I'm so sick of funding feckless parents

I remember back in the dark times of New Labour, when the 'Think of the Children' cry reached it's peak. That was when the powers that be decided to get more votes by giving uncapped mountains of taxpayers cash to people who have children. The more children, the more cash

Having children became a very good money making scheme. Children became cash cows. Some people spoke out, but the response from the Socialists in Government, was that it isn't the fault of the child that they were born to parents who can't afford them, so we shouldn't cap the welfare, because it only punishes the child

Which of course taught feckless parents that they could have as many children as they want, as the only consequence is more unearned taxpayers cash

Now that the dark times are only twilight, things are marginally better, but not so much that we don't still have a serious infestation of feckless parents and their resultant idiot spawn in this country. And the long suffering taxpayer still has to foot the bill

And now it's school holidays; that six weeks of every year when the spawn of the feckless spend all day, every day, out in the streets, messing the place up, wandering in front of traffic, breaking stuff that isn't theirs and generally making a hideous din

Oh, and not eating lunch, apparently

As the summer holidays begin, many families look forward to breaks away from home, in the UK and abroad. Yet for thousands of families, the six-week school break is characterised not by play schemes and day trips in the sun, but acute financial stress, hunger and malnourishment, due to the absence of free school meals for children on low incomes that costs a family £30-£40 a week.

As Tim W points out, it does not cost £30 to £40 per week

£30 to £40 a week to feed a child?
OK, let’s say two kids, the UK modal family size.
Aaaaah – she means that school meals cost £3 a day. And poor peeps get them free. So, if there’s no school and people aren’t getting the free meals then that costs them £3 a meal.
Which is unadulterated bollocks of course. But then Foster’s numbers never do add up, do they?

Quite. And not only that. Free school mean are lunch. Which means a child should have breakfast and tea at home, even during term time. So what is the extra cost? A sandwich or a bowl of soup each day.

Pennies. We're talking pennies

With three million children at risk of hunger during the school holidays, the Trussell Trust has warned that food bank use spikes each summer. And last year, 593 organisations running holiday clubs across the UK provided more than 190,000 meals to over 22,000 school-aged children.

Notice the language? How when we're talking about a modern moral panic, we no longer refer to the people who are affected, but refer to the people who are 'at risk' of being affected? It just makes for even better numbers

I was at risk of hunger on Monday. I forgot to bring my lunch to work. Fortunately I managed to get to Tesco and buy a pie, so crisis averted

Seriously though, first they inflate the figures of affected people, then they compound that by telling us more people are turning up to take advantage of the free thing they are offering. If all the foodbanks closed tonight, 99.99% of the people who currently use them, would simply go away and feed themselves like they always used to. It's the old bird table analogy; if free stuff is available, there will always be a constant stream of people wanting to take advantage

Lewell-Buck, who is MP for South Shields [...], comes from a family “mainly of shipyard workers”. She recalls how her parents would work out shopping bills to the penny when her father was out of work. Now, through Feeding Britain, her constituents in this ex-shipping area with high unemployment and child poverty, have clubs to feed children during the holidays

"Once we used to cut our cloth to match our means. Once we used to take responsibility for our situation in life and act accordingly and presumably also, feed our own kids. Now there are other people to do all that stuff for us, so we needn't bother"

That's what she just said, isn't it?

Lewell-Buck. Not at risk of hunger

“It’s austerity. It has massively impacted on the levels of children coming into the system. The removal of all the early intervention services and downgrading of Surestart and family centres – all of that has had a massive impact. Things that used to keep children out of the system and out of care, I’ve seen it myself, they are gone. I was still in practice for the first three years [of the coalition government] and I could see things starting to change then

Yes, they are going, but that's a good thing. They are an unnecessary waste of taxpayers money. We didn't have all this interventionist crap before New Labour and we don't need it now. Yes, it's going to be difficult for a while, as we wean the feckless welfare spongers off the taxpayers teat, but one day they will grow into responsible adults who are once again able to fend for themselves in the wilds of life and take responsibility for their own actions

Later in the year, Lewell-Buck expects a second reading of her food insecurity bill: a motion demanding the government records statistics on how many people have experienced hunger or haven’t eaten because they didn’t have enough money for food

I experienced hunger on Monday, while I was driving to Tesco for my pie. Please make sure that gets entered into your crappy and meaningless stats. Why on earth this bill is needed is beyond me. Surely if people are actually hungry, writing statistics about them in a ledger is not going to help them. The only use for this is virtue signalling; bleating about the numbers of people who have to drive to Tesco for a pie, while complaining that someone else should be doing something about it

If this woman really cared about hungry children (and I mean really cared, with no virtue signalling or vote farming), she would be in favour of educating parents about not having children they can't afford, along with reducing the amount of welfare people can claim, in order to stop children being used as cash cows by irresponsible parents

“I just think the indignity of what people have to go through in one of the richest countries in the world just to feed themselves is disgusting. It should be the shame of this government and it isn’t.”

No. It's nothing to do with the Government. If people living in 'one of the richest countries in the world', cannot afford to buy lunch for six weeks for the children they chose to have, the shame should be theirs and theirs alone