Classic Reform, they’ll say it’s the parents job but then they will remove workers rights making it harder to feed their children breakfast and making the need for breakfast clubs higher.
talesofcrouchandegg on
The ‘Parental Reponsibility’ crowd does my bloody nut. If you make things harder and harder, don’t be shocked they don’t get done. It’s literally the same mentality as being shocked people can’t afford a house when they cost 20 times their annual income instead of what they were back in the 50s. ‘It was easy for me, so anyone should find it equally easy under much harder conditions’.
Pheasant_Plucker84 on
Breakfast club isn’t just about feeding kids. Tone deaf wankers hear “free breakfast” I think it’s for “scroungers”.
Both me and my wife work full time. I start at 8 and she starts at 9. She has to leave at 08:30. We drop my daughter off in breakfast club so that we can get to work on time, not for her to be fed. It’s support to allow people to actually get to fucking work.
Important_Ruin on
Reform UK is under fire after a key party figure criticised Labour’s free breakfast clubs, saying it is “parents’ job” to start their kids’ days right.
Linden Kemkaran, the leader of Reform’s flagship Kent Council Council, wrote on social media: “Sorry, call me old fashioned but I believe it’s the parents’ job to give their child the best possible start to the school day.”
Free breakfast clubs provide a minimum of 30 minutes of free childcare and a healthy breakfast before the school day. The Department for Education (DfE) says they save working parents up to £450 a year.
A Labour source said: “You’d think Nigel and co would back something that promotes work and responsibility, but they’d rather attack it than stand up for working families. Breakfast clubs give children the best start to the school day and help parents work more to support their families. Reform are making their position crystal clear – they don’t mind if kids go hungry.”
Labour also pointed there are 29 breakfast clubs in Kent, with more to come.
A Labour source said: “You’d think Nigel and co would back something that promotes work and responsibility, but they’d rather attack it than stand up for working families
A Labour source said: ‘You’d think Nigel and co would back something that promotes work and responsibility, but they’d rather attack it than stand up for working families'(Image: Getty Images)
In April, Labour’s flagship scheme was extended to 500 more schools, benefiting some 300,000 students. It followed 750 schools joining a pilot of the scheme last year. More will join the programme from September. Labour has promised for every primary school in England to have a free breakfast club by the end of the Parliament.
Bridget Phillipson has previously said free breakfasts are “revolutionising morning routines” across the country. “From settling a child into the school day to helping parents get to work, free breakfast clubs are giving every child the best start in life,” the Education Secretary said.
“I was raised by a single parent, so I know first-hand the struggles facing parents trying to make ends meet and how important it is to tackle outdated stigmas with practical support that people can feel every day.”
The Department for Education says free breakfast clubs mean help parents with childcare at the start of the school day at no extra costs.
It means parents can drop their children off half an hour earlier, helping parents get into work and giving them up to 95 additional hours back to juggle busy mornings.
The latest rollout of clubs prioritised schools with the highest proportion of pupils on free school meals to ensure that the real-life impact of free breakfast clubs goes first to where it is most needed.
Reform UK declined to comment.
Legitimate-Tip-2149 on
Do Reform actually have any positive policies, anything that isn’t just being mad at something that already exists and wanting to get rid of it?
HaveYuHeardAboutCunt on
Reform: We need to take care of our own instead of immigrants.
British child: I’m starving.
Reform: Fuck off.
Strong_Quiet_4569 on
Your life shall be difficult. You must listen to your big brother Nigel who tells you who to worry about and blame.
RedofPaw on
I wonder how these folks feel about falling birth rates. Maybe they need to ask WHY birth rates are falling.
I suspect they’re also the sort that say “If you can’t afford kids you shouldn’t have them”.
They’re not the brightest bunch, but they do have the least empathy.
JackStrawWitchita on
Performative cruelty wins votes in modern Britain. It’s not about breakfast clubs, it’s about bringing perverse joy to the vast swathe of Britain’s population who enjoy watching vulnerable people suffer.
The more candidates ‘punch down’, causing misery to immigrants or people in poverty, the more votes they win.
There’s a streak of absolute horrific cruelty running through our nation that many don’t want to acknowledge. Reform has tapped into it and is now winning elections with it.
sf-keto on
I’m in Nottingham where the official child poverty rate is 40%. These are the children who desperately need a decent breakfast & good care. A generation of tiny Oliver Twists generally don’t grow up to a Dickensian happy ever after.
They’re sadly often the roadmen, the knife-wielders, the gang members.
Good God, Reform! Open your eyes.
Crhallan on
Remember, these are the guys that want a woman chained to the sink as a housewife and the man out working, earning the money and going to the pub for 8 Stella before coming back to beat her again.
Yes, I’m aware that’s a stereotype but still….
pjs-1987 on
If you’re voting Reform, your parents didn’t do their job
whatmichaelsays on
The government fucked up by using the term “breakfast club” (or allowing the term to stick).
These clubs aren’t about breakfast. They’re about wrap-around care for working parents who are trying to “do the right thing” as part of “alarm clock Britain”, or whatever bullshit label Reform wants to use to describe them. They are a good idea to help people contribute to the economy.
But my making them about “breakfast” rather than childcare, it leaves the door open for these sorts of barbs about feckless parents to land.
Jammy50 on
Saying parents need to be more responsible is just an easy way for people who are ideologically opposed to more government support for impoverished families to wash their hands of the problem. If telling parents they need to be more responsible was an actual solution child poverty would have been fixed decades ago.
RaymondBumcheese on
‘Why are we having less white, Christian children?’
‘Because they are expensive and we need help’
‘Fuck off’
No_Foot on
Sometimes the mask slips and reform reveal how much they fuck hate the working class people of the UK. Might as well just scrap all schools all together give how ‘woke’ learning stuff is these days.
Icy-Tear4613 on
I really dont get why right wing people hate when the state supports people like this, “you never help the working class” “no dont help children eat”.
Schools should always the equaliser helping children regardless of their parents. Breakfast is a no brainer.
SnazzyPanic on
You legally force children to be in school; it’s actually kind of your job.
mastfest on
I don’t know why people continue to be surprised by what pours out of these gobshites.
The party and its supporters completely lack critical thinking skills.
keepitreal55055 on
Reform would be an absolute disaster if they won a general election. 5 years of nothing but shit on shit.
Noonecanseemenow on
The party of spiteful punishment.
Firslty breakfast club is to allow working parents to actually fucking work. A bizzare concept for any reform official I know.
Secondly, even if it was the parents job, should the child be punished for it if the parents come up short?
Thirdly, this is one of those policies that has so few downside compared to the vast benefits it produces they you’d be mad not to want to roll out such an easy win.
Finally, what do they think will be achieved by removing this policy?
BroodLord1962 on
I agree, it is a parents job to feed their kids. If you can’t afford to feed your kids you shouldn’t be having them
Mobile_Falcon8639 on
The Irony of is that the kind of people who most likely to vote Reform are the poorer white working classes, sun, daily mail and express readers, who are not well educated. People who have the most to loose under a Reform government. Yet they’re happy to be ruled by a bunch of multi millionaires ie Farage, Tice, Yusuf who have never had even the slightest experience of the lives or the struggles of their voters.
You couldn’t make it up.
GayWolfey on
Lisa Nandy also took a swipe at breakfast clubs as well on Sky News. Saying when people are hurting. Announcing free breakfasts clubs doesn’t cut it.
skywalkers_glove on
They really couldn’t care less about working people. Somehow they will get into power though. These are strange times. If my tax money goes to feed kids who would otherwise go hungry I see it as a great use of my tax money. I have no skin in the game as I don’t have children but I do have empathy, a very commendable trait lacking in this set of charlatans.
No-Future5309 on
Cant think of a single thing postive thing they want to give. It’s all take, take, take. But hey, as long as we get rid of people deemed lesser It’s all good in their thick voters minds.
Lord-Fowls-Curse on
I’ve increasingly started to think that a lot of modern welfare policy isn’t really about challenging capitalism at all, it’s about making the pressures capitalism creates more manageable so the system keeps functioning.
Take breakfast clubs, after school homework clubs, in-work benefits, tax credits etc. On the surface they obviously help people, and I’m not arguing they should be abolished because loads of families genuinely rely on them. But it’s interesting how often the state steps in to absorb the social damage created by the market without ever really challenging the market itself.
If wages are too low to comfortably raise a family, instead of forcing employers to pay more, the state tops up incomes through benefits. If parents are working longer hours or insecure jobs, the state provides breakfast clubs and after-school care so the labour market can continue demanding that flexibility. If economic pressures make home life harder, schools increasingly end up filling gaps that didn’t used to exist.
It’s like the state becomes a kind of support system for capitalism itself. The problems are managed just enough to stop complete breakdown or unrest, but not solved in a way that fundamentally changes the structure creating them.
That’s why Neo-Marxists often argue the modern state doesn’t simply “serve the rich” in some cartoonish way. It’s more subtle than that. The state genuinely helps people at times, but often in ways that stabilise the existing economic system rather than transform it.
You can even see how politically effective this is. The public sees help being provided, governments can present themselves as compassionate, businesses still get access to relatively cheap labour, and the deeper causes of inequality remain mostly untouched.
Feels like we’ve built a system where the state constantly cushions people from the full force of the market, while never really questioning why the market keeps producing the same pressures in the first place.
ER1916 on
My kids don’t even like breakfast club food, I give them breakfast before and they just go an play with their friends there.
NGeoTeacher on
Reform also want everyone into offices (no work from home), want to reduce/scrap the minimum wage and do all kinds of other things that make things harder for parents, while apparently also wanting to increase birth rates. If they want to go back to a 1950s-style economy with a single (probably male) breadwinner and a full-time parent then they need to be advertising policies that will enable that – that means housing costs have to come down dramatically, along with all the other things that are causing our bills to spiral upwards. But they aren’t. Because they don’t actually care about children or working families.
stbens on
Of course Breakfast Clubs help many people out, especially if they are working. There are, however, a minority of people who look at them as being free child care while they go out and socialise. A mum was interviewed on TV a short time ago who loved sending her children to breakfast club because it, and I quote, “gives me more time to see my mates in Costa down the road”.
MortimerMan2 on
Breakfast clubs would ideally be a paid-for service for those that need it starting as early as demand will support and offering a range of activities and food. 30 minutes before the school day with a slice of toast isn’t “the best start” for anyone.
My kids breakfast club is great, run in-house by the teaching assistants. They get some overtime, kids are looked after, and it’s all self-funding. Win-win
TakenIsUsernameThis on
On the one hand, they are right – parents should be making sure their kids have a proper meal at the start of the day – on the other hand we have cold hard reality where some parents don’t, and in order to ensure those kids don’t suffer because of their parents failings, the state should be taking action.
Put it another way – if this was sexual abuse and Reform said “its the parents job to protect their kids” what would people think?
TomsBookReviews on
“Fury as” is such a great way to start a headline. Prime the readers to react with rage, before even revealing what was said. Then in the article itself, have one line of what was said, and then several paragraphs exploring the opposing view.
I think school breakfast clubs are a good idea, but this kind of reporting really winds me up.
michaelisnotginger on
If breakfast clubs were called ‘early drop offs’ would there be such an issue?
My child has breakfast club at nursery – she also has breakfast beforehand.
HugoChavezRamboIII on
Andrew Neil made the exact same criticism this morning on Times Radio…
Edit] To be clear, I do not like Andrew Neil.
Shesoi on
Reform: We want people to have more children!
Reform: Breakfast is a parents job, don’t have kids if you can’t afford them!
Reform: We want an end to WFH!
Reform: We want to cut/abolish minimum wage!
Who would have thought the party that embraced 30p Lee would also have his talent for pumping shit like it’s overtime in colonoscopy.
mycarefu on
Exactly this. These people claim it’s about responsibility while actively pushing policies that make it harder for working families to actually function.
seafrontbloke on
I have no skin in this game, having no children.
If we need two full time wages to afford housing for a family, we need to accept that things like breakfast clubs are needed so that children being dropped off at 7:30 am aren’t going to fall asleep during lessons.
MolybdenumBlu on
Oh, no! The leopards are eating their faces. What a shame.
apple_kicks on
If they get rid of immigrants to blame they’ll blame poors next for all our ills. Maybe even revive deportations of citizens too as we did to early colonies
40 Comments
Classic Reform, they’ll say it’s the parents job but then they will remove workers rights making it harder to feed their children breakfast and making the need for breakfast clubs higher.
The ‘Parental Reponsibility’ crowd does my bloody nut. If you make things harder and harder, don’t be shocked they don’t get done. It’s literally the same mentality as being shocked people can’t afford a house when they cost 20 times their annual income instead of what they were back in the 50s. ‘It was easy for me, so anyone should find it equally easy under much harder conditions’.
Breakfast club isn’t just about feeding kids. Tone deaf wankers hear “free breakfast” I think it’s for “scroungers”.
Both me and my wife work full time. I start at 8 and she starts at 9. She has to leave at 08:30. We drop my daughter off in breakfast club so that we can get to work on time, not for her to be fed. It’s support to allow people to actually get to fucking work.
Reform UK is under fire after a key party figure criticised Labour’s free breakfast clubs, saying it is “parents’ job” to start their kids’ days right.
Linden Kemkaran, the leader of Reform’s flagship Kent Council Council, wrote on social media: “Sorry, call me old fashioned but I believe it’s the parents’ job to give their child the best possible start to the school day.”
Free breakfast clubs provide a minimum of 30 minutes of free childcare and a healthy breakfast before the school day. The Department for Education (DfE) says they save working parents up to £450 a year.
A Labour source said: “You’d think Nigel and co would back something that promotes work and responsibility, but they’d rather attack it than stand up for working families. Breakfast clubs give children the best start to the school day and help parents work more to support their families. Reform are making their position crystal clear – they don’t mind if kids go hungry.”
Labour also pointed there are 29 breakfast clubs in Kent, with more to come.
A Labour source said: “You’d think Nigel and co would back something that promotes work and responsibility, but they’d rather attack it than stand up for working families
A Labour source said: ‘You’d think Nigel and co would back something that promotes work and responsibility, but they’d rather attack it than stand up for working families'(Image: Getty Images)
In April, Labour’s flagship scheme was extended to 500 more schools, benefiting some 300,000 students. It followed 750 schools joining a pilot of the scheme last year. More will join the programme from September. Labour has promised for every primary school in England to have a free breakfast club by the end of the Parliament.
Bridget Phillipson has previously said free breakfasts are “revolutionising morning routines” across the country. “From settling a child into the school day to helping parents get to work, free breakfast clubs are giving every child the best start in life,” the Education Secretary said.
“I was raised by a single parent, so I know first-hand the struggles facing parents trying to make ends meet and how important it is to tackle outdated stigmas with practical support that people can feel every day.”
The Department for Education says free breakfast clubs mean help parents with childcare at the start of the school day at no extra costs.
It means parents can drop their children off half an hour earlier, helping parents get into work and giving them up to 95 additional hours back to juggle busy mornings.
The latest rollout of clubs prioritised schools with the highest proportion of pupils on free school meals to ensure that the real-life impact of free breakfast clubs goes first to where it is most needed.
Reform UK declined to comment.
Do Reform actually have any positive policies, anything that isn’t just being mad at something that already exists and wanting to get rid of it?
Reform: We need to take care of our own instead of immigrants.
British child: I’m starving.
Reform: Fuck off.
Your life shall be difficult. You must listen to your big brother Nigel who tells you who to worry about and blame.
I wonder how these folks feel about falling birth rates. Maybe they need to ask WHY birth rates are falling.
I suspect they’re also the sort that say “If you can’t afford kids you shouldn’t have them”.
They’re not the brightest bunch, but they do have the least empathy.
Performative cruelty wins votes in modern Britain. It’s not about breakfast clubs, it’s about bringing perverse joy to the vast swathe of Britain’s population who enjoy watching vulnerable people suffer.
The more candidates ‘punch down’, causing misery to immigrants or people in poverty, the more votes they win.
There’s a streak of absolute horrific cruelty running through our nation that many don’t want to acknowledge. Reform has tapped into it and is now winning elections with it.
I’m in Nottingham where the official child poverty rate is 40%. These are the children who desperately need a decent breakfast & good care. A generation of tiny Oliver Twists generally don’t grow up to a Dickensian happy ever after.
They’re sadly often the roadmen, the knife-wielders, the gang members.
Good God, Reform! Open your eyes.
Remember, these are the guys that want a woman chained to the sink as a housewife and the man out working, earning the money and going to the pub for 8 Stella before coming back to beat her again.
Yes, I’m aware that’s a stereotype but still….
If you’re voting Reform, your parents didn’t do their job
The government fucked up by using the term “breakfast club” (or allowing the term to stick).
These clubs aren’t about breakfast. They’re about wrap-around care for working parents who are trying to “do the right thing” as part of “alarm clock Britain”, or whatever bullshit label Reform wants to use to describe them. They are a good idea to help people contribute to the economy.
But my making them about “breakfast” rather than childcare, it leaves the door open for these sorts of barbs about feckless parents to land.
Saying parents need to be more responsible is just an easy way for people who are ideologically opposed to more government support for impoverished families to wash their hands of the problem. If telling parents they need to be more responsible was an actual solution child poverty would have been fixed decades ago.
‘Why are we having less white, Christian children?’
‘Because they are expensive and we need help’
‘Fuck off’
Sometimes the mask slips and reform reveal how much they fuck hate the working class people of the UK. Might as well just scrap all schools all together give how ‘woke’ learning stuff is these days.
I really dont get why right wing people hate when the state supports people like this, “you never help the working class” “no dont help children eat”.
Schools should always the equaliser helping children regardless of their parents. Breakfast is a no brainer.
You legally force children to be in school; it’s actually kind of your job.
I don’t know why people continue to be surprised by what pours out of these gobshites.
The party and its supporters completely lack critical thinking skills.
Reform would be an absolute disaster if they won a general election. 5 years of nothing but shit on shit.
The party of spiteful punishment.
Firslty breakfast club is to allow working parents to actually fucking work. A bizzare concept for any reform official I know.
Secondly, even if it was the parents job, should the child be punished for it if the parents come up short?
Thirdly, this is one of those policies that has so few downside compared to the vast benefits it produces they you’d be mad not to want to roll out such an easy win.
Finally, what do they think will be achieved by removing this policy?
I agree, it is a parents job to feed their kids. If you can’t afford to feed your kids you shouldn’t be having them
The Irony of is that the kind of people who most likely to vote Reform are the poorer white working classes, sun, daily mail and express readers, who are not well educated. People who have the most to loose under a Reform government. Yet they’re happy to be ruled by a bunch of multi millionaires ie Farage, Tice, Yusuf who have never had even the slightest experience of the lives or the struggles of their voters.
You couldn’t make it up.
Lisa Nandy also took a swipe at breakfast clubs as well on Sky News. Saying when people are hurting. Announcing free breakfasts clubs doesn’t cut it.
They really couldn’t care less about working people. Somehow they will get into power though. These are strange times. If my tax money goes to feed kids who would otherwise go hungry I see it as a great use of my tax money. I have no skin in the game as I don’t have children but I do have empathy, a very commendable trait lacking in this set of charlatans.
Cant think of a single thing postive thing they want to give. It’s all take, take, take. But hey, as long as we get rid of people deemed lesser It’s all good in their thick voters minds.
I’ve increasingly started to think that a lot of modern welfare policy isn’t really about challenging capitalism at all, it’s about making the pressures capitalism creates more manageable so the system keeps functioning.
Take breakfast clubs, after school homework clubs, in-work benefits, tax credits etc. On the surface they obviously help people, and I’m not arguing they should be abolished because loads of families genuinely rely on them. But it’s interesting how often the state steps in to absorb the social damage created by the market without ever really challenging the market itself.
If wages are too low to comfortably raise a family, instead of forcing employers to pay more, the state tops up incomes through benefits. If parents are working longer hours or insecure jobs, the state provides breakfast clubs and after-school care so the labour market can continue demanding that flexibility. If economic pressures make home life harder, schools increasingly end up filling gaps that didn’t used to exist.
It’s like the state becomes a kind of support system for capitalism itself. The problems are managed just enough to stop complete breakdown or unrest, but not solved in a way that fundamentally changes the structure creating them.
That’s why Neo-Marxists often argue the modern state doesn’t simply “serve the rich” in some cartoonish way. It’s more subtle than that. The state genuinely helps people at times, but often in ways that stabilise the existing economic system rather than transform it.
You can even see how politically effective this is. The public sees help being provided, governments can present themselves as compassionate, businesses still get access to relatively cheap labour, and the deeper causes of inequality remain mostly untouched.
Feels like we’ve built a system where the state constantly cushions people from the full force of the market, while never really questioning why the market keeps producing the same pressures in the first place.
My kids don’t even like breakfast club food, I give them breakfast before and they just go an play with their friends there.
Reform also want everyone into offices (no work from home), want to reduce/scrap the minimum wage and do all kinds of other things that make things harder for parents, while apparently also wanting to increase birth rates. If they want to go back to a 1950s-style economy with a single (probably male) breadwinner and a full-time parent then they need to be advertising policies that will enable that – that means housing costs have to come down dramatically, along with all the other things that are causing our bills to spiral upwards. But they aren’t. Because they don’t actually care about children or working families.
Of course Breakfast Clubs help many people out, especially if they are working. There are, however, a minority of people who look at them as being free child care while they go out and socialise. A mum was interviewed on TV a short time ago who loved sending her children to breakfast club because it, and I quote, “gives me more time to see my mates in Costa down the road”.
Breakfast clubs would ideally be a paid-for service for those that need it starting as early as demand will support and offering a range of activities and food. 30 minutes before the school day with a slice of toast isn’t “the best start” for anyone.
My kids breakfast club is great, run in-house by the teaching assistants. They get some overtime, kids are looked after, and it’s all self-funding. Win-win
On the one hand, they are right – parents should be making sure their kids have a proper meal at the start of the day – on the other hand we have cold hard reality where some parents don’t, and in order to ensure those kids don’t suffer because of their parents failings, the state should be taking action.
Put it another way – if this was sexual abuse and Reform said “its the parents job to protect their kids” what would people think?
“Fury as” is such a great way to start a headline. Prime the readers to react with rage, before even revealing what was said. Then in the article itself, have one line of what was said, and then several paragraphs exploring the opposing view.
I think school breakfast clubs are a good idea, but this kind of reporting really winds me up.
If breakfast clubs were called ‘early drop offs’ would there be such an issue?
My child has breakfast club at nursery – she also has breakfast beforehand.
Andrew Neil made the exact same criticism this morning on Times Radio…
Edit] To be clear, I do not like Andrew Neil.
Reform: We want people to have more children!
Reform: Breakfast is a parents job, don’t have kids if you can’t afford them!
Reform: We want an end to WFH!
Reform: We want to cut/abolish minimum wage!
Who would have thought the party that embraced 30p Lee would also have his talent for pumping shit like it’s overtime in colonoscopy.
Exactly this. These people claim it’s about responsibility while actively pushing policies that make it harder for working families to actually function.
I have no skin in this game, having no children.
If we need two full time wages to afford housing for a family, we need to accept that things like breakfast clubs are needed so that children being dropped off at 7:30 am aren’t going to fall asleep during lessons.
Oh, no! The leopards are eating their faces. What a shame.
If they get rid of immigrants to blame they’ll blame poors next for all our ills. Maybe even revive deportations of citizens too as we did to early colonies