Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The Tories’ food poverty problem

(Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Marcus Rashford was just 12 when David Cameron took the Conservatives into government, a fact that makes the bones of most Westminster inhabitants creak. In the ensuing decade, he has learned to be not only a footballer of international renown, but also a measured and effective political campaigner. The Tories, on the other hand, appear to have learned nothing from ten years of dealing with the topic he campaigns on.

Rashford’s work on food poverty is unusual, not just because unlike many in his professional field who adopt causes, he has taken a great deal of time to understand it in a way that goes far beyond his personal experience. It is even more unusual in Westminster because he conducts his campaigns without any obvious partisanship and with a gentleness that appears strangely incongruous in today’s political culture.

That political culture was on show in a particularly ugly way yesterday when the Commons debated an opposition day motion from the Labour party calling for the government to carry on funding free school meals in the holidays until Easter 2021.



Opposition day debates are not binding on the government, but they are useful devices by which Labour and other parties can force the government to take a position on an issue in a vote. The position the government takes is almost inevitably to oppose the motion, partly because it is generally worded in such a way as to make it politically very difficult to support, and partly because the way party ego works means it is rare for ministers to concede that the opposition can ever be right about anything, even to the point of rejecting amendments that correct spelling mistakes in legislation. The result of the vote means opposition MPs can then say that ‘the government doesn’t want to feed hungry children’ and so on.

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