Now we see the true colours of the scumbag 'nasty party' !!!

When given an opportunity to vote in support of families and children in the poorest communities in the uk and let have a hot meal every day during school holidays, the scumbag 'nasty party' on bloc voted against it !!!


Know who these bastards are come the next election !!!


Opposition attacks Tory MPs for voting against free school meals

PA
Oct 22nd 2020 1:17AM

Opposition figures have savaged the Government after Tory MPs voted against footballer Marcus Rashford’s bid to have free school meals for eligible children extended through the coming holidays.

Labour’s motion, which called for the scheme to be extended over school holidays until Easter 2021, was defeated by 261 votes to 322 – majority 61.

Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner said the Conservatives had voted to let the more than 1.4 million children eligible for free school meals go hungry through the holidays.

Tonight I voted to feed our country's vulnerable and needy children.

The Tories voted to let them go hungry.

I voted for workers facing hardship in areas under lockdown to get 80% of their incomes.

The Tories voted against it.

That's all you need to know.

— Angela Rayner (@AngelaRayner) October 21, 2020

“Tonight I voted to feed our country’s vulnerable and needy children. The Tories voted to let them go hungry,” she tweeted, adding: “I voted for workers facing hardship in areas under lockdown to get 80% of their incomes. The Tories voted against it. That’s all you need to know.”

Labour MP for Nottingham East Nadia Whittome also attacked the Conservatives.

“I don’t know how the 322 Tory MPs are sleeping tonight. Because I can’t, knowing that 1.4 million children like Cameron will go hungry this Christmas,” she said, referring to a boy featured in a documentary she shared.

Rishi Sunak spent £500m on the "Eat Out to Help Out" scheme.

It costs around £20m to provide free school meals for a week.

There is money for half-price Nando's but there's no money to feed children?

— Nadia Whittome MP (@NadiaWhittomeMP) October 21, 2020

She added: “Rishi Sunak spent £500m on the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme. It costs around £20m to provide free school meals for a week. There is money for half-price Nando’s but there’s no money to feed children?”

The Liberal Democrats’ health and social care spokeswoman Munira Wilson tweeted: “It would be hugely unjust for this Govt to allow children to go hungry this winter, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. I urged the Govt to follow the lead of Lib Dem Edu Minister Kirsty Williams in Wales by extending #FreeSchoolMeals over the school holidays.”

It would be hugely unjust for this Govt to allow children to go hungry this winter, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. I urged the Govt to follow the lead of Lib Dem Edu Minister @Kirsty_Williams in Wales by extending #FreeSchoolMeals over the school holidays pic.twitter.com/QQTB0nCwGo

— Munira Wilson MP (@munirawilson) October 21, 2020

Former Labour minister Dame Joan Ruddock tweeted: “I cannot comprehend how Tory MPs can justify denying the children of poorest families one proper meal each day of the holidays. School meals are known to be essential to the health & wellbeing of these children & there is no substitute. They WILL go hungry – such cruelty.”

I cannot comprehend how Tory MPs can justify denying the children of poorest families one proper meal each day of the https://t.co/dgBF4VxoKu meals are known to be essential to the health & wellbeing of these children & there is no substitute.They WILL go hungry – such cruelty

— Dame Joan Ruddock (@joan_dame) October 21, 2020

Labour’s Richard Burgon said the Tories had shown they did not care that children would go hungry.

“I’m disgusted by what’s just happened in Parliament,” he tweeted. “Tory MPs just voted down extending free school meals over the Christmas holiday. They know this will mean 1 million kids going hungry. They just don’t care. A sickening display of Tory contempt for people in our communities.”

Some Conservatives, however, defended the decision.

I'm disgusted by what's just happened in Parliament.

Tory MPs just voted down extending free school meals over the Christmas holiday.

They know this will mean 1 million kids going hungry. They just don't care.

A sickening display of Tory contempt for people in our communities.

— Richard Burgon MP (@RichardBurgon) October 21, 2020

Nottingham MP Ben Bradley engaged in a Twitter exchange with Rashford, writing: “Gov has lots of responsibilities: supporting the vulnerable, helping people to help themselves, balancing the books.

“Not as simple as you to make out Marcus. Extending FSM to sch hols passes responsibility for feeding kids away from parents, to the State. It increases dependency.”

Rashford tweeted back: “Ben, the economy already pays a high price for child hunger. If children were fed properly you would increase educational attainment and boost life chances. @KelloggsUKI calculated we would spend at least £5.2M a year on lost teaching hours as teachers are caring for hungry kids.

“And for a more humane response, since March, 32% of families have suffered a drop in income. Nearly 1 million have fallen off the payroll. This is not dependency, this a cry for help. There are no jobs!! 250% increase in food poverty and rising. Nobody said this was simple…”

Ben, the economy already pays a high price for child hunger. If children were fed properly you would increase educational attainment and boost life chances. @KelloggsUKI calculated we would spend at least £5.2M a year on lost teaching hours as teachers are caring for hungry kids https://t.co/mZTI3YFYz7

— Marcus Rashford MBE (@MarcusRashford) October 21, 2020

Chief Executive of Child Poverty Action Group Alison Garnham said Britain had “reached a low point if in the midst of a pandemic we decide we can’t make sure children in the lowest income families have a nutritious meal in the middle of the day”.

“Tonight’s vote means more children going without and more desperately anxious parents – just as a coronavirus winter approaches,” Ms Garnham was quoted as saying in the Daily Mirror.

“In short it ducks our moral responsibility to protect the country’s most vulnerable children.

“It will not sit well with all those people from many walks of life who back Marcus Rashford because they do not want child poverty to be ignored any longer.”

 

Poverty is an emotive subject, how do we define poverty in the modern day and age, well that I think depends on how old you are. Us older people would probably class poverty as for example when you have to make a choice between spending your last fiver on putting electric on the meter or going and buying some stuff to feed your family, and by stuff I mean things like bread, potatoes, eggs, beans, not a maccys or a KFC.
A lot of the younger element consider themselves poor if they haven't got the latest I-phone, the full Sky package and a very large flat screen tv,hardly real poverty is it!
Sadly for the people in real hardship tv companies seem to do all they can to make the lives of people in genuine difficulties even harder. We had two so called 'docuseries' on people on low incomes, one in Birmingham and one in Jaywick, Essex, remember them?
Both of them featured out of work people who to be quite honest seemed to be doing alright on benefits, people seemed to party a lot, the had all the booze and drugs they wanted, smart designer clothes if they wanted them, sky tv, they were hardly living on the breadline, and it is this image that the Government, ably assisted by the tv companies want you to believe is the true face of poverty in the UK today, and clearly it is not, there are people out there who are starving and it is so very wrong. Now I am fully aware that there are certain people who are beyond help, give them money to buy food and they'll buy alcohol instead, give them a coat to keep them warm and they'll sell it to buy drugs, there has always been people like that, it's a fact of life, but there are a great many others who are in genuine need.
In the news the other day Boris was quoted as saying that he was packing in the leadership come spring as he couldn't survive on his £150K a year wages! there are a lot of families out there surviving on a lot less believe me, my daughter in law does a food run at Christmas to try and help some of our local vulnerabale people, she does it all out of her own pocket, now she's not rich by any means, but as she says there are people a lot worse off than she is. Last Christmas we had quite a heartbreaking incident, the food had all been distributed and she got a call off a woman, she was on her own,just her and a small dog, she was really in dire straights and needed help, what made the story all that more heartbreaking was that the woman was not asking for food for herself, only for a few tins of dog food! Her dog was her only company and her attitude was that it was somehow her fault she'd found herself in her present situation and while she could accept having to go hungry the dog should not, what had it done, nothing. Fortunately my daughter in law was able to help her out and we'd like to think she had a reasonable christmas.
I remember once, I'd been out of work for a while and finally managed to get a job I was really on the bones of my arse at the time and had had to borrow money to get to work, I'll never forget it, I had a fiver to last me all week.
We were working on the really big houses Just outside Manchester, next door to the one we were on lived the ex-drummer from a well known 80's band, he came talking to me over the fence at lunchtime and was telling me he was skint. Apparently his accountant had been on the phone telling him to reign in his spending as he had a little over £1 million pounds left in the bank! One million pounds, not to mention he was living in a house worth about 3 million with a couple of really expensive cars on the drive! I felt the change in my pocket, as I said earlier I had about a fiver to last me all week and there was he giving it all the 'woe is me' because he was down to his last million, like I said some peoples idea's of being skint are really odd.

 

A definition of poverty :

 

Now the despicable bastards are trying to find excuses as to why they voted this proposed Bill down !!!





Three Baffling Reasons Tory MPs Have Given For Voting Against Free School Meals
The justifications, which range from "investing in the welfare state" to "nationalising children", have a lot of people scratching their heads.

• 
  By Sarah Turnnidge

On Wednesday evening, 322 Tory MPs voted against a motion to extend free school meals for children, as millions of families face financial hardship through the Covid-19 crisis.

Among the MPs voting against the motion – which has been fiercely campaigned for by footballer Marcus Rashford – were children’s minister Vicky Young and Jo Gideon – a trustee of Feeding Britain.


The government has come under fierce criticism for its approach. Even Nigel Farage came out against the vote, tweeting: “If the government can subsidise Eat Out to Help Out, not being seen to give poor kids lunch in the school holidays looks mean and is wrong.”

Here are three ways MPs have justified their votes – and some of the glaring holes in their defences:

The government is focusing on ‘pumping money into the welfare system’
During an appearance on Sky News on Thursday morning, minister for crime and policing Kit Malthouse said he voted against the motion to extend free school meals because “the best way to help those on low incomes was to pump money into the welfare system”.

The Universal Credit (UC) system, which was designed and rolled out nationwide under Conservative rule to replace multiple separate benefits, has repeatedly been cited as a key factor in pulling families into poverty.

According to the UK’s biggest food poverty charity, the Trussell Trust, the huge surge in demand for foodbank use can be explicitly linked to the introduction of UC. With a five-week wait for the first payment, many households have been plunged into rent arrears and faced mounting bill payments.

#KayBurley asks the crime and policing minister why he voted against the motion to extend free school meals for children.

Kit Malthouse says 'the best way to help those on low incomes is to pump money into the welfare system'.Coronavirus news live – latest UK updates: No 10 defends timing of new lockdown financial support after Greater Manchester stand-offpic.twitter.com/XCFowoMKU0

— SkyNews (@SkyNews) October 22, 2020
Research published by the Trussell Trust in September 2019 revealed that the longer UC exists in an area, the higher the demand for foodbank use.

In areas where UC has been rolled out for at least a year, food banks in the Trussell Trust’s network saw a 30% increase in demand. In areas with the reinvented welfare system in place for at least 18 months this jumped to 40%, and increased again to 48% for food banks in areas with UC for at least two years

During the interview Malthouse referenced a government initiative announced by chancellor Rishi Sunak, in which UC claimants were given a £20-a-week ‘uplift’ to help them through the pandemic – amounting to little more than £1,000 a year.

But analysis of the support package carried out by the Resolution Foundation has revealed that there are no plans to extend the uplift beyond April 2021, meaning the UK’s poorest households will suffer an income loss of £1,000 the following year.

The UK is already ‘the most generous nation in Europe’ and the motion was ‘designed to embarrass the government’
Again appearing on Sky News, Jeremy Hunt explained along similar lines to Kit Malthouse that the government had already provided significant financial support and throughout the Covid-19 crisis the UK had been “the most generous country anywhere in Europe, possibly the world”.

But this isn’t true. In response to Boris Johnson’s recent claims that there is “no country in Europe” that has equalled the UK’s financial response to Covid-19, The National reported that both wage and business support was much better in many European nations.

Looking globally, when looking at extra spending as a percentage of GDP, Britain falls behind Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and the US.

"Why did you vote against the motion to extend free school meals?"@Jeremy_Hunt: "I think the government is doing a lot ... if we get to a point when we're in a lockdown over the Christmas holidays, I'm sure they'll look at this again." JJ#KayBurleypic.twitter.com/nzCJqgFZUF

— Kay Burley (@KayBurley) October 22, 2020
In response to a question for Burley about why Tory whips had reportedly asked MPs to brief against Rashford, Hunt said the Labour motion to extend free school meals was “designed to embarrass the government” – putting aside genuine, evidenced concerns that more children are going hungry amid the pandemic.

It was revealed on October 12 that almost one million pupils had recently signed up to the scheme for the first time on top of the 1.4 million who were already claiming.

‘I do not believe in nationalising children’
During the debate on the motion Brendan Clarke-Smith touted a need to return to parents “taking responsibility” for their own families, which he led by announcing he does “not believe in nationalising children”, apparently regardless of the fact, as a House of Commons briefing paper points out, the private sector has owned and run the majority of industries and utilities in the UK since the late 1980s.

But never mind the global pandemic which has decimated the finances of thousands of families, Clarke-Smith was very clear – asking: “Where is the slick PR campaign asking absent parents to take some responsibility for their children?”

Brendan Clarke-Smith(Tory MP) - “I do not believe in nationalising children. We need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility. This means less celebrity virtue signalling on Twitter by proxy" #FreeSchoolMealspic.twitter.com/83FuyWrfsi

— Haggis_UK (@Haggis_UK) October 21, 2020
He continued: “Instead, we need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility, and this means less celebrity virtue-signalling on Twitter by proxy and more action to tackle the real causes of child poverty.”

This may come as a surprise, but it turns out this line of argument didn’t exactly go down well.

Feeding hungry children during the school holidays in the middle of a pandemic is not 'nationalising' them. Caring about their welfare is not 'virtue signalling'. Parents struggling to make ends meet are not abandoning responsibility for their children. #insultinghttps://t.co/1qnBhdiZhC

— Aunty Malorie Blackman (@malorieblackman) October 21, 2020
Imagine forcing business closures, expecting huge numbers of people to live on two thirds of minimum wage or nothing at all, then absolving yourself of any duty to make sure children dependent on them have something to eat.

“Nationalising children.” What a nasty piece of work. https://t.co/FOjDDY5Yxw

— Emily Heward (@EmilyHeward) October 21, 2020
Imagine thinking that giving out free school meals is “nationalising children”. Imagine having that level of analysis and being an actual elected representative. https://t.co/dzJXbIELW0

 

Haven't these stupid bastards in the scumbag 'nasty party' learnt anything ???

The timing as well as the content of this letter is both inappropriate and inflammatory !!!


Headteachers left ‘speechless’ by ministerial letter amid school meals campaign

PA
Oct 23rd 2020 12:43PM
Headteachers have been left angry by a letter from ministers reminding them to provide pupils with nutritious food in school just days after MPs rejected a campaign to extend free meals to children during the holidays.

A letter – from children's minister Vicky Ford and junior health minister Jo Churchill – was sent to school leaders on Friday morning to encourage them to offer a healthy and nutritious hot meal to their pupils during term-time.

Heads received the letter two days after a Labour motion to offer free school meals to poorer children during holidays – which was prompted by a campaign by Marcus Rashford – was defeated by 322 votes to 261.

School leaders on social media said the letter was "unbelievable", adding that they were "fuming" and were "speechless".

Headteacher Andy Byers, who shared the correspondence on Twitter, told the PA news agency that there was anger and "plenty of incredulity" at the timing of the letter from the Department for Education.

Without a hint of irony, Headteachers have received a letter today from the children's minister reminding us about food standards and our responsibilities to provide students with with nutritious food and hot meals. Honestly!

— Andy Byers (@Framheadteacher) October 23, 2020

It came as a growing number of local authorities – including Liverpool City Council – and pubs, cafes and restaurants announced they would provide meals for local children during the October half-term.

Mr Byers, head of Framwellgate School Durham, tweeted: "Without a hint of irony, Headteachers have received a letter today from the children's minister reminding us about food standards and our responsibilities to provide students with nutritious food and hot meals. Honestly!"

The letter on school food provision, shared with PA, said: "The vast majority of children are in school and we understand schools may be finding it hard at this time to provide children with their usual hot meal at lunchtime especially given the need to minimise contact between bubbles.

Speechless

— Ruth Wilkes (@MrsRWilkes) October 23, 2020

"Furthermore, higher numbers of parents may also be sending their children in with a packed lunch.

"Schools have flexibility within the School Food Standards around which products/foods they serve across the school week. There is no legal requirement that meals should be hot, however we do encourage this and ask all schools to routinely be offering a varied hot meal option to pupils.

"It is much harder to comply with the School Food Standards through the provision of cold food alone. I would urge you all to work closely with your caterers to make every effort to ensure children are receiving a healthy and nutritious hot meal at school."

Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), said: "Local authorities, schools and businesses in communities across the country are now stepping in where Parliament has not. This is not, however, sustainable long term and the funding needs to come from Government.

"Adding insult to injury the children's minister has sent out a letter to heads today reminding them of the importance of promoting healthy eating in schools. You couldn't make it up. Learn the lesson and reverse the decision is the only way Boris Johnson must now proceed."

A Department for Education spokeswoman said: "All schools have gone to extraordinary lengths to get children back into education this term, and the letter was first and foremost to thank school staff for their efforts in getting kitchens open and once again providing meals to pupils, including those eligible for benefits-related free meals.

"We recognise the pressures in schools during this pandemic and so we wanted to reassure them that we will not be introducing changes to the School Food Standards at this time but that we expect the current robust standards to still be followed and implemented."