All Hail The Lunchbox Police

Forget Cameron's dunderheaded grandstanding over alcohol for a minute, as this struck a nerve at Puddlecote Towers today.

[Dr David Regis, of the Schools Health Education Unit said,] "Schools are serving better school dinners and they are also taking more of an interest in the contents of pupils' lunchboxes."

He says this as if it is a good thing.

A child's lunchbox has always been a place solely reserved for the parent and their kid, somewhere loving notes used to be left without fear of prying eyes. Has it really come to this? The state insisting on intruding on something as trivial and private as what the Mum hands to her little ones in the morning?

Well, of course. There's even a special 'police' unit assigned to the case.

"The packed lunch and tuck-shop police have been in action."

Now, it's obviously a metaphorical use of the term police, right? One hopes so, anyway. But how can one be sure when this sort of thing is happening, right now, over the pond (emphases mine).

A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

The girl's turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.

Government regulations on lunchbox contents, enforced by state 'agents'? Isn't this a bit, I dunno, fascist? Or at the very least interfering outrageously in the parents' rights over their own child? Oh billy-o, yes.

What's worse is that they don't even know their own regulations.

"With a turkey sandwich, that covers your protein, your grain, and if it had cheese on it, that's the dairy," said Jani Kozlowski, the fiscal and statutory policy manager for the division. "It sounds like the lunch itself would've met all of the standard." The lunch has to include a fruit or vegetable, but not both, she said.

So, to compound the fact that they have the gall to inspect lunchboxes at all - something Dr Regis thinks is fine and dandy over here too - the ineptitude of the public sector ensures that it's not even done properly, which is probably why all lunchboxes were deemed unsatisfactory by the idiot 'agent'.

It is unclear whether the school was allowed to charge for the cafeteria lunches they gave to every preschooler in the class that day.

When you have some jumped up moron trumpeting the success of lunchbox police, along with a blithe ignorance of how special a place the inside of a kids' private space is, our government has surely lost all sense of proportion.

How stratospherically arrogant is it that any state claims to know what is best for each individual child - based on arbitrary and homogenous population-level criteria - over and above parents who are intimately involved with them, and have knowledge that detached computer-designed spreadsheets and algorithms will never have a hope of matching.

Dr Regis is a disgusting fool, as are irresponsibly pompous politicians who believe such appalling intrusion is acceptable.

Cameron swanning around, furrow-browed, interfering in the choices of adults is just the tip of a very rancid state-funded iceberg. They really do believe that the state owns you now. Mind, body, soul, and from cradle to grave.

May God rot them, every one.