Skip to main content
Let them eat what? Free school meals and the new world order
Thanks to Marcus Rashford the national conversation is about food politics — now we must start making the connections between what we eat, how we farm and the most effective ways of taking carbon out of the atmosphere, writes ALAN SIMPSON

GOVERNMENTS fall more often from let-downs than lock-downs. That’s why Marcus Rashford’s “end child food-poverty” campaign has thrown British politics into a tiz. Who would have thought a young, black footballer would provide the leadership politics seems to lack?

Although Rashford consistently says “this is not about politics: it is about humanity,” everyone understands the umbilical links.

Knee-deep in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Rashford’s free school meals campaign stepped in to confront another pandemic; child food poverty in Britain. Boris Johnson’s government may have spurned the call to extend free school-meals vouchers to spring 2021, but the issue is anything but dead. If anything, it opened up a chasm between the government and the people.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
Features / 29 April 2025
29 April 2025

ALAN SIMPSON warns of a dystopian crossroads where Trump’s wrecking ball meets AI-driven alienation, and argues only a Green New Deal can repair our fractured society before techno-feudalism consumes us all

US President Donald Trump stands in the presidential box as
Features / 20 March 2025
20 March 2025
As the ‘NRx movement’ plots to replace democracy with corporate-feudal dictatorship, Britain must pursue a radical alternative of local food security and genuine wealth redistribution to withstand the coming upheaval, writes ALAN SIMPSON
MODERN FEUDALISM:
New US President Donald
Trump
Features / 30 January 2025
30 January 2025
Some hard political choices must be made in Trump’s post-truth era – starting by abandoning any illusions about the ‘special relationship’ and waking up to the need for bold policy-making on the climate, argues ALAN SIMPSON
PLUMMETING IN
THE POLLS: Keir
Starmer’s popularity
ratings
3 January 2025
3 January 2025
Centrist governments around the world face rejection by their electorates as neoliberalism fails to deliver the public prosperity it never promised – and the same fate awaits Labour unless it starts to deliver for those struggling to survive, says ALAN SIMPSON
Similar stories

A lunch tray in the school canteen
Britain / 12 March 2025
12 March 2025
Campaigners urge government to roll out universal free school meals
Pupils eating school dinners, March 2007
TUC Congress 2024 / 10 September 2024
10 September 2024
We need a ‘right to food’ enshrined in law and universal free school meals, as 7.2 million households face food insecurity after years of devastating failed Tory policies, writes ANNETTE MANSELL-GREEN