A puzzling policy committment from Scottish Labour

Perhaps we should spend too much time puzzling over whatever it is that Scottish Labour wishes to promise us all given that current indications are that there's not going to be a Scottish Labour soon enough. But their attitude towards food banks does deserve some puzzling over:

His announcement came the day after he promised a £175 million anti-poverty fund that he said would be used to end food banks in Scotland.

Why would we want to end food banks on Scotland?

It's entirely true that use of food banks has soared in recent years. But it's also true that we've got to be very careful in determining whether this is a supply shock or a demand shock. And all the evidence we've got is that it is indeed a supply shock. As the Trussell Trust itself points out, back a decade and more there simply were no food banks (OK, perhaps two or three) in the UK. Now there's a great network of them, alleviating the number of tens of thousands of people each week.

It is possible that there was no hunger back a decade. But anyone with any experience of the benefits system of the past would not claim that it did not make mistakes, that it did not underpay, take a long time to pay, take weeks to start getting the impoverished some cash to alleviate their hunger. Some of us here have direct experience of just those situations.

So, it is not that the benefits system is worse today than it was: it's that we've a new technology, those food banks, to deal with an already extant problem. That is, it's a supply shock, not a demand one.

At which point we come to something of a logical puzzle. The little platoons have worked out a way, a very effective way, to deal with the inefficiencies of the State. The response is thus to nationalise by that very State the thing that alleviates the State's inefficiencies?

Umm, why not just leave the little platoons to get on with the job they are doing so effectively?