What’s on the Tory menu today, kids?
Hunger, cruelty and ice-cold hearts
My secondary school was Ravenspark Academy in Irvine, where I was unlucky enough to never get school meals.
We lived quite close by, so I would make the 10-minute walk to have my tinned spaghetti (or macaroni, or ravioli, or meatballs) on toast with my dad, who drove home from his office for his lunch.
Being forbidden, school meals always looked like an impossible treat to me. They’d get fish and chips! Or pie, beans and chips. Lasagne and chips. Chips were always involved. And pudding! Apple pie. Sticky toffee.
It was, no doubt, not a menu Jamie Oliver would have looked fondly at but this was the west coast of Scotland in the early 80s. Consequently, this was Scotland at the height of Thatcherism, when the unemployment rate in Ayrshire was spiralling…
There were more than a few children who got free school meals back then.
And, naturally, there was the usual stigma attached to things like this, the usual hurtful insults. The insulters didn’t know – or care – that the tray of steaming food (with its Duralex water glass, its wee carton of milk) was very likely the only hot meal some of these kids would get that day. Because the insulters were kids, and kids can be cruel.
But, it turns out, nowhere near as cruel as adults. Because sticks and stones will break your bones but the policies of a heartless government can really hurt you.
This week – in the midst of a pandemic that sees many families struggling to make ends meet – Tory MPs voted against extending free school meals to disadvantagedsadvantaged children duringng the holidays. And they did this a few weeks afterr pinning an MBE on Marcus Rashford, the 22-year-old Mancunianncunian footballer who has been spear-spearheadingding a campaign againstnst child hunger in Britain.ritain.
The reaction to all off this fell into two camps.ps. Therere weree decentent people (like you and me obviously) who, while being dismayed that the Tories had decided against helping these children, were cheered by the fact there were still public figures as kind-hearted and righteous as Rashford. And then there were the others: the cruel, the vicious, the heartless. The adult equivalents of the kids at my school who would mock the kids who got free meals…
They accused Rashford of “virtue signalling”. They said these kids weren’t really poor, their parents just spend their money on the wrong things, like acrylic nails and tattoos and Sky Sports packages. They said you could feed a family of four perfectly well on £10 a week, that you should simply grow your own vegetables from seeds.
One woman even suggested that “apples were free” and that hungry families should just go and forage themselves some fruit. I pointed out that the opportunities for apple scrumping were thin on the ground on most inner city housing estates. (Well, OK, my language might have been a little bit stronger than that.)
Anyway, Rashford was undeterred. If your Government is run by heartless monsters, why not just take them out of the loop? By Friday, his Twitter feed was filled with companies willing to help feed children. From Essex to Cumbria, from Surrey to Yorkshire, tearooms, cafes and restaurants across the UK – many of them small business who have undoubtedly been suffering in recent times – were offering free meals during the half-term holiday.
Celebrities such as Gary Lineker came out in support of Rashford and it soon reached the point where the Government found itself being attacked from unexpected quarters. Like Nigel Farage, who tweeted: “If the Government can subsidise Eat Out to Help Out, not being seen to give poor kids lunch in the school holidays looks mean and is wrong.”
By the end of the week, it appeared that even a government like this one – utterly committed to cruelty and incompetence as a way of life – was starting to realise they’d read the room badly.
Because, as a general rule of thumb, I’d say that if you find yourself being called “mean and wrong” by NIGEL BLOODY FARAGE – literally the meanest, wrongest person in the UK – then it’s probably time for a bit of a rethink.
Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, refusing to feed the poorest children in the country in the midst of a pandemic was a bad look.
If you’re being called ‘mean’ by Nigel Farage, it’s time for a rethink