Why is the free school meals debate so toxic?

My childhood in 1980s West Yorkshire wasn’t a clichéd mash-up of a Hovis commercial and Kes. For most of my youth we had an indoor toilet, for instance, and though we lived in a cramped terraced house it wasn’t a back-to-back – which meant we could hang our washing in the back alley rather than out front. I did conform to stereotype in one sense, though: until the age of 14 I was on free school meals. I still remember how at my comprehensive school we had to line up separately on one side of the corridor. Unfairly, our dinner tickets had a special mark so that unlike the ‘other half’ we couldn’t flog them for the price of a chip butty. Presumably, the thinking was that we might not get a nutritious meal at home, which might have been the case for some kids, but not for me.

What’s astonishing almost 40 years later is not that campaigners such as the admirable Marcus Rashford still need to explain what it’s like to be poor – but that so many, mostly in the Conservative party, still seem unable to grasp that for whatever reasons, some young people still go hungry.