How could we sit down and try to come up with ideas to make the feeding of babies by desperate parents harder? By Peter Kelly...

Donald Trump won the US election and let’s be honest, it wasn’t close. He won a resounding victory. I admit I thought the contest was going to be closer than it was and was convinced Kamala Harris was going to just sneak through.

I now know that was just wishful thinking and I was listening to the wrong podcast (the rest is politics US) for forecasting accuracy. The Guardian reported that Trump’s election sales of dystopian books have surged.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood moved up 400 places and is now, at time of writing, third in the US Amazon best seller’s chart. Authoritarianism is very much back. John Kelly, Trump’s longest serving White House chief of staff, said he believed Donald Trump met the definition of a fascist and insisted he will try and rule as a dictator.

I recently had a baby. He is now seven months old and one of the things that happened to me once I had a baby is I became very baby-aware. Before the baby arrived, I never noticed babies and now I see them everywhere. I have a radar for it.

When you bring a baby into a restaurant or coffee shop, I always find it slightly reassuring to see other babies. 

I’m now always making mental notes of what places are baby-friendly, in much the same way I’m sure people know which pubs are dog-friendly.

I live in London and the city to me is pleasantly, and surprisingly, baby-friendly. There are plenty of parks and museums which all seem to perfectly cater to spending time with babies. Restaurants, bars and coffee shop staff and other customers can be very patient and understanding of having babies around.

Babies can be messy and noisy and, by and large, we have found people in the public realm who are very accommodating. However, there is one thing I have seen since I have had a baby which has very much upset me and which I think looks and feels very dystopian.

From what I can see, most, if not all, the major supermarkets have security tags on babies’ powdered milk. I have seen these types of tags on bottles of spirits, razors, sometimes steaks and other high value, easily resalable items and it never provoked any reaction in me. But to see these security tags on baby milk is very depressing.

To see the security tags on baby milk tells me this product was or is one of the most stolen products. That’s upsetting to think. Parents are having to resort to shoplifting to feed their babies. In a rich country like Britain, I feel that should just not be the case.

The other thought that comes to mind is supermarkets had the information that baby milk is being stolen and their instinct was to increase security to prevent theft. I think that’s wrong. Maybe I have lost the plot here and I’m too emotional from lack of sleep and the love of my own baby.

But I think it’s a terrible solution to a terrible problem. I have a friend who works for one of the big supermarket chains and I said it to him and he was a little defensive. He said ‘what should they do, just let people steal it?’

I said ‘yes, that is exactly what they should do.’ No supermarket chain is going to go bankrupt because of stolen baby milk and the loss of profit is not going to majorly impact on lives of the stakeholders or shareholders of the business.

But having hungry babies is a disaster for society. And having the callous messaging that profits matter more than hungry babies is a terrible message to put out into society.

To me, it says there is no community. I would love to hear other’s thoughts on this but every time I see a security tag on babies’ milk, I despair. How do you sit down and try and come up with ideas to make the feeding of babies by desperate parents harder?

If a liberal capitalist democracy can be this cruel, surely some people will start to think ‘how bad can an authoritarian regime be in comparison?’ Some people rightly feel we are already living in a dystopia. There was a naive belief that as a country like China got richer, its politics would become more like ours.

Xi Jinping’s personal power means they are less close to us than before. Maybe as authoritarian regimes get richer, we will become more like them.

Maybe it is time to start reading 1984 and Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale to see what our future holds for us.

Peter Kelly is a community pharmacist based in London and a stand-up comedian.