It is never too late to do the right thing and end child food poverty

Editorial: Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak must understand that, aside from the impact on communities, the political cost of refusing help to children on free school meals is too great

Marcus Rashford with his mother Melanie at a food bank in Manchester (FareShare)

It is hard to understand why the prime minister chose to make his stand in defence of responsible public finances on the question of food for the children of low-income families in the school holidays. We can almost imagine the conversation with his chancellor. Rishi Sunak may have said: “I know we’re borrowing £400bn this year, but we have to draw the line somewhere.” 

So did Boris Johnson reply: “Quite right; let’s draw the line against a popular young footballer who is running an exemplary moral campaign and who defeated us last time”?

Mr Sunak, at least, understands numbers, and knows the difference between billions and millions. He knows that the £100m or so that a holiday voucher scheme would cost until Easter next year is trivial against the budgets he seeks to control. And Mr Johnson, who understands politics well enough to be in the position he holds today, must know that this would have been an easy win for him if he had conceded with good grace early on and pretended that the idea was his own. 

Instead, he asked his uneasy MPs to cast votes that their opponents were bound to present as being in favour of letting children go hungry. No wonder that some of them have responded with foolish and tasteless defences that they have had to claim have been taken “out of context”. 

On Wednesday evening only five Conservative MPs were brave enough to stand up for what was right: Robert Halfon, Jason McCartney, Anne Marie Morris, Holly Mumby-Croft and Caroline Ansell, who gave up her position as an apprentice minister (she was parliamentary private secretary to George Eustice, the environment secretary). Several others did not vote, and we should not be too critical of them, because at least they withheld their support from the government on this issue, although by not voting they are not necessarily being explicit about their position. 

The half-term holiday has now started in most of England, but we would urge the prime minister to think again before the Christmas break. Mr Rashford has touched a nerve. He has been overwhelmed by offers of help to give food this week to children entitled to free school meals. We know from The Independent’s Help The Hungry campaign how generous the British people are, and how they seem to understand better than their government the extent of hardship and food poverty in the country today.  

It is never too late to do the right thing. Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak may think that they have broken the political pain barrier – a small rebellion in parliament and a few bad headlines – in order to defend the principle of prudence with public money. Just because they have borrowed unimaginable sums with no clear idea of how or whether it will ever be paid back, and just because billions have been lost in fraudulent claims on the furlough scheme, does not mean that they can spend even more of other people’s money.  

In this case, however, they can and they must, because the British people demand it.