Advertisement
Canada markets closed
  • S&P/TSX

    22,167.03
    +59.95 (+0.27%)
     
  • S&P 500

    5,254.35
    +5.86 (+0.11%)
     
  • DOW

    39,807.37
    +47.29 (+0.12%)
     
  • CAD/USD

    0.7384
    -0.0002 (-0.03%)
     
  • CRUDE OIL

    83.11
    -0.06 (-0.07%)
     
  • Bitcoin CAD

    94,927.63
    -833.80 (-0.87%)
     
  • CMC Crypto 200

    885.54
    0.00 (0.00%)
     
  • GOLD FUTURES

    2,254.80
    +16.40 (+0.73%)
     
  • RUSSELL 2000

    2,124.55
    +10.20 (+0.48%)
     
  • 10-Yr Bond

    4.2060
    +0.0100 (+0.24%)
     
  • NASDAQ

    16,379.46
    -20.06 (-0.12%)
     
  • VOLATILITY

    13.01
    0.00 (0.00%)
     
  • FTSE

    7,952.62
    +20.64 (+0.26%)
     
  • NIKKEI 225

    40,369.44
    +201.37 (+0.50%)
     
  • CAD/EUR

    0.6836
    -0.0007 (-0.10%)
     

How out of touch are the Tories? The free school meals row tells you everything you need to know

<span>Photograph: Justin Leighton/Alamy Stock Photo</span>
Photograph: Justin Leighton/Alamy Stock Photo

It was the day after 322 Conservatives voted against feeding the nation’s poorest children over the holidays. Social media, indeed all media that way inclined, had been full for many hours of people wondering how these MPs could possibly live with themselves. (The children’s minister! How can a children’s minister vote this way?) Certain Tory MPs – for brevity, the dumb ones – had taken to Twitter themselves to meansplain to the campaigning Marcus Rashford that the responsible stewardship of a nation involves keeping children hungry. Because numbers. And they say so.

I tried to work out which Tory war game this related to. Are we talking your basic Sun Tzu: when your enemy is choleric, make him angrier by interning 1.3 million kids in a state of famishment? Is it more of a culture war: really whip up that base of people who hate virtue-signalling by selecting one fundamental human virtue, empathy, and kicking it to death? Which Facebook subculture is this meant to appeal to?

Simultaneously, I was on the phone to my friend C, not 100% listening while she was saying something about spaghetti bolognese. “Do you think you can make bolognese at scale?” she asked. Sure. I once made a venison cobbler for 35. I can do anything. “OK, I’ve emailed the head. In every school there are those who can and those who can’t. He knows that.” Wait, what? “It probably wouldn’t take more than 10 of us.”

ADVERTISEMENT

It turns out that now the food-voucher plan has been voted down, she wants the school to stay open over half-term, and then we would cook, and whoever was hungry would just come in for lunch. Even the first bit is a completely mad idea. Never has a half-term been more devoutly wished for than this October’s, after six weeks of masks, bubbles, exhausted teachers, disoriented year sevens, panicking year 11 and 13s and everyone and everything in between.

C and I have known each other since the kids were in reception, nine years ago. We used to talk a lot at the gates, but when they get to secondary school, there’s a determined teacher standing at the entrance saying “Bye Mum!”, so around that time we had to just admit we were friends, and socialise in the regular way. We don’t talk a lot about politics, and our politics aren’t the same, though we’ve had a number of discussions about Keir Starmer’s hair.

I would say she’s a good barometer for me of what people think if they aren’t refreshing Twitter all day long, but that would be to overstate my engagement with the outside-Twitter world. Mainly, we talk about why Mr Z went to work without his wedding ring on (yes, really, this morning), and why Mr C needs four monitors in his home office (nobody knows), and the minutiae of being in the sandwich generation, caring for both kids and ageing parents, and how we wish we were the bread bit, not the middle bit.

Listening to her mad spaghetti idea, what I realised – and I don’t think those Conservative MPs do (is it because so many of them privately educate their children, or their income depends upon their not realising it?) – is how viscerally everyone is affected by this. In a way, the less left-leaning and political they are, the more they abhor it, having none of the emotional insulation of thinking: “Same old Tories.”

The poor are not a separate category that Channel 5 can make a discrediting documentary about. These are either your children or they’re your children’s friends. They live in your house, or they hang out in your house. You still have a pair of their pyjama bottoms from when they were in year four, or you’re missing a pair. You remember when their brother broke his arm. You remember the time they got a new coat that had stars on it, in 2015.

It is impossible to exaggerate how connected parents are to each other’s children, even if actual conversations are so limited (“please”, “thank you” on their side, “don’t do that, you’ll break it” on yours) that it would be hard to discern from the outside. They don’t have to be at a cute age. You could no more live with the idea that a 14-year-old standing in front of you hasn’t had breakfast than you would walk past a two-year-old who was lost in a supermarket.

This is where the self-styled neutral commentators hit the hard limit of their comprehension. They will show you polls that say 40% of the country agrees that children are hungry because their parents spend all their money on Netflix; they will point to callous comments under articles, and get in your grill with the hard reality of demographics, that the over-65s agree with Ben Bradley and there are more of them than there are of you.

But what this analysis doesn’t get – and I don’t think Sun Tzu gets either, although needless to say I haven’t read him – is the asymmetry of feeling. Not caring is a relatively mild state, that you wouldn’t cross the street for. Caring is a hot and urgent state that preoccupies your mind. And a cottage bolognese industry is not the answer, but it’s closer to it. People are not walking on by, and they will not let this drop.