The milk we got free was hardly a pint! I had free milk in the first couple of years I was at school, the bottles were probably about quarter of a pint, possibly half. Definitely not a whole pint. The bottles were glass too - so fully recycled even back then. Essentially, you are bemoaning 20p pints, when each kid probably got 5p's worth of milk per day. Assuming holidays of 6 weeks for summer, 2 at christmas, 2 at easter and 1 per half term, a child get's, what, roughly 52 - 12 = 40 weeks of school a year (might be less in reality, but for the sake of argument, let's say circa 40), 5 days per week, so (40*5)* 0.05 = £10 worth of milk per year. Allowing for inflation, that's still not much more than £50 a year. Given the government could bulk buy the milk for a pittance, I don't see how this "saved" the UK. Family allowance. This was never much and as I remember it, barely paid for a weeks food for a growing family. Baring in mind, it was meant to help with the *general* family upkeep, not just putting food on the table, it's not exactly accurate to claim it alleviated much of the hardship. At the beginning, maybe. But then Burgers and Pizza were exotic in the early 80's. When I was a kid, there were no McDonalds or Wimpy any where near to where I lived, there were no Pizza delivery services, except the ones on imported US TV programmes, and Fish and Chips was about as exotic as Fast Food got. During the 80's we got a Wimpy burger joint, and the culture began to change. Kids parties at Wimpy became the norm, though you'd never normally go there. Suddenly, McDonalds opened a franchise, and slowly but surely Burgers and Fries overtook Fish and Chips. Then the Pizza delivery places started to open up - still exotic and expensive, but consumerism was taking over. Before long, Burgers and Chips were the norm, as was Pizza. I clearly remember my school serving this kind of thing from 1986 onwards (senior school.) But I'm going to be honest, food just became cheaper and cheaper quality as successive spending cuts were made. Thatch started the rot, and did zilch to change the downward spiral. She was as guilty as anyone else, but it was mainly the direction she and her policies pointed the country that were the root cause of the issue.
There was no free milk, tax payers provided it for you. I never got a bottle, it was always in a carton. But I doubt the government got it cheap. However school milk was withdrawn for children 7 to 11 when Margaret Thatcher was education secretary, she opposed it but the treasury forced her to do it. Her main legacy was to privatise things, which some possibly shouldn't have been. However all of the companies that were privatised were being very badly run & fixing them was unlikely to be possible. The BBC survived even though they were mainly left wing & often critised the government, so she wasn't politically motivated. If it hadn't have been for her the country would be in a much worse state now. She wasn't perfect, but nobody is. She did what she thought was right and alot of working class people benefited, just not those who went on strike. They don't have the guts to save the 50 million pounds that they spend on milk for nursery children. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...wiftly-to-avoid-milksnatcher-tag-2047372.html
Quite right, they were quarts. I'm not bemoaning anything. My point was that even without milk at school, kids should have been able to get milk. You'd have had to have bought a pint of milk from the milkman, not quarts. So a pint of milk every day, or even every few days, wasn't breaking anyone's bank. The school milk was withdrawn in 1971, as smf said before she was Prime Minister. So why do people use it as an example of why she was a bad Prime Minister? The Prime Minister at the time was alleged paedophile Edward Heath. So if you think that removing milk from schools really was an issue, it's Edward Heath who screwed the kids... in more ways than one! You're talking about £10 a year for EVERY SCHOOL CHILD. In 1971, the population was around 56 million (compared to around 63 million today). According to the 2011 census, there were approximately 3.5 million children aged 5-9, or 5.6% of the population. That would have been around 3.1 million back in 1971 if the percentage was about the same. Let's be really kind and say there were about 2.5 million 7-10 year olds affected by the milk ban. You're talking £25 million saved. You can understand them wanting to make those sorts of cuts.... and this is when decimal currency had just come out, so that was a lot of money. To soften the blow, though, in 1971 a pint of milk was actually only 6p. So you're talking more like £7.5 million - still a lot of money to save. Incidentally, there were about 7 million children for whom child support was being claimed in 1971. It's actually meant to help with the additional cost of having children. Buying the WHOLE family's food with it is hardly having the children's interests at heart. Had that couple not conceived, they'd still live in the same house WITHOUT benefits and still be buying food for themselves. I was at school from around 1984 until 1999. My primary school did healthy food ALL of that time - rarely burgers and chips. I don't ever remember seeing pizza. At secondary school from 1991, yes there was pizza and burgers, but there were other options, too - in fact, I think we actually had a choice. Anyway, you can't say the decision to cut school milk when she was Education Secretary made 8 years before she became Prime Minister was the start of the downfall of the country. It has practically bugger all to do with anything else - just kids won't get as much calcium as you'd like if their parents don't supply it. Oh well. And if it was REALLY that big a deal, why would people vote her in 8 years later? Like I said, she wouldn't have been PM for so long if people thought she was doing a bad job. It's just that those who are Anti-Thatcher have louder voices, plain and simple.
