Milk Snatching in the UK
has been avoided for the 21st Century, in a comical manner.
Last night as I went to sleep, I was informed by BBC Radio 4 that the coalition government was going to eliminate free milk for the under five set as it did not “provide value for money”. At £50 odd million, it’s not very expensive, and while I doubt that it makes a huge difference in terms of public health, it does allegedly teach good dietary habits. But, I immediately recognized the scale of the political blunder.
In grasping free milk from my daughter’s delicate hands, the government, rather stupidly, invoked the image of “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”, when Thatcher did the same for 7 to 11 year-olds as Education Minister in the early 1970s. The last thing that David Cameron would want is a direct and valid comparison with Thatcher.
Hence, a classic U-turn, clumsily executed.
What precisely did the
ManMoron on the Clapham omnibus expect?It does nothing for one’s basic faith in human rationality when millions of people go to the polls in the depths of a recession, many already suffering from its effects, and vote for a party which promised, up front, publicly, loudly, to not only do nothing to mitigate its effects, and do nothing to prevent its recurrence, but to take steps guaranteed to make it worse.
In numbers large enough to put that party within a Nick-Clegg’s-ego-length of the finish line.
Tribalism only explains so much. I know my Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
At some point though, organic brain disease has to play a role.
Why would you be against improving the value of food vouchers for the poorest residents?
The current system provides free milk to everyone, rich or poor. How is it possibly bad to stop giving free milk to rich people, so that the poor can have more?
Because social provisions that are means-tested instantly become targets, and ones that aren’t (NHS, Social Security) don’t.
If I had any reason to think that efficiency was a goal here, I wouldn’t be as skeptical. But these are the Tories, and efficiency is never the goal.
The cost of this particular provision as it stands wouldn’t buy you a top-3 Premiership striker. Someone’s doing — or undoing — this to make a point.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! This is precisely why Paul Ryan wants progressive cuts in SS benefits, to decouple the rich from SS so it can then be targeted for
privatizationdestruction.[...] Lawyers, Guns & Money comes this nigh-comical tale of David Cameron squashing a proposal to take free milk away from [...]