The Scottish Socialist Party have a campaign to provide free school dinners for all children in the state education system. They state that a poor diet kills people prematurely. I won’t argue with that statement.
I do have a problem with extending free school meals from those who presently receive them (the children of the poor and unemployed) to every child in the state system. Unlike in the English home counties, where the middle classes send little Tarquin off to public school while the working classes are left to educate Tracy at the local Comprehensive, the Scottish middle-classes are, for historical reasons, generally perfectly happy to send their children to the local state school.
I have a number of questions I’d like The Scottish Socialist Party to answer: Why should middle-class children whose parents can well-afford to pay for school-meals be subsidised by the Scottish tax-payer ? How much money is this proposed plan going to cost ? Who came up with this stupid idea anyway ? The caption under the photograph on the link states “Our kids need free, nutritious school meals”. The ones who need it get it already, those who don’t shouldn’t. Any extension would be a collossal waste of money.
