A political opponent of the Scottish Socialist Party once quipped: ‘Elect six Trotskyites to the Scottish parliament, and the most radical thing they can come up with is a demand for free school meals’.

That criticism was coming from the right, as it happens. But it’s exactly the sort of sneering remark one can readily imagine on the lips of that certain breed of public school-educated far leftist who has succeeded in memorising the Transitional Programme word for word. Free school meals? Call yourselves revolutionaries?

Actually, when the SSP first started campaigning on the question in 2001, I thought it was quite a politically savvy thing to do. The is just the sort of concrete policy that many working class people will instantly see as making a difference to their lives.

It’s not just a question of the cash, as the SSP pointed out; there are also the very real issue among cool-conscious teenagers of the stigma attached to qualifying for a ‘handout’. Growing up as one of only two boys on free school meals in a middle-class dominated Grammar School, I’m well aware of that one.

Top that off with increased recognition of the public health concerns surrounding obesity and nutrition, particularly on the home turf of deep-fried Mars Bars, and the case is compelling.

What’s more, New Labour and the Lib Dems – parties that would, in another time and place, have come up with exactly the kind of progressive reform the idea of free school meals encapsulates – were forced to oppose such a seemingly modest reform. In 2002, they voted down an SSP bill to implement the proposal. It couldn’t possibly be afforded, you understand.

As ‘exposure demands’ that highlight the limitations of reformism in the eyes of the class go, comrades, it doesn’t get any better than that.

The SSP imploded in 2006 and lost its representation in the Scottish parliament the following year. Some of the circumstances surrounding the break up are shortly to be debated in a perjury trial, so I’ll say no more on this score.

But now the SSP are not around in Holyrood to take the credit, the policy is all of a sudden safe, at least in a dramatically watered-down version. So the Scottish National Party has today announced that all children will from 2010 get free school meals for their first three years in primary school.

Nationally, New Labour has established a free school meals pilot scheme in Hull, and unions and even some Labour MP are pushing the call. But the role of the SSP in all this is seemingly being airbrushed out; there’s no mention of it in the BBC’s coverage, for instance.

Most unfair, say I. Those SSP members who initiated and pushed the policy should take a bow. And the entire British left should be very proud of them. Small as the step may seem to a brand of politics committed to world revolution, it is one of the far left’s most significant practical achievements for many years.