning – could face imprisonment for life.
So Mings was absolutely on-target when he scorned her condemnation of the racist abuse his teammates received.
“You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens,” he tweeted.
You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens. https://t.co/fdTKHsxTB2
It really is vile hypocrisy – as was Patel’s sudden show of support for England as it became clear that Gareth Southgate’s squad was heading for the final. I also highlighted that, on July 8.
Team Captain Harry Kane has also condemned the racist attacks on his teammates, saying, “If you abuse anyone on social media you’re not an England fan and we don’t want you.”
Personally, I would wish that he extend that to include people like Patel who stoke racist abuse, as Tyrone Mings pointed out.
One last point: I wonder if the racists attacking three black players even understand their monumental hypocrisy if they agree – as I do – with Alan Shearer’s choice of “player of the tournament”: Raheem Sterling.
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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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Marcus Rashford: Here’s a man who stands up for people who would otherwise suffer at the hands of a cruel government. What he does in his spare time, with his own cash, is his own business. What does the Daily Mail stand for?
This is classism and possibly racism from the Daily Mail.
The newspaper- if you really want to dignify it with that description – ran a story that footballer Marcus Rashford has bought five houses worth £2 million.
What business is it of ours? It’s his money and what he does with it is his concern.
Here’s the tell, in the headline: “Campaigning football star Marcus Rashford has bought five luxury homes…”
Oh, now we get it! He’s under attack because he dared to campaign for the Conservative government to actually face up to its responsibilities and look after people its policies are harming.
Rashford responded:
Ok, so let’s address this. I’m 23. I came from little. I need to protect not just my future but my family’s too. To do that I made a decision at the beg of 2020 to start investing more in property. Please don’t run stories like this alongside refs to ‘campaigning’. pic.twitter.com/coqla2i19d
He realised there was a dog whistle in this – and he wasn’t the only one.
A fine example of the toxic nature of the Daily Mail. A young man makes a lot of money, legally, and through his own labour. Apparently he’s not allowed to invest that money for the future whilst paying a lot of tax and having an opinion on how some of that tax should be spent. pic.twitter.com/biqcZJg5Fe
The Daily Mail ran that story because it is a racist enterprise. I do hope it will not run a full list of all the property portfolios owned by members of the Cabinet, rich, predominantly white men who are doing nothing to help children in poverty. https://t.co/PhKN0YpHbR
NHS Million’s decision is perfectly understandable and This Writer hopes others will follow it.
I wish I could do the same but This Site (and others) has to debunk the nonsense these mass-media extremists use to pollute our political consciousness.
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.
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No square meals: vulnerable children will be forced to go hungry during the school holidays because the stingy Tory government wants them to starve.
Conservatives in Parliament have rejected a plea by footballer – and anti-poverty campaigner – Marcus Rashford for the government to fund meals for poor children during school holidays.
Despite some unease on the Tory benches, a motion on providing 1.4m disadvantaged children in England with £15-a-week food vouchers during holidays until Easter 2021 was voted down.
Conservatives were scathing in their criticism of Rashford, who personally experienced food poverty as a child:
Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith thinks feeding poor children during school holidays is “nationalising” them No it’s providing a safety net during a once a century pandemic If that’s nationalisation, then it’s the morally right thing to do
But this attitude is nonsense from a political party that has spent decades depriving working-class parents of the financial ability to feed their children.
The hypocrisy is even stronger during the year of Covid-19 when people are being forced to live on a fraction of their normal wages, or to claim Universal Credit and suffer a five-week delay in payments that pushes them into debt, meaning the amount they receive will never be enough.
I'm watching cruel Tories protesting that parents are responsible for feeding children when they've spent the last decade and more taking money away from parents in order to PREVENT them from being able to feed their children. Take responsibility, Tories! #PoliticsLive
Meanwhile, the Tory-funded “gravy train”, pumping money to their chums in business for Covid-19-related measures that don’t work, is chugging along merrily:
“While the provision of free school meals is closed, the gravy train is still open for business. £7,000 a day for consultants working on a test and trace system that doesn’t work"
But the most biting criticism came from Nigel Farage, the former UKIP and current Brexit Party leader, who said on Twitter that “not being seen to give poor kids lunch in the school holidays looks mean and is wrong”.
The comment went viral, and it isn’t hard to understand the reason:
If you're keeping score at home, the UK government has now gone to the right of Nigel Farage. https://t.co/MzT8qDTzP7
Oh dear, my government is now more far right than Nigel Farage. Thankfully, I don't think anyone has noticed. https://t.co/uWu2RgP5fw
— Boris Johnson #StayAlertControlTheVirus ᵖᵃʳᵒᵈʸ (@GetBrexit_Done) October 22, 2020
The strange forces on Twitter that spot anti-Tory tweets and try to mitigate them meant that the very first reply to Farage’s message came from one Helen Thomas, who contradicts herself in her own Twitter bio: “No personal messages, why are the lefties so vile?”
She had to change it from “Why are there so many rude selfish people on Twitter?” – possibly after it was pointed out to her that she is one such person. So we can see where she’s coming from.
Her response was that poor people should forage for food – and it has received short shrift, I’m happy to report:
When you are making Nigel Farage look like the compassionate one, it's time to evaluate your conscience.
She's changed it. These old tories don't understand that anyone with empathy disagrees with letting kids starve to death. They can't comprehend how that's not something we can get on board with pic.twitter.com/msb70tO6uJ
Lazy parents?! Food inexpensive?! What a morally bankrupt know-it-all Helen is. How devoid of empathy & humanity must you be to make Nigel Farage appear sensible.
I speak on behalf of hungry British children & 'lazy parents' when I say:
Yes indeed. How devoid of empathy & humanity must you be to make Nigel Farage appear sensible.
But that is exactly what many (although not all) Conservative MPs have done – following their boss Boris Johnson’s lead.
Including your MP, perhaps.
Postscript: Readers in England may wish to note that the devolved governments in Wales and Scotland have both provided funds to ensure that free school meals are available to children who need them:
We've guaranteed free school meals for every school holiday up to and including Easter 2021.
It's important families don't have the added pressure of worrying about food in these uncertain times.
Attended today’s Daily Briefing to announce £10 million for local councils to help fund free school meals.
The @scotgov investment will support around 156,000 children and young people – helping families who are facing increased financial pressure due to #COVID19pic.twitter.com/8bBKMVPn8Z
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
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
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