Welsh Labour leader Mark Drakeford today piled pressure on Keir Starmer over free school meals.
The UK party chief is resisting mounting calls to guarantee free dinners for all primary pupils when he publishes Labour’s election manifesto next year. The First Minister backed the Mirror’s campaign with the National Education Union for free school meals for all as Wales gears up for the full rollout of the policy next year.
Speaking exclusively to the Mirror, Mr Drakeford told how the original free school meals fight was launched at Cardiff City Hall by the centre-left think tank the Fabian Society 117 years ago when it published a paper called And They Shall Have Flowers On The Table. “The benefits are multiple - for a start they help children with learning because hungry children don’t learn well, and hungry children don’t help other children to learn well because they can’t settle,” said the First Minister.
But he added: “For us, it’s much more than a feeding scheme, it’s about socialising, it’s about saying to children, ‘you are valued’ - they shall have ‘flowers on the table’,”. He said while an incoming Labour government would “inevitably spend the first two years simply trying to deal with the worst of the damage that they will inherit”, it was “important for the party to articulate the ambitions it will have once that initial period is complete, once we’ve succeeded in putting the economy back on a path to growth”.
