Free school meals

     It is a mistake to see the provision of free school meals as costing M£20 for the 5 days of half term. The lunches in question will cost precisely the same with, as without, the vouchers. It is a question only of who pays. In one case those in jobs with enough spare money to pay taxes; in the other case the certified needy, the out-of-work, incapacitated, or single-parent. The only way to save money is if some children go hungry. 

    One of the main costs of means-tested assistance is the cost of testing the need. But that has been done. The needy are identified, and the particular need for food has been accepted. 

    I admit to slight surprise that it is as many as 15.9% of secondary school pupils that fall in this category (in the academic year 2019/20), [1,2]. But I note that Conservative and Labour parties have both accepted this call on the public purse. 

[1]. https://lginform.local.gov.uk/reports/lgastandard?mod-area=E92000001&mod-group=AllRegions_England&mod-metric=2174&mod-type=namedComparisonGroup

[2].  21% in NE England, 11% in SE England

Put more trust in good sense and decency

 

Dear Guardian Letters Editor,

I get the impression that control of the COVID pandemic in the UK is slipping out of Government control. 

I notice that COVID is largely a disease of the elderly;  that the median age of COVID deaths is 82.4 years. And I conclude that the Cabinet is taking an old-persons-view of the epidemic. 

The decision whether to shelter or work depends to a large extent on age and circumstances. A man aged 30, in good health, with a mortgage and no savings might feel differently from a retired person on a pension. The important thing is that everyone has the information they need to make the decision that suits them.

      Some may think the Government's instructions are bossy and detrimental; that the Government is taking the wrong tone and missing the complete picture. Others are worried at the lack of parliamentary endorsement on constitutional grounds. 

My own unease concerns the blurring between advice and law. I believe that in Sweden the 'rules' were issued as guidance, but were followed to much the same extent as here.  

Should we not try a more consensual approach? It seems to work in Sweden.

Yours sincerely, Cawstein

cawstein@gmail.com

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The Root Problem

The Root Problem is World Population

     What is wrong with the world? The daily number of new cases of COVID-19 leap higher and higher. But the pandemic is not the only thing going wrong in the world this year.  There are forest fires in Australia, Brazil, and California, war and starvation in Yemen and Syria, melting ice-caps, strange weather patterns, and waves of migrants lapping at the shores of Europe. These coincidences make one wonder if there is perhaps a link? Does world population crops up among the contributory causes of all these problems? Let us explore this idea further.

Global Warming

     Twice as many humans, other things being equal, will burn twice as much fossil fuel, and generate twice as much CO₂. The problem depends linearly on world population. So, even without industrialization, and concrete, there will be a population element to the increase in Global Warming. Of course there is industrialization and life-style on top of that. The discovery or fossil fuels gave rise to a way of life that freed mankind from toil and opened many possibilities for pleasure. It is hard to see us going back voluntarily to a low-energy way of life. We put our hope in renewable fuel sources. But each year there are more homes to heat, cars to drive, dinners to cook.

Famine

     There are food shortages in many parts of the world. It is estimated that famine leads directly or indirectly to 9 million deaths a year [1].  Famines can arise from drought or other natural disasters. They are often caused by war, preventing the getting and distribution of food. Nevertheless, whatever the cause of the shortage, twice as many mouths need twice as much food. Once again the problem depends linearly on world population.

War

      Murderous armed conflicts can have an ethnic, cultural, religious, or dynastic cause. (E.g. in Kashmir, Palestine, Nagorno-Karabakh.) But in some cases there is clearly an element of competition that triggers conflict, or exacerbates existing tensions. (E.g. the First World War.) 

Pandemic

      It is clear from the present pandemic that infectious disease spreads more rapidly in places of high population density. Of course, there were plagues since biblical times, in countries and civilizations that supported congested cities. It is congestion that spreads disease. But congestion is increasingly unavoidable as the world population grows.

Migration

     We are familiar with the categories of assylum seakers and economic migrants. Both can be seen as resulting from population pressure in parts of the world that offer very meagre resources of food and water.

World Population

     There is a website (https://www.worldometers.info), which purports to clock the current world-population; the numbers flicker up and down suggesting that each second some new deaths and some new births are recorded, but the trend is upwards. It may be a gimmick but the numbers agree with other sources. The net increase today was estimated as circa 194,000; this year it was 63 million. There was a period (1600–1950) of approximately exponential growth. Fortunately the curve is now bending towards slower growth but our numbers are still growing at a frightening rate; more than doubling in the last 50 years.

1960 - - - - 3,035,000,000
1970 - - - - 3,700,000,000
1980 - - - - 4,458,000,000
1990 - - - - 5,327,000,000
2000 - - - - 6,143,000,000
2010 - - - - 6,957,000,000
2020 - - - - 7,795,000,000

     We are already exhausting fish-stocks, water-resources, destroying habitats and extinguishing species by the hundreds in our increasingly desperate search for food, housing, and fuel.
     We must stop the population growing, and start the downward trend.

The Elephant in the Room

Yes, we must switch to renewable energy – and lower the population.
Yes, we must conserve species and habitats – and lower the population.
Yes, we must learn how to prevent pandemics – and lower the population.
We must continue to press for International Law – and lower the population.

References

[1] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty/hunger-and-obesity/how-many-people-die-from-hunger-each-year/story