Imagine being an MP and being asked “Do you want kids to go hungry” and you say “Yes, yes I do”

"Black lives matter. We should do something about racism"
"All lives matter!"
"Okay then, let's help refugees"
"We can't afford to do that when there are starving kids right here in the UK!"
"Alright, let's start with feeding kids during the school holidays"
"No! Not that either"

Imagine anyone but a psychopath or a sadist giving that answer.

Jeremy Hunt said they'd have to review again coming up to Christmas, as if half-term is some kind of test run to see how starvation will affect the kids.

One of those - expletives deleted - is mine, not that I would ever vote for her.

I'm not surprised she voted how she did, given how she boasts about how she, as a then school governor, improved special needs provision at a local high school when the opposite is true (I worked with that high school and the old SENCo and the pastoral manager a lot, to the point of pretty much running a weekly clinic there, not that she knew about that...).

Thinks: must ask any Tory canvassers what she has agin local children.

Now local councils, cafes and restaurants are plugging the gap.

And McDonalds if offering 1 million free meals worth of funding to the food charity Fare Share. Please note it's not 1 million burgers, they are providing funding to help the charity feed people.


eta: Sample link https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/comp...ty/ar-BB1akro7

I get why people are unhappy about parents who live a chaotic lifestyle, such that they do not feed their children properly, but further preventing those children from getting sufficient food is just going to make the situation worse, not better.

There are an awful lot of parents who are working and still can't afford to feed their children well, especially if their jobs leave them time-poor as well as money-poor.

Or parents who lost their job(s) and then have to wait 6 weeks for benefits and so end up with payday loan sharks and are trapped in a spiral of debt and poverty.

Since the Bishops are trending, here's a fun fact for the day - just 3 countries in the world have law making clerics. The UK, the Vatican and Iran.

Mark Jenkinson Tory MP for Workington tweeted his reason for voting against feeding hungry kids.

@markjenkinsonmp
Here, @AngelaRayner is either being disingenuous or really hasn’t a clue what goes on in her constituency. I hope for the sake of her constituents it’s the former.
I know in my constituency that, as tiny as a minority it might be, food parcels are sold or traded for drugs.
And that’s parcels, not vouchers - which have greater monetary value.

How much crack do you reckon a free school meal pot of yoghurt is worth?

Apparently we shouldn't give food to hungry kids because they might swap it for drugs.

OFFS :mad:

Better a thousand kids go hungry than someone trades a chicken sandwich for meth :rolleyes:

The only reason the Tories haven't given free school meals to hungry children is that they haven't yet worked out a way of contracting it out to a private company without tender at vastly more than the going rate while getting kickbacks via political donations.

Amanda Milling Chairman of the Conservative party tweeted

@amandamilling
We’ve written to @Keir_Starmer after @AngelaRayner’s comment resulted in widespread abuse towards our MPs, staff and families.
Will Sir Keir take action against Labour MPs and party members who perpetrate abuse, and apologise for Rayner’s record of unparliamentary behaviour?

Good to see her laser like focus on the important aspect of the debate.

Amanda Milling claimed £60,000 in expenses last year and voted against free school meals.

I don't need any help from Angela Rayner to be abusive towards or about most Tory MPs, party members or party employees. And I took "scum" to be a descriptive rather than pejorative term.

If you read the letter there's this sentence in it:

"Sadly, this is not the first occasion in which the Honourable Member for Ashton-under-Lyme has used such language to describe Conservatives, nor the first time she has behaved with the standards expected of a Member of Parliament."

Given the number of privately educated Tory Mps, it would seem that private education is not money well spent. Either that or they agree with her.

Yes I've seen a couple of Tory MP's come out with the parents need to take responsibility for their actions line, like it's the kids fault to have bad parents.

But the things that sticks in my throat on this is that it's coming from a party that doesn't take responsibility for anything ever, led by a man where there's doubts about whether he knows how many kids he has.

Not just that the amount needed to fund such a policy is so minuscule compared to the money the government is throwing around it beggars belief.

Hopefully this will bring home to people that “lending” your vote to the Tories always results in the same “I’m all right Jack”.

Selaine Saxby MP tweeted
@SelaineSaxby
I am delighted our local businesses have bounced back so much after lockdown they are able to give away food for free, and very much hope they will not be seeking any further government support.

How utterly despicable :mad:

I guess it would never occur to her that businesses could want to help out people in desperate need even if they are "only" in moderate need.

This comment should be getting a lot more publicity.

She has since deleted the tweet and is snivelling and squirming with the usual 'quoted out of context' bollocks. What a cow.

How can you be quoted out of context in a tweet you wrote yourself ? :confused:

It's more pathetic not to have the courage to stick to your guns.

I wonder if she’s going to take action against members of her party who have been attacking “lefty human rights lawyers”.

It's one of the usual cop-outs, along with 'I misspoke' and others. As long as the scumbags reply in some vaguely plausible way they think they're off the hook.

"Out of context" is the new Conservative MPs way of saying "I only expected it to be read by hateful people who agree with me ... not the vast majority of decent British people who won't put up with this level of inhumanity from their leaders."

Boris Johnson & Matt Hancock tweeted its “fantastic” news 7,810 more doctors are now working in our NHS than a year ago.

Both “forget” to mention that figure includes thousands of medical students not yet qualified as doctors!

With most of these claims of "I was quoted out of context" my usual question is "And exactly what would be the context in which what you said would be suitable?" See also Ben Bradley and that berk from Workington and their claims about food parcels etc being used to buy crack.

Even counting the likes of Nephew #2 (currently a medical student), does this make up for the number of medics lost since 2010? See also figures for nurses, psychologists, OTs, physios, and any other clinical discipline you care to mention.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknew...?ocid=msedgdhp

"Boris Johnson is facing growing condemnation for an “appalling” Tory alliance with neo-Nazi and anti-Muslim parties across Europe, as a Conservative peer reveals how he has refused to act.

The extraordinary pact sees the party’s MPs sitting alongside the “heirs of Mussolini” in Italy and an Estonian party that celebrates its wartime collaboration with Hitler, among other far-right groups in the Council of Europe.

Yet, Lord Balfe reveals, his repeated attempts to persuade the prime minister to take action have been rebuffed – as he was told it was going on “a long way away and no one understands it”.

Instead, the peer was kicked out of the European Conservatives Group for protesting to No 10 after the group “invited in” the far-right so-called Democratic Alliance, he said.

“It’s appalling,” Lord Balfe told The Independent, “this group contains virtually every video nasty in the book and we should not be mixed up with them.”

The best-known far-right parties in the coalition are the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany and Italy’s Northern League, but others are even more extreme.

The Brothers of Italy was born out of the country’s fascist movement, while the first leader of the Freedom Party of Austria – once headed by the notorious Jorg Haider – was a Nazi minister and SS officer.

Lord Balfe said he has seen the Sweden Democrats “walk around Stockholm with swastikas”, while Bulgaria’s United Patriots “were elected on the basis that there were too many mosques”.

The Conservative People’s Party of Estonia attends an annual march to commemorate the Estonian Legion – a unit of the Waffen-SS during the Second World War."

The idea of the undeserving poor and how they should be treated by government started in Elizabethan times with the first poor laws. It has always suited the rich to continue the debate about the undeserving poor, to distract from the undeserving rich. This time, probably due to the role of Marcus Rashford, the mantra of not supporting the undeserving poor has backfired on those who voted against free school meals to be continued during the holidays.

Talking of the "undeserving poor":

"A Conservative MP is facing calls to apologise amid claims he stigmatised working class families in a row over Marcus Rashford’s free school meals campaign.

A Conservative MP is facing calls to apologise amid claims he stigmatised working class families in a row over Marcus Rashford’s free school meals campaign.

Ben Bradley, one of hundreds of Tory MPs to vote against providing free food during the school holidays, replied to a tweet describing the programme as “£20 cash direct to a crack den and a brothel”.

In his post, which has since been removed, Mr Bradley wrote: “That’s what FSM (free school meal) vouchers in the summer effectively did...”

In an interview with BBC Breakfast, Mr Bradley claimed his tweet had been taken out of context, though he did not explain how."

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknew...?ocid=msedgdhp

Drug dealers and brothels accept free school meal vouchers?

As it has ever been.

News at Ten! People shocked!! Scorpion kills frog!!!

Twitter user "Ivor Lendingmyvote" said "I can't believe it, I was sure this time the scorpion would tell the truth!"

"A senior Tory has said the party has to "admit we've misunderstood the mood of the country" over the extension of free school meals - adding that the government will probably have to "think again" after voting against the move.

Sir Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative chairman of the Liaison Committee, made the remarks as pressure builds on Boris Johnson to perform a U-turn on the issue.

He added: "I think when you've got the chairman of the Education Select Committee not supporting the government on this, and he's a Conservative, I think the government has to listen to the Conservative Party."

Sir Bernard was absent from the vote on free school meals but said he would have supported the government's position."

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknew...?ocid=msedgdhp

He thinks the Government has got it wrong, but he will still vote the way they tell him to. Spineless.

Fijian-born British soldiers lose latest legal fight to stay in UK
High court rejects call for judicial review of eight veterans’ immigration case

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...-to-stay-in-uk

Ben Bradley - who says parents of hungry kids will somehow spend school meal vouchers on crack and prostitutes - claimed £58,985.65 in HoC expenses in 11 months.

That's £5,362.33 a month.

Michelle Donelan MP on why she voted against free school meals

https://michelledonelan.co.uk/free-school-meals-vote/

"However I am not convinced that free school meals are the best or even the correct mechanism to deal with holiday hunger. Targeted support for low income families is a matter for the welfare system, not our schools. In fact unlike schools, the welfare system was designed as the safety net to provide direct support all year round. This can be seen in the increase this government has put in place both in Universal Credit standard allowance and Working Tax Credit basic element."

The reasons why some kids need FSM are many and varied and are often short term. Schools are ideally placed to target those kids and feed them. Schools are an important part of child welfare provisions, know about vulnerable children and have the facilities to feed them. Claiming there is a better way, without saying what it is and how it can start to feed the children now, is really just a way to dodge the issue and leave those kids hungry. She goes on to say;

"I have spoken before on the issue of holiday hunger and my concerns – it’s an issue I believe we need to keep addressing but not with a sticking plaster but a long term solution that also deals with the other associated needs."

She misses the point schools have been feeding vulnerable kids since schools first started to provide meals. Nothing has ever been put into place to make similar provision during holidays. Schools are the solution and it is odd she thinks there may be another way.

Not if you believe the other way is doing bugger all.

Note, he is saying they should change policy not from any sense of right and wrong, or a matter of principle but because it may reduce majorities.

The Tories help poor people out with universal credit.

The last election certainly,but in others as well, the Tories have pushed the mantra that we need to squeeze the pips of the poor to incentivise them to work.

Universal credit as far as I can tell pays
£342.72 per month for single claimants under 25
£409.89 per month for single claimants aged 25 or over
£488.59 per month for joint claimants both under 25
£594.04 per month for joint claimants with either aged 25 or over

The fact that furlough pays many multiples of this shows there is an deserving and undeserving poor as far as the Tories are concerned and starving kids are just a consequence.

This is disingenuous politics at its worse, mixed in with of course hypocrisy. She knows full well the need is today, and of course she is well aware of the problem that this is meant to solve but she tries to pretend she wants to fix the major problem, she is attempting to create the impression that you can't do both.

Seen this argumentative technique elsewhere on the forum today, it's disgusting.

The deserving poor are the ones who struggle to make ends meet on 150 grand.

£5 grand a month! That's a hell of a lot of crack and prostitutes! How did he manage it? Red Bull, Viagra and Complan - must have been.

Them duck houses aren't going to paint themselves you know.

I didn't actually look at it that way, that just makes it even more reprehensible. The Tories have never been in sync with the general public but crikey, how more out of touch can this lot get?

I reckon by Christmas Boris will be putting on puppydog eyes and telling us how the little children really need chlorinated chicken.

sorry for offtopic, how does the UK have law making clerics? Are you referring to the house of lords?

The Bishops sit as 'Lords Spiritual' in the House of Lords.

Is there anything else that the Tories think children should be punished for, that their parents did?

Punishing someone for something they did not do and had no control over is utterly reprehensible. It goes against human rights and all legal principles.

afaik it's in the form of vouchers, so the concern is the adults will not use the vouchers for food for the kids, but for other nefarious reasons.
I don't see a drug dealer accepting vouchers, but who knows.

I did see a big sign in iceland when I was in there earlier that stated 'we will not accept food vouchers for alcohol' though.