What the commentators said
Many Tory MPs are furious with No. 10, said Esther Webber in The Times – and little wonder. It’s very hard to understand why ministers “chose this hill to die on when there was, to all intents and purposes, a dry run in the summer which gave them a pretty accurate idea of how things would play out”. The PM has been standing up for a principle, said Ross Clark in The Spectator. It’s one that Labour, too, once promoted: “that welfare should be provided in the form of money, not benefits in kind”, in order to encourage individual responsibility. It was this principle that led Gordon Brown’s government to change the housing benefits system, so that instead of the state paying landlords directly, tenants got an allowance they could use to find their own house or flat on the open market. “Does Labour now disown this principle?”
The Government is doubtless also wary of taking on another funding commitment, said Hamish McRae in The Independent. Short-term measures have a way of becoming permanent, storing up problems: witness free TV licences for the over-75s and the so-called triple lock on state pensions. No. 10 may well be worried about where things could lead, agreed Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. It’s a relatively short step, after all, from handing out food vouchers as a crisis measure, to it becoming the norm. Then people might start “asking deeply awkward questions about why so many families need this help in the first place”, even when they’re in work.
The Covid crisis is going to have a devastating effect on the poorest people in every society, unavoidably highlighting the issue of inequality, said William Hague in The Daily Telegraph. This will favour parties of the Left, which “have the natural advantage of always advocating higher spending and heavier taxation”. The Tories, and other pro-enterprise parties that believe that the state is not always the best vehicle to deliver change, will need to come up with convincing arguments of their own if they are to prevail. Ministers need to take on board the fact that this row over free school food is no one-off. It is, rather, “a warning of what is to come, a small rehearsal for the politics of the 2020s”.