Posted on 01/01/2003 8:17:04 PM PST by Tomalak
This is a shortened version of the Prime Minister's speech yesterday to the National Confederation of Food Service Employees
When the Labour Party established the National Food Service in 1948, life expectancy in this country was far lower and avoidable diseases such as rickets were commonplace. The NFS - with its founding principle that food should be free at the point of eating and available equally to all - transformed this nation's diet and wellbeing.
The Labour ethical principles underlying free universal food provision are as valid today as then. Society evolved because humans learned that cooperation, not competition, is essential to survival.
Now, cooperation implies the willing recognition in others of rights that one claims for oneself, which in turn means the sublimation of the selfish interests of the individual to those of the group.
Conservatives claim that there is an inevitable conflict between the two and that politics is the art of finding the right balance, which in their eyes is clearly on the side of selfish individualism.
But human experience shows that the interests of the individual can be fully expressed and achieved only through the group. We stand together, or fall alone. Equality of obligation and benefit is the underlying assumption behind the NFS. In other words, fair shares for all. If you want my political philosophy in a nutshell, then that's it.
Food is essential to life. Without it we die. It is therefore too important to be left to market forces, which inevitably means the well-fed profiting from the hungry. Access to this vital commodity must not depend upon the depth of someone's pocket or on the vagaries of the marketplace. Thus the state, and the state alone, can ensure a truly fair system of food provision.
But this does not mean there is no need for reform or that we can ignore the problems of the NFS. Those problems are deep-seated and structural, and our reforms must match them.
Bread shortages, meat queues, staff recruitment and retention are all issues that must urgently be addressed. Nor is it acceptable that people in inner cities and deprived regions should have to wait longer for their meals than the better-off.
Adjustments will have to be made and if calling on the private sector for transport and other ancillary functions means we get better and more food sooner, then we should not hesitate to do so. I make no apology for that.
Equally, I make no apology for accepting private donations offered to the Labour Party because I am confident that we, and we alone, will make that money work for a society in which fair feeding is the norm, not merely the aspiration.
But I have no hesitation in assuring you that, whatever means we use to achieve that goal, overall British food provision will remain in the hands of the British people themselves - which means the NFS.
Critics claim that the NFS is rationed in all but name, always has been, always will be. Well, I've got news for them: it is, and so it will remain. I know rationing gets a bad press, but anyone who thinks about it for a moment will realise it is the fairest distributive principle, one that lies at the heart of Labour values and policies.
The post-Second World War Labour government was loudly criticised for continuing wartime rationing - indeed, increasing it - into the peace, but time has shown how right those policies were. More of us eat more often and better now than we ever have. Sensible, fair, need-based rationing is a precondition of a publicly owned, free national food service.
Those who seek to wreck the NFS - the cake grabbers - do not appreciate that its million or so staff are not working for money or glory but because they believe passionately in free food for all. To blame them whenever things go wrong - as things occasionally must in any human organisation - is hurtful, unfair and demoralising.
The abuse heaped upon the regional food distribution centre following the Lowestoft salmonella tragedy was wrong and misguided. That tragedy was due to management systems inherited from the Tories, which have already been righted.
Similarly, the starvation scares in Cornwall and the so-called empty trolley deaths in Newcastle are regretted by no one more than myself - though I have to say that the Oxfam survey on which those figures are based has itself been called into question - but the answer is emphatically not to abandon the NFS in favour of competitive food provision.
Any pay-as-you-eat system means a two-tier food service to which access is rationed by wealth rather than by principle. Only the fat cats would benefit.
I know some people claim that by international standards the NFS is failing, that it has not been copied by any of the many countries in the world that studied it, that UK food expectancy is lower, vitamin deficiencies greater, delivery times longer, variety less, that foreigners get fresh fruit all the year round, and all the rest of it.
I know they say that if we had British equivalents of continental food suppliers such as La Tesco and von Sainsbury, we would eat better.
Well, maybe some would: inequality always favours the few at the expense of the many. But creating a free-for-all in food provision would never do here.
Imagine it: every high street, every marketplace, every supermarket would compete with every other to make money out of ordinary people's need to get the food that is their right.
The result would be hand-to-mouth provision, food anarchy, a scramble, with the best going to the strongest, not the hungriest. That is no basis for the fairer and more ethical society in which the majority of British people wish to live.
But it is also no excuse for standing still. We live longer and eat more; we have rising food expectations and therefore the NFS must improve to match them. More food means, to put it plainly, more money.
If we want to eat more, we must invest more. Investments - or taxes - are, like queuing, an exercise in civic virtue, representing the fairest means of distribution and access. But if we want fewer queues - and I understand that - then we have to invest more, pay more tax. I am sure the British people accept this. They know - as we know - what's good for them.
Finally, suppose we did agree that food provision could be left to the private sector, with the state intervening only to set standards, as happens in Europe, where things are different.
Consider for a moment where that would take us here. The same people would then argue that if something as essential as food could be so treated, then so could other important services such as health care and education.
After all, they would argue, if the people can be trusted to make their own arrangements for staying alive, then surely they should be trusted to make their own arrangements for improving the quality of that life.
And that, as I am sure you can see, would lead to another, altogether more political, question: what, then, would we, the Labour movement, be for? It's a sinister argument, and a silly one. I call upon the British people to reject it.
Thanks for posting it!
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