Benefits change to mean children will lose entitlement when they move to secondary school, while govt keeps them in grinding poverty
More than a million schoolkids are set to be deprived of free school meals under the Starmer government’s austerity plans as they move through the education system and parents are forced to move from legacy benefits onto the hated and unfair ‘Universal Credit’ (UC).
The phase-out of already-meagre protections put grudgingly in place by the Tories for children of families moving onto UC begins this month and Rachel Reeves has refused calls to extend the deadline or put other measures in place to prevent a vast number of poor children losing their free meals when they move to from primary to ‘big school’.
The Tories’ 2018 transitional mitigations for the eventual forced transfer of all benefit claimants onto UC, which included guaranteed access to free school meals for their children, run out at the end of March. Sources for Reeves have dismissed calls for another extension or for measures to soften the impact on poor children as “completely off the table”. Reports from teachers of children being too hungry to study are already widespread before this change.
The government has claimed that the existing system is unsustainable because demand for free school meals has risen substantially – ignoring that this is because Tory policies, which Starmer is not just maintaining but intensifying in a war on the poor and vulnerable, have made the UK’s already horrific levels of poverty even worse – and that its ‘Child Poverty Taskforce’ will help.
In cold comfort for poor children and their parents, the government claimed that children will not be hit by the change until September, when year 6 pupils will move to year 7, the first year of secondary education:
No pupil will feel any change as a result of the move to phase 2 of protections until after the summer and as with all government policy, we keep our approach to free school meals under review.
Starmer’s government has been heavily and rightly criticised for its war on poor people and their children, which have included Starmer’s decision to maintain the cruel ‘two-child benefit cap’ that helps keep more than 1.5m children in poverty – a decision that earned him the sobriquet ‘Sir Kid Starver’ – even though it costs around £38 billion more to keep the cap than to abolish it. Labour is also implementing a raft of policies, without even bothering with an impact assessment, that target disabled and sick people and their families.
The impact on UK children and other vulnerable people is so grave that the UN has said the government’s policies breach human rights and has told the Starmer he must immediately reverse the cuts, increase benefits and abolish the two-child cap, which he continues to ignore in favour of hitting them even harder.
Well over 14 million UK people – more than one in five – live in poverty. Around 4.3 million of them are children – one child out of every three in the UK.
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It’s worth remembering that we’ve been here before. While Labour is strongly associated with the creation of the modern welfare state through the 1945 government, its first majority government, in 1929, tried to implement savage attacks on the poor and unemployed in 1931, in the middle of the Depression. This led to a split in Labour with prime minister Ramsay McDonald (a much more talented and originally left-wing figure than Starmer) joining with the Tories to form a National Government, and rump Labour left in the wilderness until the postwar election.
https://www.counterfire.org/article/keir-starmer-a-man-who-always-punches-down-weekly-briefing/
And it is about to get a whole lot worse across Europe and the UK – as this FT headline of Guns not butter shills for –
https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989
As Prof. Richard Wolf………
……spells out here:
And they tried to claim the credit for rashford shaming the toerags into keeping the vouchers for kids meals during covid.
https://cdn.thepoke.com/uploads/2020/06/06075406/labour.jpg
Fucking lowlives. Hope their kids get remorselessly bullied at school.
(a much more talented and originally left-wing figure than Starmer
So was thatcher.
…And that arl bastard only stole the kids’ milk.
One in 3 children living in poverty. One in 5 voting Labour.
“I’ve changed Labour permanently” says Starmer. Yes he has.
No one has done more than Starmer to purge the ballot boxes:
better future.
His daughters’s a teacher, too, supposedly.
So when the kids aren’t concentrating through hunger and flunking their exams, she’ll be sacked.
And she’ll deserve it for using her arl fella’s proxy vote (that he shouldn’t be entitled to) to elect that shower o’ shite.
Unless, of course, she’s at one of those schools where kids’ parents are paying the VAT…
The Architects of Cruelty
This assault on the vulnerable isn’t a spontaneous development. It flows directly from Labour Together, the influential think tank founded by Morgan McSweeney — now Starmer’s chief of staff — and wealthy donor Trevor Chinn. The same organisation that methodically destroyed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is now directing its energies toward dismantling the welfare state.
A newly formed group of 36 Labour MPs calling themselves “Get Britain Working” has emerged as the vanguard of this attack. Led by David Pinto-Duschinsky, who conveniently sits on parliament’s Work and Pensions Select Committee, these MPs have issued their full-throated support for benefit cuts. Investigation reveals that 29 of these 36 MPs received funding either directly from Labour Together or from donors associated with it.
The message is clear: the Starmer project was never about saving Labour, but about capturing it for a specific ideological purpose.
https://labourheartlands.com/the-coming-storm-labours-war-on-the-vulnerable-has-only-just-begun/
A most salient observation from that piece:
“And yet the grotesque irony cannot be ignored: While Starmer’s government claims it must strip support from the most vulnerable in society, it simultaneously pours billions into Ukraine’s war effort—continuing Biden’s abandoned proxy war even as America under Trump pivots toward peace. Starmer’s self-styled “coalition of the willing” beats the drums of war and pumps public money into arms manufacturers’ coffers, choosing a Keynesian war economy over investing in its own citizens’ wellbeing. This government speaks of fiscal responsibility while funnelling resources into a conflict that edges us closer to nuclear confrontation. The choice is clear: bombs over bread, missiles over medicine, military contractors over the chronically ill. They find endless resources for destruction abroad, while pleading poverty when asked to support life at home.”
Follow the money
Your not allowed to challenge all areas of expenditure
Look and ask who benefits from that spending
Politicians are just bought and paid for money launderers for the Kleptocracy
‘Oh not to be hungry and scruffy.
As they tried to fill my head with what their education brings.
But I questioned and was a socialist at 11.
Though hadn’t quite worked out those things.
But forever more I had a passion in my heart.’
The libtards still haven’t been forgiven for ratting out the students.And this ain’t the smarmerites first rodeo over school meals.
So don’t forget what they’re about, kids. Not only do they not give a fuck about you going hungry, any of you that get mental issues during or after your schooldays (possibly as a result) are ‘swinging the lead’.
Count yer lucky ones coal fires are a thing of the past – and I don’t just mean because of the pollution.
By the time a lot of these leave school, they will become cannon fodder for the Globalist “elite’s” plan to continue the Ponzi scheme of trying to plunder the resources of the Global Majority by fighting everyone down to the last Western Subject.
‘Put another eighteen-year-old on the fire, Keir/Emmanuel/Friedrich/Mark, we’ve run out of women/children/pensioners/Ukrainians/Palestinians/Arabs/Brown skinned people.’
Suffer little children to come unto he yet they not Christians anymore just greedy lecherous wanting power and the wealth but we must find a way to cast out these creatures without humanity