The British school dinner was invented by the army, after it tried to recruit for a war and found the country's young men too stunted to send. In 1899 Britain went to war in South Africa and called for volunteers. In Manchester 11,000 men came forward. The army doctors sent 8,000 of them home. They were too short, too thin, with bad chests, rotten teeth and legs bent by rickets. The minimum height had already been cut to five feet. A general wrote it up in a magazine under the title Where to Get Men. He put it plainly. Three out of five who offered themselves were unfit to carry a rifle. Parliament panicked. It set up a Committee on Physical Deterioration, which toured the slums and reported in 1904. Its finding was that the men had been ruined as children, by hunger, and that no amount of drill would fix at eighteen what had not been fed at eight. It recommended that the state give hungry children a hot meal at school. The Act passed in 1906. Within a generation there was a cooked dinner of meat and a pudding in nearly every school in the land. So the stew, the mince, the liver and the jam roly-poly were a defence measure. The Empire had looked at the children it would need in ten years and concluded it was cheaper to feed them now. Today the army is turning recruits away for being too heavy. Nobody has set up a committee.

All I want for Christmas ... is for the worst performing water companies to be in public ownership at no expence to the tax payer. Announced this morning at our Conference. joe.co.uk/politics/thames-wa…

Politicians need to realise they are employed as public servants and their behaviour to the public should be respectful. They are not celebrities and should not abuse the public purse. #End2ndHomes.

MP's in the UK gave up their side of the deal the people have with them - they TAKE OUR MONEY BUT NO LONGER REPRESENT US.

Zionism is predicated on replacing one population another. This logic was written into the thinking of its foundational leaders. You — obviously — cannot ethnically cleanse a land in a non-racist fashion. Zionism is, definitionally, racism. Stop playing stupid.

Zionism is racism.

🔴Do YOU think Labour cares about British pensioners❓ @andyburnham @UKLabour

DEAD MAN’S SHOES (2004) hits differently because revenge never feels triumphant. Shane Meadows turns a small English town into a pressure cooker, while Paddy Considine lets Richard’s rage slowly reveal the grief underneath it.

Loved this

Happy 80th Birthday to Susan Sarandon!

RT @ColdrickDavid: @NeilClark66 The plan is clearly to nudge towards abolishing the state pension.

RT @NeilClark66: Yup. Which is why those of us who are trying to defend the State Pension and saying we do have a right to it if we have ma…

In the 80s, education was free to university level (in fact, there were bursarys to help with costs), the NHS was the envy of the world, we owned public services. Same country. Now, we've got billionaires and corporations, and lost everything. #Thatcher

The UK has been milked for profit & left to rot by decades of underinvestment. If Burnham really wants to rebuild, he'll need a good Budget not just good vibes. That means a budget that reinvests by taxing the super‑rich. 📺 Our very own Faiza Shaheen on GMB back in August.

Who knew that our Prime Minister had previously benefitted from dodgy Dubai money and had worked with their developers to carve up Manchester and not provide any social housing? Oh yes anyone who bothered to look, but he was still given a coronation without any questions.

What an absolute charlatan. Elise Benjamin, who says in her X bio that she is an ‘indigenous Judean’ and yet maintains an online family tree going back eight generations, with every single relative from Poland and environs. Not a single Levantine amongst them. She is such a charlatan that she made the family tree private after I reported it in @TheCanaryUK #DismantleZionism

why aren’t the robots working in the mines and oil fields and handling toxic chemicals or picking plastic out of the ocean? why are they writing emails and making powerpoint presentations? what the hell are we doing

This is the real purpose of AI.

BREAKING: Green Party members have backed a motion declaring that 'Zionism is racism'