There goes the great milk robbery that never was, blink and you might have missed it.  This was as close as a Government gets to taking sweets from a baby, except of course that would never happen; they wouldn’t dream of upsetting the lobbyists from Mars or Nestlé.  Anyway in case you missed it they bungled the burglary, got caught in the act and had to hand back the bottle blushing - which would be all well and good were it not for the fact that it’s pretty damned obvious that if they could have gotten away with it they would have. The reality is this was just another misdemeanour in a series of offences in the area of food policy and health since the weird coalition took office – in fact in many ways this was one of the less serious crimes - a bit like being caught shoplifting whilst continuing to mastermind a vast network of organised crime – but the pattern is pretty obvious and the ideology underpinning it transparent. Sadly if rather predictably, we are being served-up lashings of laissez faire nonsense that will create a mess that we’ll eventually have to clear up by intervening a thousand times more heavily further down the line.

It’s not about dictating how people eat, it’s about helping them to make informed choices in the face of an industry that has thunderously powerful ways of getting its message across. It’s about getting children into good food habits that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives and will relieve the pressure on our health service - in whatever shape it survives - from the spiralling pressure of obesity and myriad illnesses that come with it. It’s about having respect for what we eat and where it comes from in a world that can’t feed itself now but will have another three billion mouths to feed by 2050. I’m getting the impression that Dave doesn’t have much of a clue what his gang get up too when he’s not around. I only hope this latest bit of mischief will cause him to be a bit more attentive to the activities of Lansley and co but then that would assume that he doesn’t adhere to quite the same dogma and right now I’m struggling to summon up that level of optimism.