scrapping Labour’s plans to lift 50,000 of the poorest children out of poverty, failing to extend free school meals to 500,000 of the poorest working families. The move will cost families up to £600 more a week – the equivalent of an extra penny in income tax per child.Leaving aside the shamelessness of complaining about cuts when you supported the policies that made them inevitable just consider the figures.
Who the hell spends £600 a week on school meals? Given that children are only at school 5 days a week, LFF must believe that spending £120 a day on food is reasonable, I realise that the site's main man Will Straw is the son of an MP but even for MPs that's excessive.
Ok it does say the cost is per family, and many families have more than one child. Even then though if you assume that an acceptable lunch costs about a fiver (probably less actually) one would need to have around 24 school age children to be spending £120 a day.
6 comments:
And the nerve of complaining about a failure to extend the scheme as if they were taking bread out of the mouths of starving children....
Per year, as you well know!
Hmm.
Welfare benefits should either be universal or not at all. All this targetting is a hiding to nothing.
It'd probably be cheaper and more efficient (and engender a sense of cohesion among school children) if ALL children of whatever background got a 'free' school meal.
Or even better, parents just get education vouchers, then it's up to the schools to decide how much of their overall budget to spend on food, which is just one of many competing possible uses for the money.
Mm, yeah, this must be per year.
But, whatever, the idea that "failing to extend" something is a "cut" is symptomatic enough of the left-wing mindset that regards anything other than an open money tap as a slaughter of the first-born.
And £600 per week is a penny in income tax per child? On what planet do poor working families have to slum it on a mere £60,000 per week?
Julia & Mr E- good point about the new definition of "cut".
Matthew- TBH I assumed that they were just showing the traditional shroud waver's disregard for plausibility.
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