Your caring, sharing NHS at its most cruel

I know the term 'health fascism' is pretty polemical and intended to shock. But the truth is that increasingly public health 'campaigners' (as the newspapers always call them) have created a culture around their obsessions that is unpleasant, officious and even cruel:

What happened I found out in stages - apparently someone saw me at the week-end refilling the vape from the 'sipped case' - and told them. This evening a nurse walked over to me me and said, 'what a sweet little teddy' and proceeded to play with him - 'Oh do you keep your pen in there, good heavens no its a vape'. It was so odd that I didn't twig at first. Well, I got the rules and regulations read to me in such a patronising tone of voice.

This dying woman has one small remaining pleasure removed because the rules - rules without any basis in health - don't allow it. As Dick Puddlecote points out this is a women "on a regime of intravenous Ketamine - the drug designed to stun a rampaging elephant - and Oxycodeine, but apparently nicotine is not to be tolerated." But it's worse - part of this torture is where nurses left the vape pen just out of this paralysed woman's reach.

We're told almost daily how NHS staff are wonderful and caring yet somehow we've reached a point where "as there wasn't evidence to prove that e-cigs were safe or unsafe, they were banned on health grounds" - for people in a hospice receiving palliative care for a terminal illness. Not only is this stupid but it is really cruel. So much for the caring, sharing NHS.

Since you asked, this is what I mean by health fascism.
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"You will eat want we tell you to eat" - fussbucketry on our TVs

The clip starts with one person presenting how standardised packaging for "junk food" would look - this is accompanied by "ewwww" sounds from the others round the table as they agree they'd never eat something packaged like that. "But I wouldn't eat it anyway" giggles one of the participants.

None of the people round the table 'debating' the subject - "Junk Food: should it come with a health warning" - is is any respect an authority. No nutritionists are present, no-one who understands advertising, not even a public health professional. Instead we've a bunch of TV presenters and journalists who proceed to demonstrate just how much they loathe the choices of a lot of ordinary people out there in the real world.

We see James Caan, he of Dragons' Den fame, exclaiming "yes, yes" at the idea of banning Burger King and KFC. And Rachel Johnson, Remainiac extraordinaire suggesting that parents are incapable of resisting the pestering of children to buy a "bottle of water and a Cadbury's for a £1 in WH Smiths". Not, of course, that station forecourt booksellers are the favoured haunt of mums with screaming kids in tow.

For me this three minute long clip sums up so much that is wrong with our society, with government and with the punditry that sets the tone. "We can't afford...", "one in eleven children...", "Our NHS..." - a collection of ill-informed, evidence-free comments from people who've no idea at all what it's really like to raise a couple or three kids on a low income but who are ready and eager to condemn the failings (or what they see as failings) of those in this circumstance. All summed up by the first presenter (my apologies for not knowing who he is apart from being a vaguely familiar TV presenter sort) saying "people are making the wrong choices" and that we have to educate them into making the right choices (by telling lies about cancer, heart disease and rotten feet).

What we have is a bunch of privileged - in every meaning of this word - people given a platform to promote an intolerant and snobbish disdain for what other people do. The tone and the comments display a belief that somehow people like those gathered here to 'debate' the issue of "junk food" have some sort of righteous duty to stop other people making what they've decided are the "wrong" choices.

For me this agenda - nannying fussbucketry - is at the heart of the elite attack on the personal choices of ordinary people. The subtext of the debate is that we are not capable of making our own decisions, right or wrong, but must be guided by great and good people who have experience of presenting TV shows, writing newspaper columns and telling bad jokes. Every TV entrepreneur, actress, comedian and writer of columns in weekly magazines must adopt - with passion - a cause that involves lecturing poor people about how they're doing it all wrong.

Whether it's food, drink, bicycles, dress sense, or buying blue toys the great and the good want you to do what they say. They want to tell you that you've bought the wrong sort of car, gone on the worng holiday, visited the wrong restaurant and had the audacity to buy cheap semi-sparkling wine. These great and good believe they know what you should do and what is good for you. Like nineteenth century Methodist preachers they're going to bang on about how you are not living you lives properly.

And, if you're not compliant enough, these splendid folk will campaign for the government to damn well make you do what they want you to do. Moreover, such wonderful people are not to be challenged - fussbuckets like Jamie Oliver are to be given acres of print and hours of sychophantic TV without ever once being challenged on the evidence for the fads and food fascism they're promoting (or indeed the way in which it's used to promote their latest money making scheme).

The little clip I linked to above isn't a debate (although Nick Ferrari does at least try) it's a love-in where a bunch of self-important semi-celebrities outbid eachother as to who can be the most illiberal, the most snobbish and the most patronising about poor people. There's an important debate to be had about diet, food and obesity but conducting it on the basis of "let's ban stuff" and "you'll all get heart disease and diabetes if you eat this stuff" is simply dreadful - especially when this is done without any evidence.

The problem is that the views of such folk - nasty and bigoted views about people not in their high society - influence the decisions made by politicians. We can see the trajectory, the slippery slope, towards advertising bans, sin taxes, mandated school dinners, forced reformulation and standardised packaging. Add in bans on new shops, the removal of shiny branded livery and restrictions on what can be sold to minors and we have the full agenda. Unless we shout at these fussbuckets, these health fascists, expect this to happen, expect a duller world made ever drearier by the pompous nonsense of great and good folk on TV.

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Sorry but smoking doesn't harm Gedling Council's reputation

Gedling Borough Council (it's in Nottinghamshire and Labour-controlled, since you ask) is proposing the further demonisation and stigmatising of its employees - the ones that smoke that is:

"Whilst at work, and so far as is reasonably practicable, employees who smoke in accordance with this policy should do so with their Gedling Borough Council uniform covered as not doing so may create a negative impression of the council when viewed by the public."

Since when did smoking give a negative impression of the Council? Since officious HR managers and self-righteous councillors started treating smokers like pariahs. Ever since the smoking ban in 2007 (and long before that in many councils) smokers have clustered round the doors, on windswept pavements and corners. I'm guessing this looks untidy to those officious managers and is accompanied by moans from other employees about smoking breaks (like those other workers don't use up Council time talking about their holidays, making tea or playing solitaire on the phone).

What this policy is about is the isolation of smokers - it is but a short step away from a man with a bell parading in front of them crying "unclean, unclean". No health purpose is served and it isn't about the Council's image - it's simply nannying fussbucketry, rules for the sake of rules. A much better approach would be to provide a shelter for staff that smoke perhaps with somewhere to sit away from the doorways where smokers currently clump. But that would be thoughtful and considerate - why would the Council want to treat smokers that way, they're smelly scum aren't they?
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Health fascism triumphant - liberty put into plain packs

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So there we are walking through Hull - I forget quite where but it doesn't matter - and, as was are wont, we were smoking. Anyway a young lad walks up to John de Forte waving a slightly scrunched fag.

"Gotta light mate?"  John looks at the child, snatches the cigarette from him and screws it up before throwing it to the ground where he stamped on it.

"Disgusting. Disgusting." Exclaimed John as he reached for his jacket pocket from which he brought out a packet of Capstan Full Strength. "That's not a cigarette. This is a cigarette."

That kid is either coughing his guts out on some council estate in Hull or else hasn't toughed tobacco since - kill or cure as John put it at the time. And the truth is that that child hadn't opted to smoke because of the shiny gold and silver packets. He smoked because his mum did or because all his mates did or because he thought it made him look tough.

Still the government has taken another step towards introducing plain packs for cigarettes. This is mostly because those nasty Labour people said we wouldn't do it not because it's a policy that has loads of public support. In the end it probably doesn't matter a great deal - smokers will go on smoking, kids will carry on trying a cigarette they nicked off their mum or a drag from the old brother.

Nevertheless the legions of health fascism will be raising their glasses of filtered water (or whatever it is that puritan teetotal fussbuckets drink these days) to Jane Ellison the Minister for Public Health. And this utterly illiberal measure - the stealing of someone's intellectual property for a supposed health benefit that simply doesn't exist. Put bluntly, plain packaging (rather like advertising bans and banning smoking in pubs) will not make a jot of different to either the prevalence of smoking or the propensity of children to take up smoking. There is precisely zero evidence showing that the suppression of brand advertising reduces aggregate consumption - whether we're talking about fags, booze or butterscotch.

The very worst thing about this is that we now have open season - every fussbucket with a cause (usually a state-funded cause) to plug will be out there calling for plain packaging for their chosen demon. Plain packs for booze, plain packs for burgers, plain packs for sugar...for sweets, for chocolate, for fizzy drinks...there really is no end to the things those hideous puritan teetotal fussbuckets don't want us to see. And stupid politicians - the ones like Jane Ellison with no spines - will skip around the health fascists cooing and purring because they're good at getting headlines on the BBC or in the Daily Mail.

It is depressing, sad and pathetic.

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Health fascists - unelected, unaccountable, interfering and after the food on your plate

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A great long list of 'experts' has written to the World Health Organisation (you know the folk who hold their meetings in secret in Moscow and talk more about e-cigs than epidemics) urging them to adopt the tobacco template for food:

The governance of food production and distribution cannot be left to economic interests alone. To achieve the necessary dietary improvements and to secure good population health, a set of policy options for healthy diets are required. This includes governments taking regulatory approaches to the operation of the market through, for example, restrictions on marketing to children, health claims, compositional limits on the saturated fat, added sugar and sodium content of food, removal of artificial trans fats, interpretative front-of-pack labelling, restaurant calorie labelling, fiscal measures and financial incentives, and public health impact assessments in trade and investment policies.

The authors of this letter - adherents to the church of public health in its fundamentalist form - believe that you and I cannot make the right choice. Or rather that the world is filled with gormless sheep who respond thoughtlessly to advertising - you dear reader are one of these, a victim of Big Food.

We'll leave aside that there is little or no evidence showing these actions will actually make a difference or indeed the fact that levels of obesity (in the UK at least) are falling not rising. Instead we'll are about the moral justification for such control. The argument is that better health requires those "necessary dietary improvements" and that people will not eat a good diet unless the government forces such a diet on them by force. And don't think that just because you're some sort of trendy foodie grazing on organic beefburgers and awesome street food - those things are just a loaded with fats, salt and sugar as McDonalds, Dominos and Mr Kipling's cakes.

Wrapped up as protecting our health, these people are proposing a controlled, licensed diet for us to eat. This would be regulated by government and dictated by the priests of the Church of Public Health. Restaurants will be closed, businesses will be broken, web sites will be blocked and children will be brainwashed with half-truths about nutrition. Self-righteous folk will imply that being slightly overweight is a waste of food and campaigners will start to define giving your child a chocolate bar or crisps as a treat as some sort of abuse.

And you know there's a much bigger problem.  There are still some 400 million or more people in the world who don't have enough to eat. It's that problem the WHO should be concerned with rather than the fast less significant issue of people in the UK, Europe and North America being a bit chubbier than they used to be. But the Church of Public Health isn't interested in third world starvation, malnutrition and disease but in controlling the lives of people in the developed world, in attacking 'consumerism' and in pretending that marketing is the problem when it isn't.

This health fascism has to end. Not because there aren't problems with obesity, diabetes and such but because it really is a matter of personal choice. Inform and educate by all means but stop with this idea that Big Food is somehow manipulating us into a diet that makes us fat. It isn't - we choose to eat that stuff because we like it. And the food industry makes that stuff because we like to eat it. We are consumers with real choice not hapless victims of Big Food's evil marketing wiles.

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Why I'm right to call them health fascists...

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Sometimes people suggest my description of the public health mafia as 'health fascists' is unfair. I really don't think so and here's why:

Reporters were forcibly removed and restrained Tuesday at the World Health Organization (WHO) meeting on tobacco control in Moscow.

Washington Times editorial writer Drew Johnson told The Daily Caller that he was physically escorted out of the meeting’s convention hall by a guard while another reporter was physically restrained from entering the room, even though WHO never formally voted to restrict the media from the event.

That's right folks. A publicly funded body excluded reporters (and for that matter members of the public) from a meeting to discuss imposing a tax.  Welcome to the world of public health, welcome to health fascism.

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Dr Sarah Wollaston and the "duty to intervene" - how health fascism works

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Dr Wollaston MP, il capo di tutti capi of nannying fussbucketry, who chairs the House of Commons Health Select Committee has called for laws to ban 'supersized foods':

“Supersized” food and drinks should be banned by law in a bid to combat Britain’s obesity epidemic, the new head of the Commons health select committee has said.

Now in one respect this is just another judgement on a particular type of food service - one that is most popular with ordinary folk who can't afford to pig out in Michelin starred restaurants. But the most disturbing aspect of Dr Wollaston's call wasn't that she wants a ban - such is the default position of nannying fussbuckets everywhere - but rather that the government has "a duty to intervene".

For a Conservative MP to set out such an argument is quite disturbing. For sure, we've had our flirtations with the intellectual underpinnings of fascism before but this is a disturbing rationale - government must intervene to stop people making a choice that may (or may not) have a negative impact on their health. The context for this is apparently:

"You go into the cinema and someone will ask if you want to supersize for an extra 20p - we don’t need that.”

Now apart from being surprised that anything at all in a cinema is priced as cheaply as 20p, this argument presupposes that people are mere automata programmed from childhood to exclaim 'yes, please' at every piece of marketing communications. Even offers mumbled at the buyer by a food service operative in a cinema queue.

Indeed, Dr Wollaston, in an indication as to the scale of her ignorance of how marketing works, has this to say:

“The scale of the marketing towards children of unhealthy foods is wholly unacceptable in my view given the scale of the problem."

This is straight from the Naomi Klein "brands-are-evil" playbook - again an odd position for an intelligent Conservative MP to adopt. We are to believe, Dr Wollaston says, that consumers are rendered incapable of choice when presented with the question 'would you like to supersize that?' or 'would you like a large one of those?' This reflects the infantilising of society by lawmakers - people aren't fat because of their own poor decision-making but because the marketing of food 'targets' them, 'forcing' them to consume 'unhealthy' products.

All this suggests that those people - the majority of people as it happens - who remain at a healthy weight are stoical ascetics. Or else (and I'm inclined to this view) Dr Wollaston and her fellow fussbuckets are peddling nonsense about the marketing of food.

So where does this 'duty to intervene' come from? It's clear that no such duty exists so what Dr Wollaston is saying is rather that she thinks only 'tough' measures such as bans can deal with the 'obesity crisis'. As I'm inclined to kindness in these things, I could say that Dr Wollston is befuddling her duty as a doctor to advise her patients with some sort of wider duty falling on the state. However, regardless of Dr Wollaston's motives, the result of setting out a concept such as a 'duty to intervene' is to redefine the role of the state, to turn its role from guarantor of rights and provider of services to a primary role of shaping society.

Which is why the term 'health fascist' is entirely appropriate to describe Dr Wollaston's position. The central tenet of fascism is that the state has a duty to change men so they serve the wider purpose of the nation - we are subservient to the needs of that state because it understands what is necessary to build the right kind of society. So it is with the 'duty to intervene' - people ordering 'supersized' boxes of popcorn are not merely damaging themselves, they also damage society by placing a 'cost' on us all. Such practices are decadent with the sin compounded by the suggestion that someone profits from making people eat larger portions.

So to put this right government has that 'duty to intervene'. The wider interests of society - defined with the term 'obesity epidemic' - are served by banning a person from entering freely into a contract with another person because the state has decided that large servings of fizzy-pop and popcorn are unhealthy.

This rejection of choice in a free society because of associated 'health risks' or the 'normalisation' of somet proscribed behaviour represents a degree of control and a justification on the basis of wider society's 'interests' that can only be described as fascist. Yet this health fascism - the view that bans and controls are needed because of the 'cost to society' - has become ever more common. That we are weak and make poor choices is undeniable and society should help us to deal with these problems but this does not justify saying that I cannot be allowed the option of a 'poor' choice. The former is good government, that latter health fascism.

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Health fascism on speed - the BMA votes to ban cigarettes (but not for everyone)

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When you were at school, you remember the swottish, science sorts who did all their homework, attended the extra revision classes and got top marks in everything? You know the ones who went on to medical school? Turns out they're pretty dumb after all - at least going by the latest utterly bonkers piece of health fascism proposed by the British Medical Association:

Delegates at the British Medical Association (BMA) annual conference voted in favour of a motion to prohibit smoking to anyone born after 2000.

Now the sharp-witted amongst you will have noted that this is a monumentally stupid idea. After all those people born in the 21st century aren't yet of an age to buy and consume tobacco products. Yet we are reminded that most smokers (nearly all of them I reckon) start smoking before they reach the age when they're actually allowed to smoke. And this means that they're getting cigarettes illicitly - either by the time-honoured method of lifting them from Mum's packet, buying them using false ID, asking someone to buy them for you or purchasing them from the bloke in the van who doesn't care about age, ID or much else.

Do these ever-so-clever doctors really think that anything will change? Except that smoking will become even more hidden and illicit than it is at the moment. From a product subject to quality control, regulation and licensing we will have moved to a product sold surreptitiously to young people in dark alleys - or else simply passed on by grandpa, mum and assorted aunts.

This is health fascism on speed - a sort of frantic, desperate, headline-grabbing proposal designed to give the impression of action rather than actually respond to the question (why do young people start smoking). And as Ian Dunt points out, this policy isn't about children at all:

...this policy, which is targeted at adults by definition, is being defended on the basis of what it would do to help children - the one group who would find themselves outside its remit.

But at least the lobby is finally daring to state its objective: the criminalisation of smoking. From now on, the debate is not about public health. It is about the rights of the individual against the frenzied paternalism of those who would interfere in other people's lives.

Everyone who smokes knows the risks. The health message has been banged into children almost from the day they walked into school - smoking kills you. That some people decide to smoke regardless of this risk says something about people but is a reminder that we all have choice in our lives. And if we choose - for hedonistic reasons - to do something dangerous that is, in the end, entirely our business.

Yet again we are reminded that the debate isn't about health but about control, about prohibition about other people deciding they know better how we should live our lives. This is the agenda of nannying fussbucketry, the manifesto of health fascism.

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Schools dinners aren't what's making children fat

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We're off again in the latest piece of ill-informed nannying fussbucketry about schools dinners.

Education secretary Michael Gove will unveil a crackdown on fatty and sweet foods on Tuesday as part of new standards on school meals.

Milk must also be available to primary and secondary pupils during the school day under the new rules which come into force in January.

Pupils will only be offered two portions of deep-fried, battered and breadcrumb-coated foods each week under the rules outlined by Gove.

Pastry-based dishes will be subject to the same restrictions, schools will be completely banned from offering chocolate and confectionery in canteens and tuck shops, and salt will not be available for pupils to add to food after it is cooked.

This is a compete triumph for the worrywarts at the School Food Trust as a bunch of professional health fascists get to determine the menu for school dinners. And the saddest part of this is that all this unjustified interference won't make the slightest jot of difference to levels of obesity in children. I know this because it's not the school dinners that make the children fat, it's all the stuff they cram in their mouths during the rest of the day. No, not fast food but crisps, sweets, cakes - the contents of Mum's cupboard - that is the problem (and I'm accepting the 'official' view that childhood obesity is at 'epidemic' levels despite the rates actually falling).

Children are fed just one meal each day by the school. And the contents of that meal (assuming it's not actively poisonous) is, if children are eating three meals each day, less than a quarter of the food those children eat. Not a single child will get slimmer because of this intervention and some may, as the dinner becomes less calorific, actually suffer because that calorie rich dinner is the only decent meal they'll get that day.

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Today's health fascism starts with the international not the local

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Two things strike me about this report - the first is that it was entirely predictable once some idiot decided plain packs for cigarettes was a good idea:

Food packaging should include pictures of the damage obesity can cause health, similar to those on cigarette packets, campaigners said today.

Experts have urged governments across the world to tackle the obesity epidemic by regulating the food industry along the same lines as the tobacco industry.

Despite there being precious little evidence showing this works, the health fascists are all over the idea of getting stuck into the food business - advertising bans, sugar taxes, regulating salt content, banning trans fats and mandating scary images on packaging.

However, my second observation is rather more significant - the groups promoting health fascism no longer target national governments. Instead they focus on less publicised, more malleable international agencies and especially the World Health Organisation.

The CI and WOF will officially launch their recommendations for a Global Convention to protect and promote healthy diets at the World Health Assembly in Geneva this week.

They will call on governments to commit to a raft of policy measures designed to help people make healthier lifestyle choices.

The aim of this programme is to get changes through the back door - they want, through the auspices of the WHO, to have a 'framework convention' that is similar to those on tobacco products. This allows them, and their allies, to begin the process of browbeating national governments into implementing the raft of regulations proposed in their reports. Just as with tobacco, we'll be told there's a 'treaty obligation' (there is nothing of the sort) which means we have to move towards tighter regulation. And, of course, thise will reduce obesity (it won't, of course).

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Quote of the day: on public health...

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From Chris Snowdon:

It cannot be said too many times that 'public health' is not about health. It is a political movement aimed at state control of individuals and markets. Look at the Lancet's manifesto for 'planetary health'. Look at the European Public Health Alliance's manifesto. Follow people like Richard Horton, Martin McKee and John Ashton on Twitter. If you can bear and afford it, read Gerard Hastings' book. It is not about health, it is about pushing an unelectable, economically illiterate political agenda through the backdoor. 

The rest of the article is excellent - do read it and share it.

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Curing the working classes of their sins is now official Labour policy

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It has been a very long time since the Labour Party I see across the chamber in Bradford had a working class majority. Gradually - to the point of exclusion now - the Party has become home to an assorted collection of mostly middle class worrywarts. Most of these are public sector employees of one sort or another, certainly the links to private enterprise, small business and entrepreneurship are vanishingly small (although it's interesting to note that a third or more of Bradford's Labour Councillors are private landlords).

This takeover of the Labour Party by people whose day jobs are to patronise the working classes means that the policy agenda throws up stuff like this:

Ed Miliband plans to impose tough restrictions on the sale and advertising of alcohol, junk food and tobacco if he wins power, it was claimed.

The Labour leader’s plan would end the £300million sports sponsorship by drinks firms and impose minimum alcohol pricing to try cut down on the damaging effects of heavy drinking on people’s health.

The blueprint, revealed in documents leaked to the Mail on Sunday, also proposes new laws to limit the amount of sugar, fat and salt in food aimed at children, and a ban on advertising unhealthy products on TV before the 9pm watershed. 

This is the authentic voice of the nannying fussbucket, a sort of health fascism that sees the lifestyle choices of the working classes as sins. People are not to be allowed choice about products that their masters deem to be unhealthy or socially problematic. The four great vices of the working man - drinking, smoking, fast women and slow horses - are to be discouraged, banned, limited and controlled for the good of those men.

This is the logic of Titus Salt - alcohol, gambling and such were denied to his workforce (all wreathed in a fog of non-conformist Christianity) while Titus could serve fine wines at dinner and attend the races without fear of retribution. This is the damnation of the pauper revisited, a return to those 19th Century campaigns for assorted prohibitions and behavioural controls.

The Labour Party was created to promote an economic message, a message of liberation and freedom for the working classes. It's true the party always had a 'know-everything' tendency best typified by the racist, anti-Semitic, eugenicist Fabian Movement of the Webbs, G B Shaw and H G Wells. But this was swamped by more practical men and women from real working class backgrounds who saw improving the lot of workers as the essential mission of the party.

All this has gone now but for little angry echoes. Today the Labour Party is the party of the middle class public sector worker, its ranks filled with social workers, teachers, community workers and so forth - plus a smattering of social science and arts academics. And its policies reflect the prejudices of these people and their unwavering belief in Douglas Jay's dictum that the man in Whitehall (or the town hall or the ivory towers of ex-polytechnic academe) really does know best what is good for the working classes.

So in an age of austerity Labour want to control the little pleasures of the ordinary men and women it claims to care about. Labour want to make those little pleasures more expensive, harder to obtain or, in some cases, impossible to get at all (unless you're on the sort of wage that MPs or top social workers can command). All because these self-appointed experts with their pseudo-science believe they can cure the working classes of their sins.

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A Manifesto for Health Fascism

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The Lancet, once a respected medical publication but now a cheerleader for New Puritanism, has put out what it calls a 'manifesto for planetary health'. It is a comprehensive presentation of Health Fascism and we should thank The Lancet for publishing since we are now much clearer what we are fighting against.

This manifesto for transforming public health calls for a social movement to support collective public health action at all levels of society - personal, community, national, regional, global, and planetary. Our aim is to respond to the threats we face: threats to human health and wellbeing, threats to the sustainability of our civilisation, and threats to the natural and human-made systems that support us.

The authors move on to present the usual litany of 'progressive' political tenets - overconsumption, environmental catastrophe, inequality and rejection of 'unconstrained progress'. And we get the most bizarre of paragraphs capturing the mission of this Health Fascism:

An urgent transformation is required in our values and our practices based on recognition of our interdependence and the interconnectedness of the risks we face. We need a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at all levels of society and a new principle of planetism and wellbeing for every person on this Earth - a principle that asserts that we must conserve, sustain, and make resilient the planetary and human systems on which health depends by giving priority to the wellbeing of all. All too often governments make commitments but fail to act on them; independent accountability is essential to ensure the monitoring and review of these commitments, together with the appropriate remedial action.

What we have here is a proposal that denies any individual or personal choice - it is subsumed into the 'wellbeing of all', a well-being that isn't determined through markets or even government but via an unspecified 'independent accountability'. We can only assume that the "special part to play" that our authors ascribe to 'public health' is to provide that 'independent accountablity' and 'remedial action' - regardless of the democratic choices made by people and the politicians they elect.

Others have pointed out that better health is a consequence of our civilisation - we live longer, happier and healthier lives because of that evil capitalism and wicked neoliberalism. For me there is a much more fundamental issue here - I am not (and neither are you) a part in some societal machine run by great minds. I am a free man with free will and the chance to make my own choices, good or bad. This manifesto would deny me that choice.

It is truly the Manifesto for Health Fascism.

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Health Fascism - the new normal for public health

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Today marks a new low - we've got used to the endless dribble of health scare stories in the media but there has been a shift. Where response was once left up to our judgement - if the Daily Mail told us some bloke in a white coat had found that bacon causes cancer we were left with a choice of whether to ignore his advice. Now though, officialdom throws out misinformation, scares and exaggeration in order to prosecute their philosophy - I've called them nannying fussbuckets for some while now but this no longer fits, it's too friendly, too cuddly.

These people are fascists. Health Fascists.

Here's today's selection of their health fascism:

The winner is Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer with another demand for sugar taxes based on the complete fiction that "overweight is seen as the norm". Perhaps she can explain that to this woman who was told she was 'obese' by Dame Sally's cohorts.

Not content with talking rubbish about obesity, Dame Sally then launched into an idiotic attack on soap operas. Apparently there's too much drinking:

Hard-drinking soap characters offer an "irresponsible" portrayal of excessive alcohol consumption, according to the Chief Medical Officer for England

Elsewhere we've got:

The doctor who thinks e-cigarettes are like methadone. Seriously.

Or the people who want to ban cigarettes for everyone born after 2000 - which means come the end of this decade some adults can buy fags and some can't. These people are barking mad.

Still we can rely on academia to provide some bad research. Like that showing e-cigs don't aid quitting.

Plus public health people complaining because Council's have directed public health spending into things like reducing road accidents, improving air quality, reducing excess winter deaths in the elderly and improving food safety education or enforcement. Aren't all these things actually public health? It appears the doctors don't think so.

Health fascism everywhere you look. For public health it's the new normal.

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In which I angrily disassociate myself from most Tory MPs

"It's for the children" they cry and reel out carefully pre-packaged statistics showing how millions of kids are killed, maimed, left with brain damage and generally corrupted by their mum or dad having the occasional gasper whilst fighting the traffic on the school run. So-called facts are wheeled out about how smoke inside a car is so very much more damaging than any other sort of smoke resulting in ugly, pasty-faced children who fail all their maths exams.

And MPs clamber onto a bandwagon constructed from these lies - I guess if enough lie tissue is laid down it results in a solid structure ideal for politicians to demonstrate how much they care about "the children". These self-serving MPs then pontificate, nay compete, about how much they care, about how "the time is right" despite knowing the law is virtually unenforceable and utterly pointless. Indeed one such idiot MP - the public health minister no less - even said that it doesn't matter that the law can't be enforced.

This is bonkers. A sort of post-modern demon has captured the minds of our MPs and twisted them to believe that passing unenforceable, divisive and ugly laws is somehow a good thing - "for the children". These bizarre human beings, trapped in the glamour of a local paper headline, argue that banning smoking in cars will somehow change behaviour and that will be all fine and hunky-dory.

What we'll actually see is that nice middle-class mums and dads won't smoke in their cars (mostly because very few of them actually smoke) whereas the same people who use mobiles phones on the move, don't make sure their kids wear seatbelts (or indeed wear on themselves) and have been known to drive along with a five-year old on their lap - these people will carry right on smoking.

The people who voted for this have voted to open a new avenue for health fascism. It will be only a short time before social housing landlords are urged to ban smoking in their homes. And when they don't a law will be passed banning such smoking - housing officers will become like sniffer dogs hounding ordinary folk to the edge of despair for the terrible crime of having a fag while watching the late night movie on a Friday night.

And then we'll get the ban on smoking in houses - any houses - with children. Granting the health fascists right to smash into your privacy - "for the children".

There is no defence, no justification, no sense to this proposal yet nearly 400 of our MPs cheerfully voted for the amendment. And they did so knowing they could brag about how much they care - "for the children" you know, "for the children".

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'They don't have right to tells us what we can feed our son' - more school-based health fascism

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Schools are getting ever more assertive about the contents of lunchboxes but this particular piece of health fascism from Colnbrook C of E Primary School near Slough rather takes the biscuit:

A six-year-old boy who went to school with a bag of Mini Cheddars in his packed lunch has been suspended for four days after teachers said it contravened its healthy eating policy.

That's right folks, this school deprived a six-year-old of four days education because his mum put some snack biscuits in his lunchbox.

And the school's excuse, you wonder?

'We cannot talk about individual circumstances, but there is one family who are not prepared to support the policy.

'We are in discussions with them about how we move it forward. We have excluded [the pupil] for four days due to lack of support for the policy.

'It is to avoid putting the children in a difficult situation. If the policy is not being abided by, then that potentially harms that pupil.'

We get the classic line of refusing to comment 'on individual cases' and a reiteration of the ghastly fascism of this food policy. The scale of ignorance about nutrition and belief that the school can railroad over parental choice in such a cavalier manner makes this an exceptional piece of crass nannying fussbucketry.

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Health fascism - coming to a school near you.

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I posted an example from Canada the other day. Well this is closer to home - in Essex:

Please do not put any drink other than water in your child's packed lunch box as they will not be able to drink it at school. 

And, whereas the Canadians landed parents with a fine ($5 per sin) this school simply snatches the carton of juice from the child's hands:

Carly Nunn, 26, claimed her five-year-old daughter, Teagan, had her drinks snatched by a dinner lady.

She said: "She put a straw in the carton and took one sip and it was taken off her and put in the bin.

"The next day, I put it in a bottle, but it was tipped onto the table to check the colour." 

Such a caring, encouraging and supportive environment. One parent who complained got this:

 "We spoke to the head about it and she just offered us a transfer form." 

 And why is the school behaving so badly? Other than because they are a bunch of nannying fussbuckets it appears that they want to win a prize:

In a letter to parents, headteacher Elizabeth Chaplin said the new rule was part of a campaign to win a London Healthy Schools Award. 

Awful. Indefensible. But this school is not alone.

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Passive vaping and New York's health fascism

I wrote about some emerging research showing no link between passive smoking and lung cancer:

The article describes a large prospective study that "confirmed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer but found no link between the disease and secondhand smoke." 

And, in writing about this I noting that the authors were back-pedalling rapidly on the reasons for smoking bans - 'denormalising' smoking rather than protecting health.

Today, in a development that further reveals the willingness of the Church of Public Health to act without evidence, New York City Council is deciding whether to apply the same controls to e-cigarettes as apply to regular cancer sticks:

In late November, a month after banning the sale of the devices to people under 21, the City Council surprised the sector by introducing a bill that would treat electronic cigarettes like their tobacco counterparts, prohibiting use in restaurants, bars, workplaces and even parks.

There is no evidence to support the main contention of the ban's proponents - vaping looks like smoking so will act to promote the latter. Nor is there evidence that there are any significant health risks that result from vaping let alone from 'passive vaping'. But this doesn't stop New York's nanny-in-chief:

At a recent public hearing of the bill, Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley challenged the notion that e-cigs are healthier than tobacco smokes...

Dr Farley knows this is a lie, just as the tobacco controllers have known since the day they proposed smoking bans that passive smoking is at worst a very minor risk factor in lung cancer. What is even worse is that, by effectively banning vaping, New York will remove the incentive for smokers to switch to less harmful e-cigs. And that means more deaths.

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