Start 'em young...

If you had the opportunity to rid the world of poverty at a stroke, would you do it? No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t do it because the only quick solution requires a drastic population reduction, it’s efficacy would be short-lived – a generation or so – and the stench would be dreadful. It’s something that has happened under most forms of heavy-handed state control and it has always appalled the sensibilities of the so-called ‘free world’.

So why are western governments so desperate to embrace a new statism, regulating everything from cradle to grave, creating chaos and discontent and generally treating their populations like unruly children who can’t be trusted to do a single thing for themselves?

And yet the one thing they won’t regulate is population, because in sheer numbers they see their raison d’etre - the more people we have, the more we need state control, goes their argument. The more seething and milling the masses, the greater the power of supposedly elected leaders – the greater the numbers of votes I command, booms Ozymandias, the greater the good I can do. And the earlier in life they can control the voters the more likely are those voters to vote for the system that keeps them poor. Humans may individually do great things, but collectively they really are very, very stupid.

I was born four years after rationing ended and my parents brought me up full of misplaced optimism and hope but they never once told me the world owed me a living. Accepting what assistance the state then gave was a mark of failure and something you strove to rise above because it was clear that if you always rely on the support of others you lose the ability to stand on your own. And when the world turns to shit you are all you have left.

So, just what ARE you going to do with ‘the poor’? Like the mice in the grain store, the poor will procreate as long as there is a living to be had. It’s an immutable law of human nature that the less gainfully occupied you are the more frequently you will breed. We used to have poor houses and work houses where sloth was punished and dignity was shed as the price for reliance; most poor people did their utmost to remain out of their clutches… but they didn’t have votes back then.

All of which explains the sheer cynicism of Nick Clegg’s free school meals pledge, extracted in exchange for ‘allowing’ a Conservative tax policy to be waved through. This has nothing to do with alleviating poverty; if anything it will exacerbate it. It is all, as always, to do with acquiring power. We have given up trying to upskill our dumbed-down population and instead reverted to just buying their votes from an earlier age – their earliest memories will be of the state feeding them and weaning them off that teat will eventually become an effort of political will too far.

So, if you nowadays misguidedly raise your kids to be self-reliant, to do a good day’s work, better themselves and enter the workforce as a contributor, not a taker, you are consigning them to a life of drudgery in order to pay for those who have taken the socialist shilling. As a parent how can you countenance that? It’s tantamount to child abuse.

And when the wealth creators cash in their capital, sell their ageing plant to foreign asset strippers and leave these shores, the weak will still go to the wall; they always do. The poor will always be with us and when they are in the majority our society will have failed. And what worth your ‘power’ then, Mr Clegg?

Free school meals for all? What harm could that do?

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away