New Labour is back to its favourite pastime: bullying the working classes
New Labour wishes to market 'good health' as a desirable commodity to its feckless and stupid subject people, but government ministers are having a tough time of it A white paper to tackle obesity is in preparation and the big idea is that food will be labelled under the traffic lights system: green means it's good for you; orange is sort of Libllem fare — neither good nor had, sort of neutral food; and red means if you eat it you'll end up swathed in rolls of purulent blubber, unable to rise from your sofa even when Ainsley Harriot appears on the television.
I don't think this will work. I have the horrible feeling that people will make straight for the red lights, thinking, in their childish error, that the stuff will taste better. The Today programme sent a reporter to a supermarket in Newcastle and vox-popped a bunch of Geordie monkeys as they paid for their purchases. One woman described the contents of her trolley for the benefit of the Today listeners (most of whom are resident in places like Tring and Tunbridge Wells and may have had difficulty deciphering the dialect): 'I've got crisps, chips, sweets and pop,' she said cheerfully.
Most people in the countty haven't heard the word 'pop' in such a context since William Hague bandied it around. For the uninitiated, it means fizzy soft drinks like cherry-flavour 'Diet' Tango, Appletize and those enormous plastic bottles of supermarket-brand carbonated, saccharine-drenched water which retail for about nine pence and taste like that section of the Manchester Ship Canal as it passes through Warrington. But I digress.
'You see,' the woman continued, 'I don't really agree with healthy eating. I don't like healthy food. I like unhealthy food.'
That's the problem. It doesn't matter how often you tell these morons; they are still regrettably possessed by this thing 'free will', which no government has ever attempted to market to the electorate as a desirable commodity. Soon New Labour will have recourse to compulsion instead of mere advice. It is already planning to do this with smoking: cigarettes are to be banned from all places where food is served, which means that you won't be allowed to smoke in an estimated 90 per cent of public houses, for example. And so we will all crowd into the remaining 10 per cent and chain-smoke like laboratory beagles, until it's banned in those redoubts as well.
What New Labour needs is a popular and responsible role-model for the populace, someone to whom that dissolute Geordie woman can aspire, a paragon of virtue and healthy living who can be exploited on poster campaigns and in television public-health advertisements. The immediately obvious answer is Adolf Hitler, who retains an enormous popularity and affection among British people. As modern-day German politicians repeatedly chide us, scarcely a day goes by without Adolf being featured in some television documentary, drama or comedy series, or in newspaper articles and books. We cannot get enough of Hitler. And he was an ascetic chap, Adolf. He banned smoking throughout his delightful Berchtesgaden retreat — a revolutionary act in the 1930s — and as a committed vegetarian ate only the healthiest of foods. He did not drink alcohol and, as a bonus for New Labour, was also opposed to fox-hunting and in favour of a united Europe, of course. A nationwide poster campaign showing the Hihrer looking very healthy and happy while his jubilant troops occupied the Saarland or routed the hapless Poles would, I'm sure, have an immediate effect upon even our dumbest citizens. How about this for a catchphrase: 'Give yourself some Lebensraum on just 400 calories per day'?
Of course, it would be stupid to denigrate the notion of eating healthily simply because it was a consuming obsession of the most ghastly chap to have walked the earth in the last millennium. As the saying goes, just because it's in the Daily Telegraph it doesn't mean it's wrong. Adolf, we ought to agree, got some things right. Those autobahns, for example, were ahead of their time. Then there's Volkswagen. And Hitler's industrial regeneration arguably formed the basis of Konrad Adenauer's postwar economic miracle, the Wirtschaftwunder.
But I would be more convinced by the government's avowed wish to have us all live a lot longer if it put its money where its mouth was. The net gain to the exchequer from tobacco taxes is way, way in excess of that expended by the National Health Service treating people suffering from smoking-related diseases. Every time the budget comes around, the Chancellor delivers a pious edict about smoking and whacks up the tax on a packet of cigarettes. The implication is that he wants us to stop smoking and is attempting to achieve this goal by making it more expensive for us to smoke, but he would be in a hell of a quandary if we all stopped smoking tomorrow. Rather, it is yet another chavtax, like the national lottery, a means of squeezing more dosh out of the people least able to afford it.
And then there's the supermarkets. Now, I don't wish to be seen as obsessive, but are not Tesco and Asda and Morrisons the principal purveyors of the very convenience foods that have turned the nation into fat, indolent, salt'n'sugar-addicted monsters? And how has New Labour dealt with the supermarkets, with the peddlers of had food? With a degree of indulgence, I think you have to say, with what the Germans would call verstehen. Whether it be with regard to planning permission or the contracts between the supermarkets and our farmers, New Labour has allowed the big stores, which now blight the outskirts of every town in Britain, to proceed pretty much unhindered. It is a cartel which should have been dealt with a decade or so ago. And while New Labour insists that the chavs should take responsibility for their lives and eat healthily, there is no sanction against Tesco, for example, for shoving the glutinous and unnatural muck down the throats of its customers. There is no demand that the supermarkets behave 'responsibly'. The real money-spinners are those convenience foods — and don't be kidded for a moment that their 'healthy choice' range is, in any understandable sense of the term, very healthy, really. It's just prepackaged muck with less fat in it.
So we have a government determined to force its old constituency, the working class, to adopt the lifestyle patterns of its new constituency, the metropolitan middle class. And it will have recourse to bullying and, when push comes to shove, compulsion to ensure it achieves the desired end. But there ought to be at least a semblance of logical consistency. Either you go with the market and let shops sell what they want and people buy what they want, or you decide that the market has done damage enough and step in to regulate both the demand and the supply. —
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