No such thing as a free breakfast

Okay, let's see a show of hands (and off your phone, you at the back!) - who hated school?

When speculating upon why the so-called "awake" are awake, a common theme - along with a complete and utter aversion to television - is a deep antipathy for state education. A disproportionately large number of people who go on to become "conspiracy theorists" hated school.

I was certainly amongst them. I quite liked primary school, and enjoyed doing my A-levels, but secondary school, I despised. Everything about it seemed designed to be as boring, alienating, and spirit-crushing as possible (and that's not just an elaborate excuse for why I failed maths...).

When as an adult, I read veteran teacher, John Taylor Gatto's, treatise on state education, "Dumbing Us Down", I realised that is, indeed, exactly what it was designed to be.

In short, Gatto explained that the purpose of state schooling is to produce predictable, formulaic people who cannot critically think or challenge authority, because these kinds of people are the most useful and the least threatening to the ruling classes.

There is a very good reason the government invests such a colossal amount of money in state schooling (£116 billion in 2024-25), whilst offering it to children entirely for free, and it's a comparable reason to why a similar model is employed for vaccinations, e.g., they recoup on their investment in other, much more sinister ways.

So, whenever the government offers something on a large scale for free, especially to children, we ought to know by now to be acutely on our guard.

Therefore, I was extremely disturbed to learn that my hometown of Stoke-on-Trent is piloting a new free breakfast club in several of the locality's primary schools.

Purporting to be about saving working families money, this scheme will feed children before school, whilst also offering "at least 30 minutes" of free childcare.

The idea is that it saves parents money - not primarily by giving children a free bowl of cereal, which costs pence - but by offering free before-school childcare, which, up until now - needing to get to work by 9am - many families had been paying for.

So what's the problem with that, some may ask. Parents can't get to work by 9am if they need to drop children off at school at that time too, therefore having a free breakfast club makes sense.

This being a fairly valid point, we might want to question why schools and workplaces both typically commence at the same time of 9am. If a primary purpose of state schooling is to allow parents to work (and it is), then why don't employers routinely start at 9:30 or 10, to accommodate parents who need to complete the school run first?

It's almost as if... the system has been set up to make it difficult for working parents to get their children to school on time, precisely so that the state has to step in to "help" further...

Similarly, an average family can no longer survive on one wage, so both parents have to work, and therefore rely on state daycare for preschool children.

Yet in the recent past, families - including non-wealthy families - could manage on one wage, enabling the other parent to be at home with the children until they were school-aged.

Again, it's almost as if the system has been set up to force both parents into the workplace so that the children can enter state-controlled care as soon as possible.

Well, I doubt it will come as breaking news to many readers of this blog to confirm that, yes, the system has been set up this way.

State schooling, state daycare, and now state breakfasts are all part of a long and insidious march towards undermining the authority of the family and making child-rearing more and more of a state responsibility.

The state is gradually making it harder for parents to adequately provide for their own children, and then presenting free "solutions" to the problems it itself has created.

(As the old joke goes, the way government works is, the government breaks your legs, then gives you a state-subsidised wheelchair, and tells you that, without the government, you wouldn't be getting around so well.)

If these state "solutions" to childcare issues are widely accepted by parents, then they lose more and more agency over their children, becoming ever-more dependent on the state to make their lives work, which makes them acutely vulnerable, because...

What if the state suddenly revokes these "solutions"?

What if government officials one day declare, "the breakfast club is too expensive, we're scrapping it" - yet millions of parents have come to rely on it, and can only retain their employment if the government continues to provide free before-school care?

We saw how much many parents struggled when the state suddenly revoked free childcare in the shape of school by closing all the nation's schools during "Covid", with even parents who worked from home stating they found it hugely difficult to manage the joint challenges of working and supervising children.

Parents who had to go out to work were typically left in even more dire straits.

The government, of course, knew full well what an impossible position abruptly closing all the schools would put working parents in.

Yet it closed them anyway, and all on the pretext of an alleged virus which - even if one believed every word of the official story - was never a threat to children..

So why did they really close the schools?

It wasn't to protect children.

It was to trap parents.

It was to demonstrate to families just how much power the state really has over those parents who rely on it for childcare.

So the cruel truth we have to face is that worldwide governments have lured parents into this trap on purpose. When the government offers families free state services to "help them", it, ultimately, is never really to help them, but always to trap them.

It's important to know our history, and realise there was never actually a need for the state to step in to educate children, and communities managed to inculcate literacy, numeracy, and other necessary skills into their children perfectly well without government "help".

The state didn't like these arrangements, though. The children grew up too healthy and autonomous, and lacked the formulaic and predictable character traits the ruling classes required in the labouring classes to toil in their factories and die in their wars.

Hence, the prospect of compulsory state schooling was introduced, carefully designed to mould children to grow up exactly as the ruling classes wanted them to.

Knowing why the state had introduced these measures, the concept was furiously resisted by many families, to the extent that some children had to be marched to school by armed guards, so desperate were their families not to let them go.

Concurrently, the ruling classes enacted an international programme of breaking up the traditional extended families and communities that were well integrated and supportive, and could easily look after all their own children, replacing this natural human model with the unnatural and atomised "nuclear family" (a term that didn't exist until 1947), where just two adults are expected to provide everything for their children.

The pressure this puts on the adults in question, lacking the support network of close extended families, can be enormous, and often leads to the relationship collapsing, and the consequent proliferation of single parent families.

Single parent families are the most vulnerable to government control, as they are the most likely to be reliant on free state "solutions" to childcare issues, such as daycare and breakfast clubs.

That is why the ruling classes have engineered a social environment where single parenthood has become so common (single parent households having exploded in frequency since the 1950s). It's because it's the best possible way for the state to get at the children.

This is not meant as an attack on single parents, most of whom do their best under what are often difficult circumstances, and, not infrequently, circumstances beyond their control (i.e., few people set out to bring up children as single parents).

It is meant as an acute warning to any parents - single or otherwise - who think the government is offering free breakfast clubs to children because the government wants to help either children, or parents.

The government does not want this. Rather, the government wants control, and is therefore offering all these "free" services to increase its control, and, ultimately, to abolish the family entirely. The way it is doing this is to make families more and more dependent on the state, until they cannot cope without it and its "solutions" at all - and that is the exact point at which the state will pull the "solutions" rug out from under families, just as it did when it closed all the nation's schools during "Covid".

It is not a secret or a conspiracy theory that the future of education is online, and lockdown was simply a preview and test-run for how all education will be conducted in the near future: from home via a screen, using increasingly advanced AI and VR (virtual reality).

"But my child can't learn from home online, because I have to work," many parents will say.

Exactly.

That is precisely the nature of the cruel trap the ruling classes have engineered.

As and when they pull the free state childcare services, whether they're in the form of nursery places, schools, or breakfast clubs, scores of families will suddenly find themselves unable to make their arrangements work. Parents need to earn money to live, but they can't go out to do that if they have to be at home with their child.

The two probable "solutions" the state will offer at this point are a UBI stipend (which many now see as an inevitability anyway, due to so many jobs and industries being subsumed by AI), so the parent is able to not work, stay at home, and supervise their child, or out-and-out state care, in the form of fostering or a children's home (more on that later).

Obviously, this is not a "choice" anyone ever wants to be forced into, because UBI - as with all free government solutions - will be yet another baited trap, as we must remember that the U stands for "universal" and not "unconditional". There may not be conditions to this payment at first, in order to entice people to accept it, but it's inevitable conditions would soon start to creep in.

I'm really not trying to scare or depress anyone here, rather, I'm attempting to outline where the ever-increasing expansion of free state childcare services is very likely heading, and therefore, aiming to equip people with the foreknowledge to take appropriate action now.

It is of note that the journalist Peter Hitchens calls nurseries "day orphanages" and regrettably, I think this is a rather perceptive and even prophetic description. The concept of the state stepping in to care for babies and toddlers historically only applied to orphans. If a child's parents were alive, the child would be cared for at home - with the only alternative for families facing such severe poverty they could no longer care for their children being the workhouse.

The fact that workhouses have been scrapped, yet "day orphanages" exist everywhere, and the government is prepared to so extensively fund them, demonstrates unequivocally what the government's real endgame is.

Tax-payer money (several billion each year) is used to fund free nursery places for children as young as nine months old, so their parents can work, yet if optimal child welfare and increased adult productivity was the goal of using tax-payer money to subsidise early years' care, it would in fact make far more sense to pay parents to stay at home with their own preschool children, rather than farming them out to the often young, inexperienced, and overworked strangers who staff nurseries.

The effect of nursery care on children under three has been extensively studied and it is, in general, significantly more detrimental to the child than traditional, at-home childcare arrangements. Obviously, there are exceptions - there are good nurseries and bad parents - but on the whole, this observation stands. Very young children generally do better when not exposed to extensive daycare settings, and the consequences when they are can be severe and long-lasting (including a "sharp and contemporaneous increase in criminal behaviour" later on).

Nevertheless, the government is projected to spend over £8 billion on free early years entitlements in 2025-26.

Would it not make more sense, knowing what is known about the effects of daycare on child development, to use this money to enable parents to stay at home with their own young children?

The idea of public money being used to "pay people to stay at home" may rub some up the wrong way, and I understand why, but given our taxes are already being used to subsidise early years childcare, it's important to look at the bigger picture and ask whether the type of childcare we are subsidising is the optimal kind: after all, we all have an investment in the way young children are raised, because those children will go on to comprise and define the society we are all part of.

As they say, "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world", meaning that the way children are treated in their earliest years goes on to inform the kind of adults they become, and therefore, the kind of world they create.

The philosopher Aristotle said, "give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man", because it is at this time that characters and temperaments are forged: when we are very young, when our brains are very malleable, and largely before we are school-aged (the first three years being the most significant).

If there is therefore strong evidence to suggest (and there is) that it is better for under-threes to be at home with their own special caregiver, rather than in a crowded nursery setting with many other children and unrelated adults, and that staying at home correlates with them becoming more functional and productive adults, isn't it better public money is used to subsidise that, rather than an arrangement clearly shown to be detrimental?

Yet no matter how much evidence was presented to policy-makers that this arrangement would be better for children, families, and societies - and it would likely be a lot cheaper, too - they would never consider it.

Why?

For the reasons I state: to normalise the concept of "day orphanges", i.e., that the state, rather than the family, is primarily responsible for ensuring the welfare of children, so that eventually, the family can be axed altogether.

So, to return to the new free state breakfast club, the reason this scheme is being piloted in Stoke-on-Trent is because Stoke is one of the poorest and most deprived areas of the country, and, therefore, one of the most vulnerable to state control.

To state the obvious, when a family is struggling financially, they are far more likely to accept the offer of free state subsidies for their children, than families who are not struggling in this way.

A more affluent family is markedly less likely to use a "free breakfast club" - especially given the free breakfast in question is likely to comprise the kind of cheap and processed foods wealthier families tend to try to avoid - whereas a less affluent one is far more likely to use such a service, including and especially because it is free.

Breakfast clubs have been around for a while, but when families had to pay for them, a struggling family would be more likely to search for an alternative solution to get to work on time - maybe looking for a job that starts later, or asking a family member or friend to take their child to school.

Once these clubs become free, however, many families who would not otherwise have used them, and would have searched for more autonomous solutions, will give those solutions up and pass further responsibility to the state instead.

Although this will unequivocally impact on less affluent families the most, it is of interest and note to observe that not all schools being enrolled in these schemes are in deprived areas. As the Family Education Trust said on Twitter:

"Labour’s ‘free’ breakfast rollout (funded by the tax raid on private schools) includes 174 schools where hardly any pupils are entitled to free school meals, including one in Kensington and two schools where zero children are eligible."

Palpably, then, this scheme is attempting to wrest parental control from all types of families, not just the less affluent.

Parents living in Kensington who can send their children to schools where nobody is eligible for free school meals clearly do not require subsidised preschool childcare or free breakfasts, and can meet these costs of these things themselves.

Yet the lure of the word "free" can appeal to those of all income brackets.

The fact that this free state service is available to all families, rather than being means-tested for those who might more require it, reveals unequivocally what this scheme is really about...

Further facilitating the transfer of power from families to the state.

The state already has children all day in its schools, feeds them lunch (when this was not routine as recently as the 1980s, when many children went home for lunch), and gives them its "homework" to further take away from family time. Now that it is also giving them breakfast, all we really need are "free sleepover clubs" (which, in reality, are no qualitatively different to any of the free state childcare services we already have), and it's fait accompli.

I am well aware of the extraordinary difficulties many parents face in trying to juggle work and childcare (as we've discussed, it's been specifically engineered to be that way), but I would simply advise people to take heed of these warnings and do everything that it is reasonably possible to do to not become more dependent on the state for childcare than they already are.

There are alternatives. There are employers with start times that accommodate the school run, friends you can make to take children to and from school, moving closer to family who can help if it's possible, and even pulling kids out of school entirely and starting home-schooling co-ops with likeminded families.

I don't suggest any of this is easy: I know that the system is rigged to make it extremely obstacle-ridden and challenging. Yet it is possible, and we all need to think about ways to make our local communities more integrated and supportive, whether we have school-aged children or not, and how to reclaim more of our own power back from the state and its always-insidious agendas.

This is especially so in the context of an even more insidious agenda that is unfolding, and that really does make Peter Hitchens' "day orphanages" comments all the more painfully prophetic: an increasing number of children are literally being orphaned, as their parents "die suddenly" within only a few months of each other.

Whistleblowers warned us from the start that we would really start to see death tolls from the Covid "vaccine" spike 3-5 years in, and this year, 2025, marks four years on from when the jabs were widely rolled out in 2021.

Therefore, the sudden expansion of state services to care for children in the form of free breakfast clubs for all, regardless of familial affluence, may be deliberately scheduled to coincide with a time period in which the state knows a lot of children are to soon become orphaned. The state may be engaging in a strategic transfer of power from parents to state, to more prepare children for becoming parentless, and being cared for by the state entirely.

This, after all, would not be the first time the ruling classes have engineered an "orphan crisis" and used the situation to their advantage.

The positives we can take from this situation are that - especially post-Covid - many people are a lot less naïve than they once were, and a lot more sceptical about the government trying to "help them". Many parents have made it abundantly clear they see right through the expansion of free state services for children, and will resist these at all costs.

And finally, if there's one good thing about "breakfast club" now trending on Twitter, it's that it may cue a renaissance of the brilliant eponymous film, charting a day in the life of a group of teenagers, sent to their school's euphemistically named "breakfast club" as a penalty for their various adolescent misdemeanours.

It's instructive and revealing to note, therefore, that, in 1985 when The Breakfast Club came out, being detained at school in the early morning hours and kept away from your family was seen as a punishment.

We cannot let the ruthless and power-hungry state convince us that what were detested children's punishments of 40 years ago, have somehow become today's childhood perks.

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