From my Twitter account this morning:
There will be a blog post later: right now I am going for a walk whilst it is dry.
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Cut the faux outrage.
Government not providing free school meals during SCHOOL HOLIDAYS. What a horrible crime.
What next? Free school meals all year round?
Why stop there? Why shouldn’t government provide all food, water, electricity and housing, plus whatever else people need.
Parents should be responsible for their children. People should take responsibility for themselves and frankly many on the left should grow up – yourself included.
I guess there had to be one such comment turn up
And I guess it had to be someone who had most likely posted here before under another identity because that’s what cowards do
And I guess the real answer is ‘why not, indeed?’ to the question you oppose if that is what people decide
Because you see we live in a parliamentary democracy where it’s been decided that providing a social safety net is essential and that meant that for decades doctors did not see kids presenting in the UK with malnourishment
Sure, there were too many cases of kids failing to thrive, but not malnourishment
And now there are such cases
And that can only be the fault of a failed government
And you, I presume are happy about that
Thankfully the grown ups in the room are not
That’s the rest of us, just in case you’re a little too callous to understand what I am saying
Whilst not wishing to dilute the justified anger of this government’s refusal to supply free school meals to poor children Andrew Rawnsley has a good article today about the effects on Brexit of the American presidential and Senate elections:-
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/25/johnson-dangerously-close-to-one-us-president-wht-if-biden-wins#comment-144769994
To augment what Rawnsley has to say here slap bang in the middle of this other article is the technical clue to Brexiteer idiocy first articulated by an Englishman John Maynard Keynes 84 years ago and the key words are “global competition”:-
“… the interaction between the sum of the individual firms’ sales expectations (aggregate demand) and their estimated production costs (aggregate supply) that together with a number of institutional conditions (bank credit, labour market organization, global competition and technology) determine the business sector decisions on output as a whole and employment …”
https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2020/10/21/what-is-effective-demand-2/
In short the Brexiteer failing is not understanding Aggregated Demand and Supply Theory!
Of course undermining Britain’s standing in the world and the issue of free school meals all ties in to undermine Tory Party credibility!
Well spotted
Well we are this far down the rabbit hole so its not as if money is the problem here, its just they don,t want to ,hence making themselves look stupid ,i suspect a about turn this week.
This is from a comment in The Guardian I’ve embellished a little:-
“Why not join the Conservative Party’s “world beating” campaign “Starve a kid to save a quid! You know it makes sense!
Actually, I don’t think the government should be paying for free school meals.
Instead they should provide an adequate general safety net.
It’s not good enough to supply one little piece here and another little sop there.
There’s absolutely no reason not to provide a general safety net. Other, that is, a dogmatic, false, ideology that we can’t afford it.
I understand that
But the symbolism os this issue is important
Id not disagree – its treating the symptom and not the causes – low pay, gig economy and the rest.
But in the situation we are in, the symptom needs treating urgently and the reaction of the Cabinet and Tory MPs is seen as a reflection of the attitudes and policies more generally. And rightly so.
I have to agree. While ‘starving children due to Covid’ is a catchy slogan it somewhat misses the point.
If we had a proper social security system, based on an individual’s or family’s need, there would have been no need for furlough or free school meals in the holidays or £20 per week extra on Universal Credit. The type of system we had pre-Thatcher and which has been eroded by successive governments, of either persuasion since her time.
The Covid situation is unique, but peoples’ needs have not changed drasatically due to it. Indeed for some there has been an increase in disposable income because of their ability to work from home and the reduced costs involved in going to work.
Children from poorer families have suffered for a long time. Malnutrition is not new – just ask the teachers who, prior to this crisis regularly took food to school for the children who could not learn due to their hunger.
My wife was a paediatrician for part of her career
She did not see malnutrition and worked in some tough parts of London 30 years ago
I think it is, if not new, a growing problem
The thing is Tim, after 10 years in power, the Tories have debased what help there was – I mean waiting 5 weeks for your money?
I can see social security being very ad hoc until we can deal effectively with Covid and we do need to shout up or sectors of society will miss out in the melee.
‘waiting 5 weeks for your money’.
The Trussell Trust produced an excellent report before Universal Credit was launched. They identified the wide range of problems in low income families. They highlighted the shortcomings in the proposals, including the 5 week wait. The DWP ignored them.
I wrote to Ian Duncan-Smith at the time, citing the report, pointing out how much of an own goal this was going to be. I asked him why the DWP was ignoring the report and said that the 5 week wait was unworkable. I got one paragraph of some kind of acknowledgement and several dozen paragraphs of copy and paste.
What I find galling is that in almost all areas of social policy we know the things that can work and consistently (deliberately?) fail to do them.