[UPDATE: Over the weekend Marcus Rashford continued to use his Twitter account to share announcements from local businesses offering to provide free meals for children over October half term. As of Monday morning he has shared announcements from over 400+ businesses.]
Over the summer Marcus Rashford, the England and Manchester United football player, led a food poverty campaign so effective that it forced an embarrassing policy u-turn from Boris Johnson. The England international wrote a moving open-letter to all MPs in Parliament that spoke about his own experience growing up dependent on free school meals and he urged ministers to extend the free school meals scheme, which provides food for 1.3m children during term time, through the summer break while pandemic restrictions remained in place. The government had not been planning such an extension but facing mounting pressure from the opposition, the media and even their own backbenchers, a last minute change of direction was made and the government agreed to release £120m to fund the scheme.
This week, schools were out for half-term in England again and on Wednesday there was an Opposition Day Debate in the UK Parliament to discuss the continued provision of free school meals during school holidays for the rest of the year and into 2021. (The Scottish and Welsh governments have already put in place funding for extensions into 2021 for Scotland and Wales.) The Conservative government directed their MPs to oppose the extension and so the proposal was defeated by a vote in Parliament on Wednesday.
Rashford reacted to the defeat by vowing not to give up his campaign. And so, on Thursday evening he began tweeting.
