What is the Conservative case for facing down Marcus Rashford on free school meals during the holidays? Ask a handful of Tory MPs, including the Prime Minister, and they’ll throw out a contradictory mess of answers. Many of those who are most uneasy with the way the government has refused to U-turn on the matter suspect it is merely the Treasury trying to draw the line after an endless splurge of spending over the past few months. But they are uncomfortable that this is where the line has been drawn. Rows about children always get cut-through in politics. Rows about children and food even more so.
You don’t have to have a particularly long memory or good knowledge of niche facts about the 1970s to recognise the line ‘Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’. She spent years regretting her decision to end free milk for junior school children when she was education secretary. In fact, 19 years later when her health secretary Ken Clarke was considering ending free milk for nursery school children, she wrote him a note as prime minister, warning: ‘No – this will cause a terrible row – all for £4m. I know – I went through it 19 years ago.’
As I wrote last week, the Tories today still have a strange inability to present their case cogently when it comes to tackling food poverty. They leave the left to frame the issue, and then panic when it blows up into a row. But there is a case for refusing to hand out vouchers for meals in the holidays. It’s just that few Conservatives are setting it out – or perhaps few even know what it is.
Former Downing Street adviser Danny Kruger had a go at explaining it on Radio 4’s PM programme this evening. He has long worked on strengthening civil society, and his view is that community groups, charities and councils are much better equipped to help people in food poverty than central government. He told the programme that while ‘government is very good at doing big simple things’ like increasing the amount of benefits someone is entitled to, ‘we will only fix this if we do it locally’. While for some people food poverty had the very simple cause that they did not have enough money, for others ‘it’s a much more challenging set of circumstances’ which central government was not flexible enough to respond to.
Compassionate Conservatives don’t believe in not helping people. It’s just that their starting point isn’t always that the state is the best vehicle for that help. It might, as Kruger believes, be that government can enable local organisations to help people in their communities better than a blanket scheme could.
The problem is that this is the sort of argument a party needs to spend years making so that it is clear it is not, as is now common parlance, ‘in favour of letting kids starve in the holidays’. The Tories haven’t managed that, and instead they waited until the issue reached a head in the Commons and sent some of their MPs out with a bunch of half-baked arguments.
Even now, the message keeps changing. Is it that vouchers would be to prescriptive? Or that they would stigmatise people? Or that – as some have rather bizarrely claimed – that they would be sold in exchange for drugs (as opposed to cash awards, which would surely be easier to sell)?
Kruger accepted in his interview that ‘we’ve handled it badly’ and that his party had lost the argument on this matter. Many of his colleagues agree: like Thatcher, they wonder why their ministerial colleagues are intent on causing such a terrible row for such a small amount of money. But Thatcher had the confidence to make difficult political arguments. Too many Tories today don’t, and they are now reaping the punishment for that.
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