Breakfast Clubs and the State Takeover of Children

 

RICHARD MORRISEY

YESTERDAY, my wife and I met our two-day-old granddaughter – a tiny, fragile miracle reminding us how precious children are and how carefully they must be nurtured. Today, I read about Labour’s plan to roll out nationwide breakfast clubs, and the contrast struck me deeply.

On one hand, the intimate bond of family; on the other, the cold efficiency of state-run childcare. This isn’t just about scrambled eggs and toast. It’s about who gets to shape childhood: parents who cherish their children as irreplaceable individuals, or a system that views them as units to be managed.

Sir Keir Starmer’s policy is framed as ‘help’ for working parents, but it’s another step toward outsourcing the heart of family life. Like a ship leaving harbour just one degree off course, small shifts in parenting – who feeds a child, who shares their first moments of the day – compound over time. A ‘convenient’ breakfast club today becomes a generational drift toward disconnected families tomorrow.

Over 33 years, I’ve cooked roughly 30,000 meals for my family. These weren’t transactional events: they were the bedrock of our relationships. You could call it ‘the soul of the family meal’. Research confirms what I’ve witnessed first-hand:

• Children who eat family meals regularly perform better academically (Harvard, 2012) and exhibit lower rates of depression (Columbia, 2015);

• Shared family meals build emotional resilience, foster healthy eating habits, good behaviour and create traditions that span generations.

None of this should surprise. Yet Labour’s policy isn’t interested in this evidence. Breakfast clubs don’t just replace a meal; they replace (or rather don’t replace) critical daily interactions between parent and child. These morning exchanges – observing a child’s mood, ensuring he or she has eaten properly, addressing concerns before school, reinforcing family values – build the foundation of trust and understanding that no institutional setting can replicate. These aren’t sentimental luxuries but essential components of effective parenting.

Starmer claims to ‘ease burdens’ but the subtext is clear: the state increasingly sees itself as the rightful architect of childhood. Consider the trajectory of the state’s quiet takeover of children:

1. Breakfast clubs (state-fed mornings);

2. Extended school hours (‘wraparound care’);

3. Digital encroachment (screens replacing conversation).

Each step pulls children further from parental influence. State employees may meet nutritional requirements, but they lack the intimate knowledge of a child’s individual needs, temperament and development that parents naturally possess. The subtle cues and patterns that inform effective parenting cannot be replicated in institutional settings, yet policy increasingly treats them as interchangeable.

We need only look to Sweden, often hailed as a progressive utopia, to see the unintended consequences of state-led parenting. Despite generous parental leave and childcare subsidies, Swedish teenagers now report among the highest rates of anxiety in Europe (WHO, 2023). Psychologists attribute this to ‘premature institutionalisation’ – children spending more time in collective care than in one-on-one family bonds. Meanwhile, family meal frequency has dropped 40 per cent since the 1980s (Nordic Journal of Social Policy 2021), paralleling declines in child mental health. The state can provide calories, but it cannot replicate the emotional nutrition of a parent’s presence.

Sweden offers a cautionary tale for the UK where, already only 25-50 per cent of families engage in family meals several days a week although ‘beneficial nutrition-related outcomes have been cross-sectionally associated with family meal frequency, including increased fruit and vegetable consumption and weight status’. Better-off families and those with mothers at home are also ‘associated with’ family meal frequency.

Critics will say breakfast clubs are optional, saving children whose parents can’t provide due to early shifts, tight budgets or neglect. I hear them: one in five British children face food insecurity (Food Foundation, 2024). These are legitimate concerns. But even voluntary state clubs blanket families with a one-size-fits-all fix, normalising dependency and sidelining poorer parents who want to provide. Freedom is empowering such parents to provide, through tax relief or flexible hours, not replacing this role. For the few who truly can’t, expand free school meal eligibility, don’t incentivise every parent to outsource every child’s early morning.

If the goal is truly to support parents (as opposed to Bridget Phillipson’s choiceness offer), here’s where to start:

1 Tax relief for stay-at-home parents: Stop penalising single-earner families. Value caregiving as essential work;

2 Flexible work policies: Let parents prioritise mornings at home without career penalties;

3 Community networks: Replace state-run clubs with neighbourhood meal rotations (for example parents taking turns hosting breakfast).

This isn’t nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s about recognising that the stakes are high for our children. Children raised by systems grow into adults who trust systems, not people. The Labour policy whispers a dangerous lie: that parents are replaceable.

I look at our newborn granddaughter and wonder what world she will inherit – one where family bonds are sacred, or where the state increasingly inserts itself between parent and child? What we decide today will shape her tomorrow.

Hold the line. Fight for a world where families, not the state, shape the next generation.

‘Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.’ (Proverbs 22:6)

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This article (Breakfast clubs and the state takeover of children) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Richard Morrisey

You’re ‘Far Right’ Now If You Think Parents Should Feed Their Own Kids? Give Me a Break!

CP

Did you know that if you dare to suggest that maybe, just maybe, parents should take some responsibility for feeding their own children, you’re now branded as “Far Right”?

Yes, welcome to Britain in 2025: where common sense is cancelled, and the taxpayer is guilt-tripped into funding breakfast clubs for everyone else’s kids, while many can’t even afford to have their own.

Let’s be clear: we are not talking about abandoning the vulnerable. Britain must look after its most disadvantaged. No decent society turns its back on the hungry. But when did “compassion” become synonymous with compulsory collectivism?

Because that’s what this is. Labour’s latest wheeze, free breakfasts for all children, is not charity. It’s not kindness. It’s the state barging into your kitchen, confiscating your toaster, and telling your six-year-old that toast now belongs to the Ministry of Breakfast.

What used to be a parent’s early morning ritual, whether it’s a humble slice of buttered toast, a lone Weetabix, or, heaven forbid, a chopped apple, is now being absorbed by the state. Why? Because Labour doesn’t trust you to do it yourself.

Instead, they’d prefer to tax you twice—once to pay out benefits, and then again to run a breakfast buffet in every school hall from Land’s End to Inverness. That’s not support. That’s a nanny state with a megaphone, shouting, “Don’t worry, mum and dad, we’ll handle it all for you—now back off.”

It’s no wonder so many working couples are delaying or abandoning the dream of having children. Who can afford it? Spiralling taxes, frozen wages, and now the surreal reality that you’re paying for strangers’ kids to be fed before you’ve even had your own coffee. It’s like being charged for a gym membership you’re not allowed to use because someone else needs the treadmill more.

Let us pose a radical question: is it still OK to expect parents to feed their children?

Is it still permissible in polite society to believe that bringing a child into the world carries some responsibilities, including ensuring that child has something to eat before heading to school?

Or is that “cruel”? Is that “elitist”? Is that… brace yourself… “Far Right”?

The truth is far simpler. Labour doesn’t just want to feed your kids. They want to brush their teeth, teach them what to think (and not how to think), and then send you the bill for the whole charade. This is cradle-to-clipboard socialism. Big Brother with a lunchbox.

And it’s not just inefficient. It’s dangerous. Every inch the state takes from parents is an inch taken from the freedom of family life. If the government raises your child, what’s left for you to do? Just clap politely at the school gates while Keir Starmer hands your daughter a soy-based snack and a pamphlet on “inclusivity in breakfast”?

No. Absolutely not.

It’s time for Britain to say: enough. Enough with the paternalistic power grabs. Enough with the virtue-signalling that uses your payslip as a blank cheque. Enough with being branded “far right” for believing in something as wildly radical as parenting.

Britain doesn’t need another layer of state intervention smothered over its families like cold porridge. It needs the dignity of responsibility, the freedom to raise one’s children without the government peering over the cornflakes.

So, to all the politicians who want to nationalise the kitchen table: we see you. And we say no.

Because when the state takes the spoon from your hand, it won’t be long before it’s feeding you ideology for pudding.

By Dorothy Lyons.

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This article (You’re ‘Far Right’ Now If You Think Parents Should Feed Their Own Kids? Give Me a Break!) was created and published by Conservative Post and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Dorothy Lyons.