If you want to see how politicians would like to treat the public if they were not constrained by democracy, look at how they treat children. Soon to be banned from using social media and, from 1 January 2027, banned from ever buying tobacco, the under-16s are also about to be subjected to phase two of Jamie Oliver’s assault on school dinners.

It is almost exactly 20 years since a Labour government introduced new food standards in England’s schools after the unbearable celebrity chef made a TV series about it. Budgets were increased and Turkey Twizzlers were banned, but Oliver didn’t stop to catch his breath. He immediately demanded a ban on packed lunches and, in a classic case of projection, described parents who gave their children fizzy drinks as ‘tossers’ and ‘arseholes’.

The new school-dinner rules announced today give Oliver everything he has been lobbying for. Pastries and croissants will no longer be permitted in breakfast clubs. Sausages and bacon are allowed, but only once a week. Fried eggs are banned completely. Only breakfast cereals that are very low in sugar can be served. Teacakes, crumpets and unsweetened pancakes can be served, but only twice a week. Porridge is permitted but only if it is ‘plain’ and ‘unflavoured’ – no sugar, honey, syrups or sweeteners are to be made available.

For lunch, kids can no longer be offered fried chips or any other deep-fried food. Processed meat and ‘foods containing pastry’ can only be served once a week. Meals containing cheese, such as lasagna, are limited to three portions a week. Lentils and chickpeas are to be compulsory at least once a week. No foods containing chocolate are permitted. ‘Sweetened desserts’ can only be served twice a week.

As for the tuck shop, the government has decreed that the ‘only permitted snacks are plain fruits, vegetables, savoury crackers, breadsticks, yoghurt / plant-based versions (as per the dairy food group) and houmous’. Nom, nom!

It is not just that the government is being puritanical. The new food regime also reveals a thirst for micromanagement and regulation for the sake of regulation that is quite mind-boggling. No detail is too small for Labour’s Gastronomic Gestapo. No dinner lady is to be trusted and nothing can be left to common sense. Not only will kids be limited to two sweetened desserts a week, but those desserts ‘must include an 80g portion of fruit or vegetables’. Only jam and marmalade with ‘reduced sugar’ can be served, but they ‘must be limited to sachets or portions of no more than 10g or one teaspoon’.

The rationale for many of the new rules is far from obvious. Schools will be allowed to fry sausages but not eggs. If a school serves a food containing pastry and a food containing processed meat, it cannot serve a food covered in breadcrumbs in the same week. Schools cannot serve more than two portions of ‘meat and fish alternative products’ in the same week, but starchy carbohydrates, such as chips, must be available every day. The vegetarian menu must contain pulses at least three days a week. Where have all these numbers come from? Where is the science for any of this?

The new rules go far beyond ensuring that kids have a balanced diet and consume enough calories to get through the day. They are a grab bag of arbitrary prohibitions on random food products and compulsory targets that seem to have been devised by rolling dice. Their only redeeming feature is that they will save the taxpayer money if children decide to eat their breakfast at home and take a packed lunch with them to school.

This is why Jamie Oliver was so keen to ban packed lunches 20 years ago and it is why nanny statists have been echoing his demand ever since. Only last month, the cake-promoting anti-obesity campaigner Prue Leith said the quiet part out loud when she called for packed lunches to be banned because the government ‘can’t police’ what parents put in them. The constant expansion of breakfast clubs and ‘free’ school meals isn’t about preventing children from going hungry. It is about control. The state doesn’t trust parents to follow the latest food fad and it wants to overrule the preferences of not just the child, but also of the child’s family.

The new school-meals regime reveals in absurd detail what a state-sanctioned diet looks like. The government can enforce it on children because children can’t vote. It can’t enforce it on the rest of us for the time being, but through the use of taxes, bans and reformulation, it will do its best to try.

Christopher Snowdon is director of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs and the co-host of Last Orders, spiked’s nanny-state podcast.