"though too many measures were excluded from its scope to be excessive" features an excessive use of 'excessive'.
I get that there's an obesity crisis, but it really feels like this one skipped the step where they checked if school meals were the problem, and jumped straight to a plan of "Make children miserable -> ??? -> profit". I appreciate your framing the larger problem of how we're ratchetting ourselves into ruin.
Not sure stopping kids eating crap so they don’t carry on into adulthood and inevitably have heart attacks which the nhs picks up the tab for is quite the hill to die on, but take your point more generally
This seems to me to be the steelman of the inchoate but valid complaints about the ‘deep state’, the ‘blob’ etc. which are really about a culture rather than about individual bad things. And Ovendon’s point is important: it’s not a secret conspiracy, it’s about the effect of everybody behaving quite openly as the school foods standards people do.
I joined the Libertarian Party a couple of weeks ago. The thing that tipped me over the edge was Nigel Farage saying that "the puritanical spirit of Oliver Cromwell again stalks the land. Our bossy, ruling elite’s default response to something is moving to ban it." . . .
. . . a few days after having called for a ban on Muslims playing in public: "We wouldn’t want to stop individuals praying but mass prayer is banned in many Muslim countries in the Middle East itself. So, yes, we have to stop this kind of mass demonstration, provocative demonstration, in historic British sites."
I wouldn't describe myself as a 100% Ayn Rand reading American style libertarian, but I'm heading that way. Perhaps I'm a "state capacity libertarian"; scrap the legislation that is making us waste money on bat tunnels and fish discos so we can spend the money on fixing potholes, building reservoirs, running municipal tips etc.
QUOTE> "I have on occasion suggested that we should simply repeal every law and regulation passed since the mid-90s, with only a small grace period allowed to identify those we wished to keep. In reality this probably would not work - even if we could find a politician bold enough to do it. Other whimsical ideas, such as every law ceasing within 10 years unless an MP can be found to read it out, in full, in the Chamber, similarly belong more within the pages of a Heinlein novel than in real life."
These both sound like good ideas to me!
Honestly, I increasingly feel like I'm living in some kind of dystopia (Idiocracy, perhaps). My only optimistic take is that I do think a lot of the UK's problems could be fixed if there was the political will to do so.
About milk in schools. I work in a primary school, we throw away a huge amount of semi-skimmed "free school milk" every week, and it seems such a waste. I expect if it was whole milk - which is tastier - and came with plastic straws - which have a more pleasant "mouth feel" - instead of paper straws, we would throw away a lot less.
I'd be curious how you felt about France's school food which is clearly very bureaucracy-controlled but connected to a genuine food culture. Though I'm worried all the annoying usual suspects are *too* enthusiastic about it and there might be problems on deeper scrutiny.
"though too many measures were excluded from its scope to be excessive" features an excessive use of 'excessive'.
I get that there's an obesity crisis, but it really feels like this one skipped the step where they checked if school meals were the problem, and jumped straight to a plan of "Make children miserable -> ??? -> profit". I appreciate your framing the larger problem of how we're ratchetting ourselves into ruin.
Not sure stopping kids eating crap so they don’t carry on into adulthood and inevitably have heart attacks which the nhs picks up the tab for is quite the hill to die on, but take your point more generally
This seems to me to be the steelman of the inchoate but valid complaints about the ‘deep state’, the ‘blob’ etc. which are really about a culture rather than about individual bad things. And Ovendon’s point is important: it’s not a secret conspiracy, it’s about the effect of everybody behaving quite openly as the school foods standards people do.
Hear Hear! 👏
I joined the Libertarian Party a couple of weeks ago. The thing that tipped me over the edge was Nigel Farage saying that "the puritanical spirit of Oliver Cromwell again stalks the land. Our bossy, ruling elite’s default response to something is moving to ban it." . . .
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/23/reform-will-repeal-the-generational-smoking-ban/
. . . a few days after having called for a ban on Muslims playing in public: "We wouldn’t want to stop individuals praying but mass prayer is banned in many Muslim countries in the Middle East itself. So, yes, we have to stop this kind of mass demonstration, provocative demonstration, in historic British sites."
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/19/nigel-farage-condemned-over-call-to-ban-public-prayer-for-muslims-in-the-uk
I wouldn't describe myself as a 100% Ayn Rand reading American style libertarian, but I'm heading that way. Perhaps I'm a "state capacity libertarian"; scrap the legislation that is making us waste money on bat tunnels and fish discos so we can spend the money on fixing potholes, building reservoirs, running municipal tips etc.
QUOTE> "I have on occasion suggested that we should simply repeal every law and regulation passed since the mid-90s, with only a small grace period allowed to identify those we wished to keep. In reality this probably would not work - even if we could find a politician bold enough to do it. Other whimsical ideas, such as every law ceasing within 10 years unless an MP can be found to read it out, in full, in the Chamber, similarly belong more within the pages of a Heinlein novel than in real life."
These both sound like good ideas to me!
Honestly, I increasingly feel like I'm living in some kind of dystopia (Idiocracy, perhaps). My only optimistic take is that I do think a lot of the UK's problems could be fixed if there was the political will to do so.
About milk in schools. I work in a primary school, we throw away a huge amount of semi-skimmed "free school milk" every week, and it seems such a waste. I expect if it was whole milk - which is tastier - and came with plastic straws - which have a more pleasant "mouth feel" - instead of paper straws, we would throw away a lot less.
I'd be curious how you felt about France's school food which is clearly very bureaucracy-controlled but connected to a genuine food culture. Though I'm worried all the annoying usual suspects are *too* enthusiastic about it and there might be problems on deeper scrutiny.