Tory U-turns over free school meals risk alienating new voters

The interval between the Manchester United striker’s take-down and the screeching U-turn that follows is getting shorter, but it’s still there, writes Ed Dorrell

Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford (Manchester United via Getty Images)

It has become a subject of wry amusement that the government keeps apparently walking blindly into the same row and behaving in the same way - and then losing. 

Pretty much every half term or holiday since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, Marcus Rashford has demanded that food vouchers or packages be provided for free to the parents of children who qualify for free school meals, and every time have ministers resisted for a few days and then caved.

Admittedly, the interval between the Manchester United striker delivering a blistering-and-yet-oh-so-classy take-down and the screeching U-turn that inevitably follows is getting shorter, but it’s still there.

Received wisdom has it that the government thinks that it must resist dishing out the cash too easily because it has to be seen to be tough on “welfare scroungers”: that there is a constituency of voters, many to be found in the Red Wall-that-turned-blue, who want to see ministers playing hardball with recipients of benefits.

This is why the MP for Mansfield, Ben Bradley (who styles himself the “first blue brick” because he won his seat from Labour in 2017), is deployed to argue in the media that the level of universal credit takes into account the need to feed the recipient's children - and to simply ignore this fact is to be, in some way, both socially and fiscally weak.

But if the government thinks that in taking this line it is shoring up the vote in Bolsover and Blyth Valley, I suspect they are wrong.

Over the last several months I have had the pleasure of running many, many focus groups in the new Tory heartlands with new Tory voters. They have all, to a lesser or greater extent, dealt with the subject of Coronavirus and the economic crisis that has followed in its wake – and Rashford and the successive free school meals rows have come up time and again, often unprompted. The findings of these groups suggest that the Conservative position on this issue is not playing well at all – and could indeed lose the government support, not reinforce it.

Voters in the demographic groups who lent their vote to Boris Johnson in 2019 understand the argument that Bradley et al make about how universal credit ought to be sufficient, and even support it. They are, for better or worse, wary of the welfare state being allowed to grow and they are clear that parents on benefits should be able to feed their own children without extra contributions from the taxpayer.

And yet simultaneously this group of voters (often characterised as “the just-about managing”) also passionately believe that Rashford is right and that of course the government should sort out food vouchers for the school holidays. They are proud of the campaign being orchestrated by Rashford (in large part seeing him as one of their own) and are indignant that ministers should even consider letting children go hungry. They do not stop to worry that there might be some kind of contradiction to taking both positions – and perhaps they’re right not to.

Many would critique this as mass cognitive dissonance, but I am not so sure. In his recently published memoirs, Barack Obama writes interestingly about the importance of being able to hold two contradictory arguments in your head at the same time, somehow accepting that they are both simultaneously true. There is wisdom in that thought, just as there is wisdom in the voters of Darlington and the Don Valley.