Covid-19: Children

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bichard.

I too am grateful to my noble friend Lady Morris for devoting her birthday today, like so much of her distinguished life before it, to the care, education, well-being and fulfilment of the United Kingdom’s children. As your Lordships’ House will have come to expect from her, the opening to this debate was expert, eloquent, constructive and practical but also completely devastating. I believe she is right that during the pandemic, which has been the greatest magnifier of every structural and endemic inequality in our society, our children have been let down by the Government. While no member of society should be failed by those charged with their protection, to betray the young is a particularly shameful breach of intergenerational trust in one of the wealthiest places on the planet.

My noble friend has been ably assisted by many contributors from across your Lordships’ House already. It is perhaps invidious to name favourites but I feel compelled to congratulate my noble friend Lord Coaker on combining the passion associated with the other place, in which he served for so long, with the clarity and eloquence that I associate with your Lordships’ House.

In my short time, I wish to focus on just two areas of this broad terrain of inequality: hardship and ticking generational time bombs. Children and young people’s mental health was in crisis before Covid-19, fuelled by inequality, insecurity and the pressures of new and social media. After so much time in national and international lockdowns, death tolls reminiscent of world wars and such cause for anxiety about the future, that crisis is now in danger of becoming its own pandemic, attacking the mental health of the world’s young. So I commend Labour’s commitment to a full-time counsellor in every single secondary school, and to access to such services for even younger children.

Not for the first time, so I hope noble Lords will forgive me, I urge the Government to use the opportunity in their forthcoming national food strategy to commit to a free, nutritious school breakfast and lunch for every single child in compulsory education in the UK. What a perfect pandemic promise for every child in our nations. This would be comparable and complementary to the provision of universal secondary education itself towards the end of World War Two in 1944. I can think of no better way of giving substantive content to the slogan of “levelling up”. As the state-school-educated child of migrants to this country, who never once knew hunger as a child, I simply cannot tolerate hunger among our young so many years on, nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century.

It is a challenge to warn any Administration riding high in the polls, not least when buoyed by the NHS vaccine rollout and an instinctive desire for national unity in terrible times, but our children and young people will live long lives and have long memories, continually jogged by an indelible internet. They will not forget that so many of them were locked down without laptops and free broadband for home learning; they will remember that their teachers were attacked and their concerns about international solidarity, racial justice and climate catastrophe were openly mocked as “woke” or “gesture politics” by senior politicians; and they may well reflect on a Government who left them hungry and looking to football players and managers instead of Ministers for moral leadership and even basic nutrition. That is a pandemic legacy that no wise Government should aspire to.