'It's nigh on impossible to argue against free school meals'

01 July 2023 , 18:18

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'It’s terrible to say but I think we’re all getting used to Labour's flip-flopping'

For the past three weeks, I’ve been banging on about the Labour Party flip-flopping.

Last week it was the House of Lords, before that something else – green investment or something. I forget. It is very difficult to keep track these days. Dizzying, almost.

You could, genuinely, do one a week. Income tax, free movement, tuition fees. Take your pick.

It’s terrible to say but I think we’re all getting used to it now.

I don’t think it makes much of a difference to their election chances. They are still probable rather than possible, but it is incredibly hard to vote for a set of people when you know what they’re against but not what they’re for.

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So, yes, I’d got kind of used to them changing tack. But this week they really have played a blinder.

It is very difficult – nigh on impossible, in fact – to argue against universal free school meals.

There are more than four million children in this country who grow up in poverty – just shy of a third of all kids, in every class of 30 there are nine.

It’s an obscene statistic. Utterly shameful and, I must add, not just the fault of these chancers. A succession of ­governments have completely failed to tackle the issue.

The least – and I mean the ­absolute least – we can do is to make sure children are getting enough to eat. Sixty per cent of teachers say they have seen kids at their school who are obviously going hungry, kids that are tired and weak because there is nothing to eat at home.

And the way to do that is school.

Meals at school. Free meals at school. Free school meals.

Everybody wants it to happen. We didn’t expect the Tories to do it – why would they have any interest in hungry kids? But I really thought Labour would commit. At conference last year, they said they would. It would be policy. Now it’s not.

Incredible. Just incredible.

My mum was a headteacher in Leeds for years, an inner-city primary school. She wanted to make sure all the children at her school were fed, clothed, happy.

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She told me a story once about a kid she caught at ­lunchtime, looking round sneakily, then taking the mashed potato off his plate and putting in his pocket.

Mum took him to one side and said that if he didn’t like it, he could leave it. “It’s not that,” he told her, “it’s so I’ll have something to eat when I get home tonight.”

I’ve never forgotten that story. How that was allowed to happen in this country in the 21st century. How my mum and her staff had to make sure kids were fed.

There’s a campaign now, No Child Left Behind. Again, extremely hard to argue against, isn’t it? Who would leave a child behind?

Labour should be all over this. Front and centre, shouting it from the rooftops.

They’re not, which might be canny politics, but is cowardly.

For the life of me, I cannot work out what they are up to at the moment. I’ll vote for them, of course, but for the first time in my life I really have no idea why.

Visit nochildleftbehind.org.uk

Keir Mudie