Poor people are kept in their place by Tories

The school meals row rumbles on and you report that the prime minister is hinting at a better scheme in time for the Christmas holidays (Free school meals: Johnson under renewed pressure from council leaders, 26 October). Really? So far, the government’s schemes for pandemic management have proved rushed, wasteful, unnecessarily costly or frighteningly inept – and frequently all four.

This week, the Tory MP for Broxbourne, Sir Charles Walker, wrote to constituents on the subject: “I am struggling to think of any better way the state could strip parents of their value and self-worth than by it saying to them, without exception, ‘we don’t believe you have the capacity or desire to feed your children so we will feed them for you’.”

The breathtaking condescension towards parents struggling through bitter times suggests that the government has neither the understanding nor the mindset to devise solutions for those they are paid to serve, and whom they clearly regard as having questionable value.
Penny Fell
Llancarfan, Vale of Glamorgan

• After passing our 11-plus in the 1960s, my brother and I attended grammar schools in Urmston, Trafford, which was then a Conservative-run authority, and the local MP was Winston Churchill’s grandson (of the same name). My mum was divorced and worked as a legal secretary. We qualified for free school meals, but I was made to collect the dining numbers from each class as I was told I had to earn my keep. When we went to university in the 1970s, we both received full grants (sadly no longer available).

We have both worked in the public and voluntary sectors, my brother in education, myself in social work; between us we have contributed more than 80 years of service to help improve society. Our mother’s determination to improve our life chances was crucial, but we would have not been able to do this without our free school meals, as you cannot concentrate on an empty stomach.

Marcus Rashford has shone a spotlight on what it means to be hungry in 2020, and as a Mancunian I applaud him. But the Tories’ lack of care and concern for the most disadvantaged is in their DNA – history shows us that. Showing such callous disregard for hungry children is just another example of keeping the poor in their place. Our stigmatising experiences in the 1960s were part of that.
Jackie King-Owen
Matlock, Derbyshire