Degrees of Freedom

 I am sick to death of the way that the good and the great seem to imagine that they have a divine right to direct every detail of our lives — always, of course, for our own good.  And there is a new and worrying element creeping in — the idea that health and safety legislation will always (like European Integration) go only one way.  Yesterday on the BBC Today programme they were making it explicit.  “The public may not be ready for these measures today, but they soon will be”.
 
James Naughtie was interviewing a spokesman for a joint 12-point public health manifesto which includes, inter alia, a minimum price for alcohol (which, like so many measures, will punish the innocent and the responsible while leaving drunks and alcoholics and lager louts little affected). This manifesto is being jointly proposed by The Faculty of Public Health, which is a Faculty of the Royal Colleges of Physicians, and the RSPH (Royal Society for Public Health) which is an independent charity formed in October 2008 with the merger of the Royal Society of Health (RSH) and the Royal Institute of Public Health (RIPH).

We can be amused by the way that Labour in London is pursuing a minimum price policy for alcohol at the same time as Labour in Scotland opposes it.  Nonetheless it is clear that the forces of repression think they have the upper hand.  They are convinced that they are right, and have the right, to tell us exactly what we should eat, drink, smoke, drive — and whether we should fly at all.

Just in case you were wondering what the twelve points were, I thought I’d include them:

1. A minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol sold
2. No junk food advertising in pre-watershed television
3. Ban smoking in cars with children
4. Chlamydia screening for university and college freshers
5. 20 mph limit in built up areas
6. A dedicated school nurse for every secondary school
7. 25% increase in cycle lanes and cycle racks by 2015
8. Compulsory and standardised front-of-pack labelling for all pre-packaged food
9. Olympic legacy to include commitment to expand and upgrade school sports facilities and playing fields across the UK
10. Introduce presumed consent for organ donation
11. Free school meals for all children under 16
12. Stop the use of transfats

I have no problem with school nurses and sports grounds, and (voluntary) chlamydia screening, and the trans-fat ban.  But the sustained assault on smoking (I thought we’d finished with that — but these do-gooders are never finished), on drinking, on driving, and the assumption that even our bodily parts are not our own, is Orwellian, as is the arrogant assumption that while a few Luddites may protest for a while, the public will inevitably come to accept these measures.

On the same day, we heard that Shyam Kolvekar, a consultant heart surgeon with University College Hospitals in London, has called for a ban on butter, which he says could save 3,500 lives a year.  You will not be surprised to learn that his press release came from an agency that works for Unilever, makers of Flora margarine.  How dare they?  Milk and dairy products have been a staple of the human diet for thousands of years, and until recently were regarded as healthy and desirable.  But above all, the decision on what we choose to eat is surely a basic personal freedom.  By all means give us good advice (as if we don’t get enough of that already).  But ban butter?   No thanks.  I gather that the dairy industry is not best pleased.

Degrees of freedom?  Listen carefully.  You will be able to hear the echoing sound of prison doors slamming shut, and keys turning in locks.