Photo: VASILIS VERVERIDIS / Alamy Stock Photo
Welcome to Worst Hot Take of the Week – a column in which @MULLET_FAN_NEO crowns the wildest hot take of the week.
Reasonable take: The UK government should be doing everything humanly possible to address the fact that 1.3 million children are going hungry in a first world country, starting with not axing a scheme that barely touches the sides of the problem.
Brain rot: You've really fucked me here, Marcus. Why don't you donate some of your wages to personally fund this "entitlement scheme", hmm?
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Lockdown heroes come in many forms. There are the NHS staff working tirelessly to save lives, only for student nurses to have their contracts cut short; the UberEats cyclists who brave all weather conditions to deliver you a lukewarm boneless banquet; and Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United striker who forced the Tory government into a humbling U-turn this week after they initially refused to provide free school meals for 1.3 million impoverished children in England during the summer holidays.Sometimes, you dream of a plausible situation where a unanimous consensus could be reached within Britain. I wonder how many of us can earnestly say crisps are shit, or that an ice cold can of Lilt on the beach isn't a personal nirvana? But there are some things that go beyond preference. You would think an example of basic decency, such as "feeding hungry children", wouldn't be up for debate, but somehow middle-Englanders have managed to find a way.This week, Britain's Green Welly Brigade sprayed a slurry of bad takes across the world wide web to rival the muck spreading that "ruins a countryside getaway". Deciding to shift their grumblings from "Black people wanting equality is bad" to "Black footballer from a working class background successfully taking on Boris Johnson and making him feed hungry kids during a pandemic is bad", the usual roster of arseholes emerged to passive aggressively "congratulate" Rashford on a campaign they view as an attack on their cushty lifestyles.
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Author of a Daily Mail "Book of the week", Peter Lloyd, also attempted to exposé Rashford’s victorious campaign by stating: "If you think Marcus Rashford is doing this alone, without a massive PR machine plotting every more, then you’re seriously naive. I doubt he even writes his own tweets."Poor, naive Marcus Rashford, merely a pawn being underhandedly manipulated to, uh, feed 1.3 million hungry children. Next, we will be hearing some revelation about him having "TEN other team-mates who help him to score goals for England".Next up was a fellow England international, but in the "gentleman’s sport" of rugby, Courtney Lawes, who tweeted at Rashford saying: "Great win mate, you’ve done an incredible thing for a lot of young people!" But incomprehensibly he chose not to stop there, and continued: "Maybe now would be a good time to bring attention to the importance of being financially secure and preferably married before having kids? This would go a long way to treating a big part of the issue."
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Mark Littlewood, the director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs London, suggested that Marcus Rashford could get the PFA to agree that all Premier League pay a "20% anti-poverty levy on earnings about £1m pa". Which, I believe, is a flawless encapsulation of neoliberalism: a man so desperate to own a 22-year-old working class kid done good for making the Tory government look bad that he inadvertently proposes progressive taxation.How the fuck is it even possible that, in the same news cycle, the Bank of England can announce another £100 billion to "boost the economy" while we are driven to discussing if the country can afford to subsidise £15 a week for famished kids? I guess you don’t have to look that far for answers as to why British discourse delves into the pros and cons of feeding hungry children. BBC Political editor Laura Kuenssberg's commentary on the Government U-turn read like an 800-word intro to a potato masala dosa recipe on a food blog called "LauraBakesWell", prattling on about their indecision over what to cook for the in-laws on their visit from Chalfont St Giles.
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