Be Excellent To Each Other

For a lighter (and cracking) read about working for her and a description of a very weird crush then I'd recommend the Alan Clarke Diaries...in fact you should just read them as they are brilliant.

Meanwhile:

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/odd/news/a473343/margaret-thatcher-painted-as-the-terminator-in-mural-picture.html

The artist (34) painted this because ""Margaret Thatcher stole my milk. It was the only part of school that I enjoyed."

The milk was withdrawn in 1971 but he wasn't even born until 1979.

Vincent continued: "I also cannot afford to get on the property ladder because she sold all the affordable houses to the generation before me."

Ha!

That is the most senseless, circular and self contradicting argument that I have ever seen.

The milk was withdrawn in 1971 but he wasn't even born until 1979.

I got (presumably free) milk at my primary school. I was born in 1975 and attendend from 1979 - 1986.

Malc

Your school may have paid for it out of their funding, your parents may have paid for it or you may have qualified for it if your parents were hard-up. If you were under 7 it was still free until 1980.

Ironically of course, not only was she against the withdrawal of the milk in 1971 for 7-11 year olds, but it was the previous Labour government that started the policy by abolishing free milk for 12 to 18 year olds.

In short, Thatcher did not take the milk from that artist.

The whole class got it and I'm pretty sure we did right up until aged 11.

Malc

Central London.

Malc

I had free milk too in primary school, which would have been 1981 onwards, this was in the heartland of left wing councils that is Bedfordshire

Sticklers for historical accuracy may now be questioning both my memory and Barr’s. After all, if “Maggie Thatcher milk snatcher” removed free milk from primary schools in 1971 when she was Education Secretary, how could I have been downing it two years later? And what on earth was Damian Barr doing getting his daily dose in 1984? I found myself so confused on this point that I emailed Barr (who was certain of his dates) and then got straight on to Google. Courtesy of John Redwood’s excellent blog, I discovered that the true story of milk’s exit from the classroom was far more complex than the accusatory ditty would have us believe. As Redwood writes, “The biggest 'milk snatchers’ were Labour.” Harold Wilson’s government removed free milk from all 11- to 18-year-olds in 1968, yet nobody vilified the then education secretary, Ted Short. Three years later the Heath administration took away milk from 7- to 11-year-olds in England and Margaret Thatcher was singled out for everlasting blame.

Meanwhile, infant classes carried on drinking the filthy stuff until around 1980 (there were no loud protests when it petered out). In Scotland different measures applied, which was why Barr was still drinking milk aged eight, until the day his teacher announced: “The Prime Minister of England has stopped free milk in schools down there and now she’s trying to stop it up here as well…”

Then you may have even had one of the rabidly left wing councils that simply funded it then.

Westminster.

Malc

Trooper wrote:
I had free milk too in primary school, which would have been 1981 onwards, this was in the heartland of left wing councils that is Bedfordshire

It struck me the other day, that the criticism against the poll tax was that those with large families were likely to be those that could least afford to pay a tax based on the number of people in the home. So, instead, we got council tax, based on the size of the home itself. Now we have the suggested bedroom tax, which is based on having a home that's bigger than the number of people living in it would require. It is, in effect, the anti-poll tax. And still the tories get absolutely battered for suggesting it.

I think the problem with a flat tax is that to get enough cash in total you make the flat amount too much for the poorest to pay.

Does anyone not remember milk in school in the early 80s?
Maybe the milk snatcher thing was a huge con!

I think the problem with a flat tax is that to get enough cash in total you make the flat amount too much for the poorest to pay.

Council tax is a bizarre thing, not least because it doesn't take in to account various factors. You could pack 10 adults into a 3 bed-room home, all of whom would severely drain various council resources, such as water (if it's included in your council tax band, as it is in Scotland), rubbish collection, police, fire, libraries et al, all based on the price of the single home they all live in. There's no differentiation between being the owner-occupier of an expensive house, or just renting it. A single person only gets a 25% discount. Also, the richer you are, the less likely you are to use public services that everyone elses use [citation needed].

Council tax bandings are typically based on house values in 1991. House prices have changed a tad since 1991 and not uniformly across all housing. Some areas are now much more valuable, and others pretty stagnant. But new builds on previously poor land don't seem to count. New developments built on reclaimed dock areas up here are banded in E or F - massively expensive and not appreciably nicer to equivalent housing less than a mile away.

Obviously we live in a fuzzy society where everyone contributes, but having a flat council-contribution per person seems much more logical and fair, and leave wealth-based taxation to income tax. I'm sure if there's a flaw in that logic, someone will tell me.

I also remember milk in school in the mid-80s, although that was in North Wales and we got the choice of milk or milkshake. Milkshake was 95% of the time strawberry flavoured, although on very rare occasions it was chocolate and incredibly awesome.

Milk as a thing is pretty damn cheap in any case. When I was doing a cheap-food blog about five years ago I noticed the price of 4 pints to be £1.44. As recently as last year I then noted it had gone down to as low as £1.18, and was very often sold in 2 for £2 offers. In other words, if you, as a parent, are overly concerned about forcing milk in to your child, you can do it very economically.

*to be fair, Nimrod wasn't as good as the American AWACS, but the feeling at the time was that with RAF support, enough investment would've been there to get it up to speed. And, you know, it was a homegrown project providing jobs to British workers as opposed to just buying something off the Yanks.

That said, school budgets are very, very tight (I know this as a parent governor, sadly), and even a hundred extra quid a year for something can be a problem. So Chinny's suggestion that "well, the schools could just pay for it" is naive in the extreme.

But they did. Every school in Bedfordshire did, for example.

Where did they get the money from? I bet it wasn't from their own, existing budgets. It'd have been the council giving extra money to them. These days if we went to the council and said "can we have an extra £1,000 a year to pay for milk" we'd get told to get lost.

No-one's talking about "these days" besides you, though.

true, but at the time I bet it wasn't the school paying for it.