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One colleague has described how he can still “taste and smell the panic” that he had as a child and relied on free school meals when the holidays were approaching, and told Sky News that the government must change its direction.
Leslie Griffiths, now a Work Lord, said he and his brother used to rummage through rubbish piles for coal to heat the only room where they lived with their mother in the late 1940s in Burry Port, North Wales.
“It was very, very hard,” she recalled, describing how her mother, who worked in a tin factory that “broke her body” and left them relying on profits, used to worry about school holidays when her two children ate for free . arrested.
Children do not receive free school meals during the holidays
“More than once I saw her put food on the table and she was pretending to have something and she didn’t,” Lord Leslie told Sky News.
It was a “threadbare existence,” he added, after speaking in a House of Lords debate early Tuesday about free school meals.
The problem has flared again when children spend half their period at home Boris johnson has resisted a soccer player campaign Marcus rashford extend free school meals during the holidays during the coronavirus pandemic.
Government U-turn to do it during the summer but he refuses to do something similar for the rest of the winter.
Boris Johnson has so far refused to make another U-turn
Ministers argue that support can be better targeted and various Conservative backbenchers have warned against creating a greater reliance on the coupon system.
But Lord Griffiths praised Rashford as “the best looking celebrity”.
He described how friends took care of his family during strange nights and then gave him a spare room at his grandparents’ house in a brick courtyard.
“I have no pleasure in telling this story to make people cry or to provoke admiration. We were very happy,” he told Sky News.
“My mother was a very remarkable and resilient woman. But it was very, very difficult.
“I don’t remember not having free school meals.”
Lord Griffiths grew up in Burry Port, North Wales. Photo: Google
When he was 11 years old, Lord Griffiths got a place in an elementary school, while his brother went to modern high school.
That was the age when he realized how different his own position was from that of others around him.
“Now he was surrounded by bourgeois people, he had never met anyone like that,” he said.
“But I became self-conscious. Here I was, wearing this elegant uniform, they gave me this blue card and told me to line up, quite different from the others.”
Lord Griffiths said the only reason he spoke was to “draw attention to the fact that an old Etonian doesn’t understand what people like us went through, what it feels like and what it means in terms of the ability to people to manage “. .
And praising Rashford, he added: “It’s so rare that those guys who get so much money and so much stardom step out of the images we create for them just to be ordinary guys.
Marcus Rashford was praised for being the ‘best looking celebrity’
“He’s been so beautifully underrated, that he hasn’t flaunted himself. He’s the best-looking celebrity …
“Since he’s had the attention, it hasn’t gone to his head, he hasn’t bragged, he’s just stayed true to himself.
“I really wanted them to be my five minutes in support of what is a very worthwhile campaign.”
And Lord Griffiths said that while some councils and Samaritans had stepped in to commit to feeding starving children over the holidays, not all children would be lucky enough to benefit.
“That’s the problem: some will get the benefit and some won’t, that’s what makes it a zip code lottery,” he added.
Some charities and companies have stepped in to provide lunches.
In response to her earlier address to the Lords, Minister Baroness Berridge said that “many Noble Lords from all parties and none can recall circumstances in which their own needs, whether for shelter or food, were not met by the circumstances. of his family”.
She added: “It is not a zip code lottery.
“1.4 million children in England are entitled to free school meals, saving their families over £ 400 a year, and on top of that, particularly through the soda tax, the government has been funding in almost 2,500 schools new breakfast clubs to provide children with healthy food. “
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that I hadn’t spoken to Rashford since JuneBut he praised their “tremendous” campaign against food poverty.
He promised “to do everything in our power to make sure that no child, no child goes hungry this winter during the holidays.”
