Insulting comments on feeding children

In recent weeks, I have seen and heard many people criticising the campaign for free school meals for children from low-income households, insisting that “If people can’t afford to feed their kids, they shouldn’t have them”.

I can only assume that these people don’t engage their brains before they express such idiotic and insulting comments.

Or perhaps they sadistically love gloating at other people’s misfortunes, to make themselves feel morally superior?

However financially well-off a couple are when they start a family, their circumstances can change for the worse after their children have been born.

Covid has led to millions of people either experiencing redundancy, or lower pay due to cuts in working hours or furlough.

Many other workers have lost their previously ‘safe’ jobs due to automation, technology and relentless corporate cost-cutting (to maximise profits and shareholders’ dividends) – for example, bank clerks and cashiers as high street banks close, airport check-in staff (passengers are increasingly expected to ‘check-in’ themselves), supermarket cashiers replaced by self-service tills, etc.

In a few other instances, tragedy can strike; a spouse might have to stop working due to long-term debilitating illness, or in some instances, a spouse dies of cancer.

In either awful scenario, the household income is immediately halved.

In other cases, a brave police officer or soldier might be killed ‘on duty’ or ‘in active service’, and so leave behind a grieving widow, who is also now a single-parent, on a much-reduced income.

Telling anyone in these circumstances that it is somehow their fault that they cannot afford to feed their children is disgraceful, and reveals the sheer ignorance and inhumanity of those who make such malicious comments.

Also, I wonder how many people who insist that we should keep out asylum seekers, and cut overseas aid, in order to ‘look after our own’, are the same people who don’t want to ‘ look after our own’ now they have a golden opportunity to show their patriotism?

It seems that those who hate ‘foreigners’ also seem equally to hate the British poor.

Brexit Britain really is becoming a cruel, intolerant, backward-looking, country.

‘Taking back control’ seems to have become a green-light for being nasty to the economically poor and socially disadvantaged.

I bet that if Jesus was alive today, he’d be denounced as a ‘do-gooder’, and accused of ‘virtue-signalling’. Pete Dorey

Bath