"Aren't all these kids supposed to be fat?" Why the Government's child obesity strategy is wrong

Every lunchtime Parkside school opens its gates and disgorges starving pupils onto the streets of our village. Long queues form outside the chip shop and the butcher - wise locals hunker down until these hungry young people are gone. A day or two ago, someone commented to me about these queues - "you know," she said, "aren't these kids all supposed to be fat?"

Indeed, to listen to the fussbuckets we put in charge of our health services and the media who, without even a glance at any actual evidence, publish those folks' nannying proposals, you'd think that near every child was a barely mobile lard-bucket unable to do anything but plonk before a screen. The truth - at least from watching those queues is that you've got to work pretty hard to find a fat child. I'm sure they're there, just as they were there when I was at school. I'm even prepared to believe that, like the population in general, there are more chubby kids than back in the 1970s (when, incidentally, we consumed more sugar than we do today). But it doesn't look like a crisis to me.

All this hasn't stop a host of fussbuckets, urged on by a couple of celebrity chefs with brands to promote and books to sell, from deciding that they know better - either by targeting so-called "junk" food or else by creating a moral panic about the food industry. At the heart of all this is the idea that parents - especially working-class parents - are unable to resist promotions:

"It is near impossible to shield children from exposure to unhealthy foods"

So says Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health. Let's examine this little sentence and extract its meaning. Firstly is creates the idea of an 'unhealthy food' when this is an entirely evidence-free assertion - there are no unhealthy foods, only unhealthy diets. Secondly, the statement exploits our innate desire to protect children - "shield" suggests that the child will be damaged by the very act of seeing a chocolate bar, a fizzy drink or a burger. Yet all these things are both pleasurable and healthy, consumed without risk by children and adults most of whom are not obese.

I try to understand why it is that we've created this moralistic stampede about eating? Part of me suspects that it's influenced by upper middle class snobbery about food, typified by David Cameron's old advisors Camilla Cavendish and Claire Foges. But there has to be more - as consumers we look for excuses to explain away what we think are poor choices. The result is the overuse of words like 'addiction' to describe a lack of willpower rather than a pathological condition. Plus, of course, the belief that we wouldn't have bought all that chocolate, eaten all that pizza, stuffed our faces with cake if it hadn't have been for capitalism and its evil minion advertising.

When we see the countline bars lined up by the checkout, we know exactly what the retailer is doing. That shops wants to upsell us, add a little more value to the purchase we're making - essentially free margin. If we succumb, it is not because the retailer has made us buy but because we've made a choice to add that Snickers to our shopping basket. Thousands of other customers successfully ignore the line up of sweet goodies and negotiate their purchase without adding a bag of doughnuts.

This doesn't stop the fussbuckets - "...parents find offers for sugary sweets and snacks at checkouts annoying" says Jeremy Hunt. I beg to differ. If parents really were annoyed then there'd be enough consumer pressure on the retailers to change the practice - that they haven't tells me that parents are only 'annoyed' when some poll asks whether they are annoyed.

The same goes for advertising. It's an easy target. You've heard it said - "if advertising didn't work, they wouldn't spend so much money on it. It's common sense that advertising bans will work." Not only is this a complete misunderstanding of what "works" means for the advertiser but it also raises some profound questions about whether we should ever be justified in banning commercial speech for entirely healthy products. It bears repeating that advertising doesn't act to raise aggregate demand either across the economy as a whole or for individual categories of good (even "addictive" ones like tobacco, beer and sugar).

Advertising works by maintaining or increasing levels of market share - we don't buy bread because of an advert featuring Haworth Main Street to the strains of Dvorak, we might buy Hovis because of that advert. When you see the Rolex advert on the Wimbledon scoreboard, you are reminded of the brand and, when you next buy a wristwatch, might consider that brand. And when Tony the Tiger roars "they're grrreat" in a Frosties advert, he's increasing the chances of you buying Frosties rather than competing products promoted by cartoon monkeys or large yellow monsters. Banning advertising serves no purpose other than to say "look we've done something" and, the more of it we ban, the more we undermine the media that require the advertising to keep afloat.

If there's a child obesity crisis (and I'm completely unconvinced) then we should look at why this is happening rather than lollop about bashing things to make us look popular - sales promotions, advertising, calorie information, cartoon characters. Let's ask some sensible questions instead like:

Why, when average calorie intake in the UK has fallen, are we on average heavier?

What has changed in every day environments that may contribute to this increase in average weight (hint - it's not advertising, checkout promotions, two-for-one offers or cartoon characters as these were all around when we were skinnier)?

What aspects of consumer behaviour have changed over this time - more eating out, grazing not set meals, time-pressured working women?

When we look at the reduction in smoking - in health terms a far more serious issue than a modest increase in obesity - the two factors that seem to be most important are good quality health information (today everybody knows smoking is bad for your health) and price. It seems to me that making food more expensive wouldn't be popular - VAT on food anyone - which is why we have this idea of 'good' and 'bad' foods. The problem is that taxing foods high in fat, sugar and salt either runs the risk of clobbering everything but leaf vegetables and chicken or else leads to substitution (if you can't get your calories from Mr Kipling's cakes, you get them from Mr Warburton's bread).

This leaves us with public information - telling people what a healthy, balanced lifestyle means and allowing them to make choices armed with this knowledge. This worked for smoking, has largely worked for alcohol and could have the same impact on diet. The problem is that a great deal of the anti-obesity campaigns are driven by low carb cranks rather than by seeking a consensus view from dietitians. I suspect, however, that this advice should boil down to: eat regular meals, avoid snacking, have a balanced diet including meat, veg and stodge, don't eat too many sweets. Essentially what our mums told us back in the 1970s.

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Judgmental, immoral fussbuckets - an everyday tale of NHS management

This is, quite simply, wrong. Not wrong as in 'incorrect' but wrong as in 'immoral and indefensible':

Patients who smoke will be breathalysed to check they have given up before being referred, while those who are obese must lose 10 per cent of their weight.

Doctors claimed it was the latest example of rationing which is becoming 'more commonplace' across the NHS. The two trusts, East and North Hertfordshire and Herts Valleys Clinical Commissioning Groups, are trying to save £68 million this year.

Any patient who is obese – with a body mass index above 30 – will have to shed at least 10 per cent of their body weight before being referred for non-urgent surgery.

I know there are pressures on the NHS but singling out lifestyle choices for exclusion is not how we should respond to a lack of cash. Imagine for a moment that it's your Dad who's been told he has to quit smoking in order to have a hip operation or you Mum they're telling to lose a stone before they do her cateract operation. The people proposing these things - just to save a bit of cash - are ghastly, self-centred and uncaring, yet we're told every day how wonderful the NHS is and how it's employees are living saints. This proposal proves - once again - that the service is filled with judgemental fussbuckets.

It is time the Government put an end to NHS Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups implementing these policies.

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Obesity strategies ignore obese people

Some time around 1990 I was involved in some work for Bradford Health Authority that touched on the use of data to improve the impact of public health messaging - we were looking mostly at HIV/AIDS and diabetes. The difficulty for the health authorities came when we pointed out that AIDS really wasn't an 'all population' risk except in the very broadest of definitions. There were some groups in Bradford - gay men, intravenous drug users, African immigrants - where the risks were far higher. We suggested profiling and targeting so as to get the best value from the limited pubic health funding available (especially since there were extensive national media information campaigns about AIDS at the time). This was rejected because of 'stigma' or a risk of being perceived as racist or homophobic.

The consequence of this refusal to use profiling is a belief that, not only are the risks equal across society, but that public health strategies should be directed to the whole population regardless of the truth about those risks. This 'whole population' approach has been widely debunked with alcohol consumption (although its advocates continue to use models to pretend that the merest sip of the demon drink lead inevitably to ill health) and we see it also with obesity where the public health focus is on what they call Tier One Intervention - stressing the 'social determinants of health'.

With obesity, the result is that health funding is directed primarily to seeking behavioural change in the whole population - weighing children, getting shouty chefs to bang on about school dinners, browbeating restaurants to make portions smaller or offer salad, banning kebab shops anywhere near children and getting Lucozade to make their core product taste awful. This is despite the fact that 95% of the population isn't facing any serious health risk from our weight. We use 'scare statistics' about how two-thirds are 'obese or overweight' and then illustrate this with images of a 25 stone person rather than the reality that 'overweight' (BMI 26-30) really isn't anything that 'a little more exercise and fewer puddings' wouldn't sort out and probably isn't unhealthy either.

At this point the Guardian notices that the UK, compared to other places, doesn't do much bariatric surgery on obese people:

What’s going on? The procedure is the most effective way of helping people who are obese to lose weight and can have a radical impact on their quality of life. At approximately £6,000 per operation, it’s relatively cheap and saves the NHS significant amounts of money on more expensive procedures such as hip and knee replacements further down the line. But here in Britain, it is being reserved only for the most extreme cases.

This situation is entirely a consequence of stressing Tier One rather than looking at higher tiers. You could call this 'fat shaming' but I prefer to call it massively stupid public policy. There are around 5% of the population with a serious, health-threatening weight problem but public health is too busy making out that obesity is the biggest health problem in society (and getting schools to write unpleasant letters to parents about their children's weight) to do its job of helping those people who really do have a problem with their weight.

None of this Tier One effort makes a blind bit of difference to levels of morbid obesity. If you take the sugar out of fizzy pop, obese people just switch to another calorie-loaded drink or food. Campaigns about fizzy pop, pizza or burgers result in thin people changing their diets (and talking endless rubbish about 'low carb' or 'clean diet') but do not look at the reasons why some people - maybe one in 20 - are very fat. And the same goes for exercise - it's probably a good thing that active living promotions have helped shift a further 3-4% of the population into regular (the approved 30 minutes a day) physical activity but it isn't working for the 50% of folk who do next to no exercise.

For all that the NHS bosses say obesity is their number one priority, we see that actually doing something to help people who really are obese isn't included within that prioritisation. Instead we get an increasing pile of pointless and intrusive fussbucketry masquerading as an 'obesity strategy'. While all this righteous lecturing about food (and attempts to make out that it's not fat people's fault that they're fat by blaming the food industry) is going on, the option of targeting efforts on the very obese is ignored. Public health wants to change the behaviour of the whole society - despite most folk's behaviour not seriously risking their health - rather than help the people who, for whatever reason, are riskily overweight. It's perhaps time we started talking about the problem - and helping those with it - rather than making up a sort of moral panic about lots of people being a few pounds heavier than they used to be.

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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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Voluntary bans - smoking and the power of tutting!

Oxford City Council has just rolled out its 'voluntary ban' on smoking in children's play areas across all of its 87 such places. This follows a three month trial in three parks. The coverage reports that stickers have been placed at the sites advising parents not to smoke - for the sake of the children, of course, because ASH have said that second-hand smoke is bad. Even on a windy September morning. And even when the playground is a few yards from a busy road filled will fume-spewing diesel motor vehicles.

This is a voluntary ban as the resident fussbucket (or, if you prefer, Council Board Member for Leisure, Parks and Sport) puts it:

"It's something we need to keep an eye on.

"I don't think a PSPO is necessary at the moment; it's just asking people to respect other users and respect the children playing."

A bit of a warning there, I suspect, as the councillor invokes the "do as you're told citizens or we'll have to take sterner action" approach that we love so much. Right now the signs have all the enforcement power of tutting and a bit of side-eye and, I guess, the Council wants to enlist the self-appointed school gate enforcement team.

Most parents will probably abide by the advice, mostly for the sake of a quiet life, but I think the response from one hints at a growing appreciation of the smoking issue:

Alex Thomas, a father-of-three from Botley, said: "I suspect it's a good idea in terms of encouraging children not to see smokers as a norm."

But the 34-year-old said he 'wouldn't mind' if he saw people smoking in play areas, adding: "I think it's entirely their right.

"There are enough places smokers aren't allowed to smoke and if a parent needs a cigarette to get through an hour in the playground on a cold November day, fair enough."

Well said Alex. Shame that public health bosses seem unable to summon anything like this degree of respect for other humans.

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Brexit, fussbucketry and being a Tory - top posts of 2016

In a fit of indulgence I thought I'd revisit my most popular postings of 2016. You never know with this sort of review, something might pop up, some sort of revelation. Probably not.

The top two posts, unsurprisingly, are about the EU referendum - firstly back in February when I invoked Don Quixote and talked of my scepticism:

I am a genuine sceptic in all this. I don't really believe in ever more draconian immigration controls, I don't want a sort of pseudo-fascist isolationist approach to the economy for that is lunacy. And I absolutely believe that the EU has played a role (albeit a smaller one than its vanity permits) in securing peace and harmony on what was a divided continent. So I ought to be a supporter of the EU except for a couple of real problems.

As the actual referendum campaign hotted up, I returned again to the problems as I saw them (referencing Jonathan Swift's flying island of Laputa this time):

In one respect it is quite sweet that so many very clever people cluster around the EU's court. Like every other bunch of courtiers throughout history, these people mostly believe (when they've finished chasing consultancy contracts, speaking engagements, advisor positions and policy jobs) that there really is no alternative to the world in which they live, they develop a sort of strabimus with one eye gazing into their narrow little world while the other swivels frantically searching for ever grander ideas of union, collaboration and co-operation. We're told these people are the bright ones, the 'experts', yet they are - quite literally - ignorant of the lives, loves, aspirations and hopes of the people who are supposed to be their bosses.

For me these statements are at the heart of why Remain lost. In the first, I was there to gained as a supporter - all they had to do was explain how the EU could reform in the direction of openness and freedom. The second explains why: the advocates of the EU were too wrapped up in now, in their schemes and plots, to engage with a million plus sceptics who were there to be persuaded. In the end I voted to leave and, given what's been revealed since, I think I made the right choice:

It is rather about whether or not you and I can, if we're angry enough, get up from our armchairs, turn the telly off, go down to the village hall, and vote the bastards out. It's not our country we want back, it's our rights. Or rather the most important right of all - the right to overthrow the government and stick in a new one.

You're welcome to disagree with me even to the extent of shouting abuse but if you try to use bureaucracy and legalistic legerdemain to thwart the decision of 23 June then you are no different or better than those alt-right authoritarians you despise so much:

Although with their talk of populism and nativism these Remainers want to portray the leave voter as the nascent authoritarian, the truth is quite the opposite. Remainers now consider that the ordinary voter cannot be entrusted with the future of the nation, this future should be in the hands of people who know, the experts. The idea of representative democracy is acceptable but only if it produces a result that allows the Remainer great and good to continue dictating the direction of policy.

Which brings us to the direction of policy where it's no surprise that most of those irritated - even angered - by the fussbucketry of public health were leave voters.

Public health is an ideology of control not a healthcare programme. It dulls the senses of health management by suggesting their inevitable cost pressures will be relieved by patients embracing an approved lifestyle that eliminates the risks contributing to the growing number of people living with chronic conditions like type-2 diabetes. Above all public health represents a crusade to promote a moral and righteous life to the populace - don't smoke, don't drink, don't stay up late, do the right amount of exercise, eat the right diet, avoid salt and sugar. This lifestyle is promoted through the use of public funds to appeal, on one hand, to our fear of mortality through talk of cancer, heart attacks and dementia, while simultaneously suggesting that beautiful, successful people adhere to this stultifying, dull set of consumption behaviours. Across all this runs the argument that, if we want our children to be one or those beautiful, successful people - or even to live - then they mustn't be exposed to these sins of diet or pleasure.

It's not just this nannying of grown-ups of course but an attitude to childhood that leads of seemingly every possible risk being banned or hidden from children:

Instead we see people who behave like the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - corralling children into a dull, purposeful programme of approved activities monitored by the agents of those authorities. Much of the effort here is dedicated to creating obedient little unchallenging conformists. And what we create are a bunch of snowflakes who demand safe spaces, who cry at criticism and who would rather ban free speech than accept that some people are unpleasant or rude. Disagreement is dealt with not through a handshake and "we'll talk about this again" but by one or other party running off to cuddle a teddy bear while listening to calming whale sounds.

I discovered the origins of the word snob the other day - interesting how it shifted from the subject of disdain to the person doing the disdaining. And public health folk have snobbery in spades - the plebs aren't able to decide for themselves:

If public health campaigners really cared about people's wellbeing they'd ask why it is that poor people die younger. They'd wonder why the single mum overeats, the unemployed twenty-something smokes and the old soldier drinks rather than simply trying to nudge them out of these habits with the policy equivalent of a baseball bat. But these public health fanatics don't ask these questions, they just ban stuff, control stuff, lecture, nanny and fuss. Public health campaigning isn't about health, it's about the snobbish promotion of a lifestyle set by passionless middle-class puritans.

Thanks for reading - especially the dedicated few who keep posting comments even though I'm crap at responding - and remember that, for the Kippers and libertarians trying to claim me as one of theirs, I'm just a regular sort of Tory.

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What obesity strategies - if we have to have one - should look like.

I'm not sure we need an obesity strategy but I also know I'm in a minority on this issue. The cohorts of fussbucketry have crowded out much that is sensible (by which I mean informed by evidence) in public health so we're going to have such a strategy. And in Bradford it's going to cost you £2 million or so each and every year.

So, in the interests of getting a strategy that isn't infomed by nagging the hell out of everyone, here's how the Mayor of Oklahoma City did it:

On January 1, 2012, five years after he received national attention for challenging his city to go on a joint diet, he announced they’d hit their weight loss goal: A total of 47,000 residents had together achieved the mayor’s goal of shedding 1 million pounds, registering their achievements on the campaign’s site, "This City Is Going On A Diet."

The success came because of a massive public awareness campaign that educated and encouraged citizens to eat fewer fried foods and more fresh produce, and more importantly, a collective goal that spurred competition among local employers and businesses. The mayor, whose weight once fell in the obese range, lost 40 pounds himself. The CEO of Taco Bell even flew in to discuss how to steer people to the low-fat "fresco" side of the chain’s menu.

And this successful approach is being followed up with a strategy that aims to promote physical activity - not sports but just moving around more:

Partly using proceeds from a one-penny sales tax passed in late 2009, it’s now in the process of making a slate of improvements, including a 70-acre park that will link the city’s downtown with the Oklahoma River, a new streetcar line and river kayaking facility, a senior wellness center, and hundreds of miles of jogging, walking, and biking trails. It’s also making sure there are gyms in all grade schools and is narrowing all the downtown streets to add trees to wider, more pedestrian-friendly sidewalks.

Much better than banning fast food shops, soda taxes or obsessing about weighing five-year-olds.

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The triumph of fussbucketry...

So it's the AGM of the Local Government Association (LGA) and, having done the regular stuff of AGMs like electing the committee and approving the accounts we get a motion. It's about public health. And it explains why the fussbuckets are triumphant.

The content of the motion itself was pretty anodyne - along the lines that public health is a jolly good thing and we need more of it. But it's when you discover just what more public health means the the hackles rise and the blood temperature lifts. For by public health they don't mean the sort of things public health should be about - air quality, clean water, immunisation and so forth - but rather they want to spend more time telling you and me that our lifestyle is wrong. More importantly these fussbuckets - we heard from a Cambridgeshire Liberal Democrat, a Hertfordshire Tory and a Boltonian Labourite - want to tell people who eschew right behaviours, mostly ignorant people from the lower classes if I'm translating the rhetoric correctly, that this won't do.

In his summation the Liberal Democrat (in that rejection of liberalism and democracy typical of the sort) frowningly commented that telling people you didn't approve of their lifestyle choices wasn't conducive to getting their vote. But of course - for those poor deluded commoners - it was essential that the error of their ways is made clear and they are nudged, bullied and pressured into the approved and incredibly boring lifestyle our abstemious councillors commend. To my shame I didn't say anything - I probably should have done - but I would have been a solitary voice in a sea of fussbucketry, a torrent of approving hands gleefully voting to nanny the hell out of ordinary folk who want to smoke, drink, vape and eat kebabs.

This is what we are contending with. Local government has always attracted the busybody, the sort of person who doesn't just think he or she knows what's good for you and I but is absolutely convinced of the utter rightness of their superiority. Fussbucketry comes easy to too many local councillors - using planning rules to ban fast food shops, imposing meat-free Mondays on bin men or spending public funds on inaccurate infographic posters lecturing us about obesity. So, having got the public health budgets from the NHS, it's inevitable that some councillors will splash this money about imposing their boring, fun-free, new puritan worldview on the poor unsuspecting public.

And the excuse? All this will save money for the NHS. As the Liberal Democrat councillors said "there are too many sick people" and most of this sickness can be 'prevented' - I'm guessing because people eat sugar, put salt on their chips, drink more than one small glass of sherry a week, and don't spend two hours jogging every day. So we should invest in 'prevention' - and let me remind you that this is 'prevention':

...it is aggressively assertive, pursuing symptomless individuals and telling them what they must do to remain healthy. Occasionally invoking the force of law (immunizations, seat belts), it prescribes and proscribes for both individual patients and the general citizenry of every age and stage. Second, preventive medicine is presumptuous, confident that the interventions it espouses will, on average, do more good than harm to those who accept and adhere to them. Finally, preventive medicine is overbearing, attacking those who question the value of its recommendations.

Even worse prevention may be better than cure when it comes to personal health but it's the very opposite of a cure when it comes to the finances of our health system. Our success in preventing the quick, painful and relative youthful deaths of times past means that we've replaced it with gradual, less painful, and incredibly expensive slow death. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that our average life expectancy is pushing 80 and that plenty of people are leading happy, healthy and active lives into their 90s. But this doesn't save a single farthing in NHS spending and, in truth, represents the dominant reason for the financial pressures on the health system.

Despite this fussbucketry has triumphed. We can expect a new avalanche of public health initiatives aimed at nudging us - with the policy equivalent of a baseball bat - into the approved lifestyles nannying councillors have told us we should follow. For my part I concluded a while ago that public health is not other offensive and unethical but mostly a waste of money:

The truth about public health spending is that nearly all of it is wasted, is money spent on promoting an ideology of control. No lives are saved by public health's actions. No money is saved for the wider health system by the interventions of public health. No-one's wellbeing is improve by public health. Indeed for many thousands the actions of these ideologues result in a worse life. Yet in my city of Bradford over £30 million is spend on public health programmes, money that could fix the roads, could provide care for the elderly, could smarten up parks. Instead we'll spend it on nannying the hell out of the population, on promoting an unpleasant controlling ideology founded on a myth of wellbeing that has no basis in fact or substantive value to the poor masses it is being imposed upon.

Sitting in that hall and looking at those hands raising to endorse fussbucketry and the New Puritan agenda, I realised why millions of ordinary people voted to leave the EU and told pollsters that they didn't trust the experts and elites. I saw a comment (I forget where) about the referendum debate where, when some economist talked about GDP, someone cried out "that's your GDP not ours". The tale of fussbucketry is just another face of the passive aggressive oppression that is modern government - everything from trite lectures about chocolates on countlines through the confused debates about weight and body image to ignorant nonsense about why we get fat (and struggle to get thin again).

None of this will change much any time soon but it is time people affected by the moralising of professional fussbuckets started kicking back, telling the nannies that it really is absolutely none of their bloody business what we eat, drink or smoke. And that perhaps the fussbuckets might like to try having a little more fun in their life as maybe that would make them less inclined to ruin the pleasures of the rest of us. I hope so but suspect that the triumph of fussbucketry will run for a while yet.

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Free speech, fussbucketry and other things I won't shut up about in 2016 (sorry but a happy new year)

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The ineffective puritanism of modern public health

Perhaps, we will shift back to a more balanced approach to these issues. Less judging, less hectoring. Or maybe we'll sleepwalk into a ghastly, oppressive world where the New Puritans police our behaviour for its adherence to the received orthodoxy of believe about pleasures. I am not all that hopeful right now.

How lies - by pharma companies and tobacco businesses - are used to try and kill vaping

Biebert has identified Big Pharma, anti-smoking groups and government as the real forces at work to discourage electronic cigarettes and vaping. Biebert, who neither vapes nor smokes, was first drawn to the topic after reading about the famous ‘formaldehyde in ecigs’ claim. Beibert had friends that had switched from smoking to vaping and when he looked into the formaldehyde in ecigs study, the lie was obvious. That got him wondering.

Why free speech is really really important and the only winners in its removal are those with power

"In simple terms: one, I don't think we should be spending public money on finding out whether we can ban the EDL.

"Secondly, free speech and free assembly matters and if we can't have these things our society is worse for it."

How the lack of real accountability in the NHS kills any attempt to make it more efficient or more effective

The idea that the NHS is run by ‘the people’, as a joint endeavour, is a romantic fantasy. The NHS is an elite project, and this could not be otherwise. Collective choice is not a substitute for individual choice and ‘voice’ is not a substitute for ‘exit’. The illusory ‘accountability’ mediated through the political process cannot come anywhere near the accountability of a marketplace, or of a properly designed quasi-market setting, in which providers stand and fall with the choices consumers make, and depend on them for their very economic survival.

How free markets, free trade and capitalism are making the world - day after day - a healthier, wealthier, happier and more equal place

It was Schumpeter who pointed out that capitalism and the free market revolution didn’t mean all that much to Elizabeth I. She already had knitted stockings (in fact, we know the day she got her first pair). The great genius of capitalism is that it ended up with every factory girl possessing knitted stockings. That’s actually the defining feature of the system, that it ends up making everything just extraordinarily cheap–exactly the thing we want in order to be able to improve the lives of the poor. Just as it did our own forefathers of course. Because our forefathers were, almost all of them for almost all of history in exactly that $2 a day poverty that we now define as absolute poverty.

In between this stuff there'll be the usual bits about urbanism, the stupidity of planning, daft environmentalism, a bit of Bradford and - of course, of course - some mushrooms. I might even find a little time to say something about why we should leave the EU. Hopefully some of you will stay the course. Whatever you do, have a good 2016 if you possibly can.

It goes without saying that I'm grateful so many of you kept coming back here - prompted by a few great blogs including that commie fellow Chris Dillow's 'Stumbling & Mumbling', Dick Puddlecote and Chris Snowdon as well as the legion of folk who arrive from Twitter and Facebook.

So whatever you're doing this evening, do it in style and I pray it includes some binge drinking, over-eating, staying up too late, making a noise and enjoying the fabulous munificence of this great world we've got to live on. And I hope you don't let the nannies, the fussbuckets, the puritans, the health fascists and the greeny-greeny, back-to-the-mud huts brigade ruin your year. Above all please try to be polite while saying the things you want to say about the things that matter to you. Don't let the tyranny of those - like the Labour's leader on Bradford Council - who want to stifle your right to speak freely.

Happy New Year. And have a good one.

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Shooting the sugar plum fairy. Why advertising isn't to blame.

The headlines from the report into childhood obesity published today will be all about taxing fizzy drinks. A pretty daft idea that targets just one source of sugar on the basis that in one place, Mexico, a 'soda tax' managed to reduce consumption by about 6%. There's no evidence that this tax reduced obesity, which was the main reason for introducing the tax in the first place.

Others will explain better than I can why all this is pretty daft. Not least because childhood obesity is falling in the UK - as the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) reported recently. More to the point, the problem with all this is that there's precious little evidence supporting a link between being overweight or mildly 'obese' and mortality:

There is now extensive and convincing evidence that the greatest life expectancy is experienced by those who are classified as “Overweight”. In addition, there is no reliable evidence that there is any reduced expectancy even in those who are mildly obese (5). It is true that those who are seriously obese do have an increased mortality but the picture changes when the effect of physical fitness is incorporated.

I suspect there's little or no chance of the current government introducing a tax on fizzy drinks - the prime minister has ruled it out more than once and the dissenters to the proposal from the health select committee report were both Conservatives - here's Andrew Percy:

Andrew Percy, the Tory MP for Brigg and Goole who sits on the health committee told the paper Oliver’s suggestion is “patronising nonsense”.

“This is a classic nanny state reaction and it won’t work.

“Slapping 10p or 20p on a can of sugary drink won’t make people change their behaviour.”

However the committee's report makes a whole load of other proposals that target advertising and marketing activity - that shoot the messenger.

Promotional and marketing techniques for specific products or brands have the aim of achieving one main goal—increases in sales. This is achieved through old (eg TV advertising, programme sponsorship, cinema, radio and billboards) and new methods (eg social media, advergames and internet pop-ups), which are designed to influence our food choices by, for example, overriding our established eating habits, and taking advantage of others such as our desire to reduce costs. The intent can be to encourage us to switch between brands or products; or there may be an additional consequence of getting us to buy and consume more.

Now this argument - from Public Health England and unsupported by evidence - flies in the face of everything that we know about advertising, choice and the way communications shape our preferences and decisions. Firstly, it just isn't true that advertising's purpose is to increase sales (I'm taking this to mean increasing the size of the market - to sell more sweets or fizzy drinks rather than more of the advertisers sweets or fizzy drinks). Here's the most well know study into the effects of advertising:

This paper is concerned with testing for causation, using the Granger definition, in a bivariate time-series context. It is argued that a sound and natural approach to such tests must rely primarily on the out-of-sample forecasting performance of models relating the original (non-prewhitened) series of interest. A specific technique of this sort is presented and employed to investigate the relation between aggregate advertising and aggregate consumption spending. The null hypothesis that advertising does not cause consumption cannot be rejected, but some evidence suggesting that consumption may cause advertising is presented.

In simple terms, advertising doesn't create new demand and there's some suggestion that the reverse is true. Indeed advertising effects on demand are persistently weak:

Advertising effects appear to be so weak as to give little, if any, support for the Galbraithian view that advertisers exert powerful, manipulative effects upon the allocation of consumers' expenditure between products.

As a marketing professional this is pretty depressing - we've all watched Mad Men and read Vince Packard's 'Hidden Persuaders' and kidded ourselves that advertising somehow created the consumerist world we live in. The prosaic truth is that, as we knew in our hearts (and those famed ad men of the '50s and '60s knew), advertising is a mirror held up to society and merely reflects the changes in our fads, fancies, preferences and choices. Don't get me wrong, advertising works but not in the way people who aren't marketers think it works.

And if you think about this for a second, it becomes clear. The advertiser has absolutely no interest in promoting his competitors' products, which is what he would be doing if what PHE says were true. And the effects - or objectives - are no different if it's cars, chicken or chocolate we're advertising. Or indeed if the audience is children or grown-ups (although there's some evidence showing children are more believing of ads this still only makes them choose one brand of breakfast cereal instead of another).

The most depressing part of all this - apart from the wholly unjustified attack on sugar as a macronutrient - is that the select committee conducted a review of and recommends regulations affecting advertising and marketing without taking evidence from any marketers. Yet again - as we saw with tobacco, with alcohol and with financial services - the messenger is machine-gunned by MPs who start off with no knowledge of marketing and finish with no knowledge of marketing.

In nearly every circumstance, brand advertising doesn't create new demand. Yet we see again the lie that banning or restricting its use will somehow reduce demand. This simply won't happen. The committee is just shooting the sugar plum fairy.

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Misusing the idea of 'evidence' - the case of alcohol policy

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It's Alcohol Awareness Week when all the fussbuckets issue tutting press releases lecturing ordinary folk about how they're drinking too much. These are leapt on by gleeful health reporters keen to fill pages with yet another load of old toss about how what we're eating and drinking is leading us to an early grave.

So we shouldn't be surprised if two of the UK's leading centres of fussbucketry - Sterling and Sheffield Universities - have published a new report about alcohol policy. The premise of the report is this:

Alcohol policies across the four UK nations vary widely in the extent to which they are grounded in scientific evidence, with political considerations appearing to have significant bearing

Awful, I think you'll agree, awful. How very dare politicians take account of "political considerations" such as how many jobs, businesses, exports and so forth link to the drinks industry.

What concerns me here is what these people consider to be evidence. And the truth here is that we're not talking about evidence at all but rather about a report setting out a series of policy proposals loosely based on a selective interpretation of the "evidence" and wholly wedded to the lie that alcohol harm is a "whole population" problem. In simple terms the "research" simply castigates the UK government for failing to do what the researchers said the government should do - concluding their press release with a quotation accusing the government of 'ideology' which is a bit rich considering that their anti-booze position is deeply ideological.

The 'evidence' presented isn't evidence at all - not surprising since these are the sort of researchers who ignore facts like a nearly 20% decline in alcohol consumption and a similar decline in linked issues like violent crime. Nor do these researchers recognise the enormous - and consistent - body of evidence showing that moderate drinking, far from being remotely harmful, is actually healthy (indeed healthier than abstinence).

The most egregious element of this 'evidence' is that our researchers believe that engaging in 'partnerships with the alcohol industry' is a terrible sin because that industry doesn't support the researchers temperance and prohibitionist position.

It really is time we told these supposed 'scientists' to end their evidence-light, ideological attack on drinking. An attack based on prejudice and ignorance rather than any actual facts about drinking. They are wrong about pricing, wrong about marketing and advertising, wrong about the costs and benefits of alcohol to the UK, wrong about children and drinking, and wrong about the level of alcohol-related harm. And by wrong I mean they have no evidence to support their position not just that I disagree with them.

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Nannying fussbucketry of the day - cutting your nose off to spite your face

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Rory Stewart is a government minister in the environment department. Presented with the opportunity to take some cash off tobacco companies to help clean up litter, he plays the nannying fussbucket card:

In January, Kris Hopkins, then a local government minister, said he wanted tobacco companies to "make a contribution to put right the wrongs as a consequence of their product". The companies offered to fund measures to help clean the country's streets last month, but the offer was rejected by Rory Stewart, a junior environment minister. In a letter to the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, Mr Stewart said that a tie-up risked undermining councils’ work in promoting public health. Mr Stewart said it was "for local authorities to decide whether they wish to work with the tobacco industry", but added that councils should take their own legal advice before accepting the support. He said: "Since April 1 2013, local authorities have had responsibility for improving the health of their local populations and for public health services. The Government's view is that where a local authority enters into a partnership with a tobacco company, this fundamentally undermines the authority's statutory duty to promote public health." 

How stupid is this?

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Vegemite - a reminder (if you needed one) that prohibition doesn't work

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OK it's Australia, home to some of the world's most intrusive fussbucketry but it's a lesson:

Australia’s government says Vegemite sales should be limited in some communities to prevent the yeast-based spread being used to make home-made alcohol.

Nigel Scullion, the indigenous affairs minister, said the spread – which is considered something of a national culinary staple – was a "precursor to misery" in communities suffering from alcohol abuse.

He said he was not proposing a ban but wanted to restrict excessive sales of high-yeast products such as Vegemite in “dry” communities – typically remote Aboriginal townships where alcohol sales are banned.

“Addiction of any type is a concern but communities, especially where alcohol is banned, must work to ensure home brewing of this type does not occur,” he said.

See what's happened here? These 'dry' communities (apparently Aussie white people think Aboriginal drink problems relate to some natural predisposition not to 200 years of oppression) do what dry communities always do - they make their own booze. And, as we all know, alcohol is very easy to make.

You see, prohibition doesn't work.

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Government diet fascists, why not just give us a ration book and be done with it?

The government doesn't want you to eat this - you know what they can do!

The government is about to issue new guidelines on a healthy diet. And it will come as no surprise to discover that the big target in this latest round of fussbucketry is sugar:

Adults and children should be instructed by the Government to halve the amount of sugar they consume and eat almost twice as much pasta, potato and other fibrous foods, an official report is expected to say this week.

This continues the almost daily assault on sugar as a source of energy in our diet - myths about how in some way refined sugars behave differently from naturally occurring sugars when we eat them to lies about direct links between obesity and sugar. Accompanying this, we're told there will be guidance on salt, fat and much else besides. Unsurprisingly alcohol gets a swipe from these diet fascists:

Healthy snacks included a handful of unsalted nuts and raisins one day and a plain scone with low-fat spread on another. Two glasses of wine were allowed during the week and deserts consisted of fruit most days. There was space for a small chocolate mousse one day, and a spiced rice pudding on Sunday.

And it's recognised that urging people to increase dietary fibre "would push most people above the Government's targets for salt, sugar and overall energy intake" - meaning that we end up with a diet stuffed full of vegetables.

Let's predict what will happen here. Firstly all the headlines will be about sugar with the myths and lies reinforced across the media. Stories (as with this story) will be illustrated with pictures of the evil white stuff further stressing the emphasis on sugar. Nice middle-class families will cut out the sugar replacing it with other sources of energy - fruit, bread, pasta and so forth. And then get surprised when they are neither slimmer nor healthier as a result.

At the same time government agencies from local council public health departments and GPs through to schools, hospitals and prisons will start enforcing the 'guidelines' as if they are hard and fast rules. Perfectly slim and healthy children will have chocolate bars snatched from their hands by teachers, hospital food will sink to new levels of utter uselessness, and hordes of clipboard-wielding nannies will fan out across the nation trying to force every establishment serving food to 'offer healthy options', remove salt and serve less sugar. Those cafe sugar dispensers will be banned as rufty-tufty builders have to fight with a rationed dollop of sugar in an inconvenient and wasteful paper sachet.

Meanwhile the triumphant fussbuckets will - even more shrilly than now - begin to shout about the need for a sugar tax or a soda tax. MPs will be inundated with deliberate misinformation from Action on Sugar while behinds the scenes that shocking liar Simon Stevens (who runs the NHS) will agitate a ministers for "something to be done" about obesity. And that something will be a sugar tax - despite there being no link between overall sugar consumption (which has fallen) and obesity.

This 'model diet' might be presented as guidance but it will quickly (as is always the case with government guidance) become a prescription adhered to, enforced and nudged into place by the army of nannying fussbuckets in government agencies and the charities those agencies fund. They might as well be done with it, issue us ration books so we comply with their approved diet and take any vestiges of please in food and eating away from ordinary people.

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Councils should be allowed to fund care rather than forced to pay for fussbucketry

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The LGA has been asking MPs about social care funding. This is important because, even if we put an end to the myth of 'selling the family home' (it's usually one from which the family has long departed), social care budgets are the most pressured in local government. Mostly because we're unhelpfully living longer and because the NHS has decided that folk recover better if you get them out of hospital as swiftly as possible.

The boss of the LGA, Cllr David Sparks waves the shroud:

'Adult social care is in crisis. We need a care system that is fit for the 21st century. It's not enough for consecutive governments to keep papering over the cracks with short term fixes.

'We urgently need a longer-term solution that puts social care on a sustainable footing. Failure to do so will deprive our elderly of the care they deserve, create additional pressure on the NHS and push other local services over the edge.'

And the solution that the LGA proposes is to hypothecate - to 'ringfence' - social care budgets. Essentially to take away from councillors the ability to make choices about a very significant part of the council budget. This is because, we're told, there will be a £4.3 billion "black hole" needing to be filled by 2020.

Now firstly I don't see how ringfencing will make a jot of difference. It's not like the size of the pot miraculously gets bigger if you stop councillors from having a say in its determination. What's needed is for local councillors to be given more rather than less budgetary power - and this means removing the ringfence (imposed to appease the NHS) from public health budgets.

Currently over half of public health spending goes on what, for want of a better term, is essentially nannying fussbucketry. Nice to do if you've loads of cash sloshing around but since councils haven't it's pretty galling for there to be all this money spent on smoking cessation campaigns, free slimming classes and campaigns against booze, fizzy drinks and burger bars. Currently this amounts to somewhere between £1 and £2 billion per year across England - a pretty good start towards the far more useful task of looking after the old, sick and disabled.

I'd also scrap Public Health England with its responsibilities for immunisation programmes and response to health emergencies going back to the NHS and the remainder of its money - the fussbucketry funds sucked up by sockpuppets like Alcohol Concern and ASH - going to local councils without a ringfence.

This would do more for public health and for the care of people across England than the provision of stern lectures about our bad lifestyle choices or campaigns to ban, tax, regulate and control things the high-ups in Public Health don't approve of. We should be funding care not fussbucketry.

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Burgers, bookies, borrowing and the holiday tan - nannying fussbucketry reaches the High Street

A healthy high street - complete with 'unhealthy' sugar!

The 'Health on the High Street' report from the Royal Society of Public Health starts off well with a statement that, for once, actually has some connection to actual public health rather than the regular nannying fussbucketry we associated with the profession:

A healthy high street environment is one in which there is clean air, less noise, more connected neighbourhoods, things to see and do, and a place where people feel relaxed. The architecture of the high street would be such that it fosters active urban design principles including pavements, seating, shade and shelter. Above all the high street would provide a safe environment where the public don’t live in fear of crime,violence, harassment, or accidents. 

It's hard to take issue with this as an argument. Firstly it's absolutely about the public realm, the environment in which people go about our everyday tasks and in which we celebrate the good things of life. And this is the concern - if there is one - of public health. But just as importantly these things - less pollution, places to sit, low crime and a mix of indoor and outdoor - are what make for successful town centres.

Sadly though the Royal Society of Public Health doesn't stop with saying high streets should be clean, green and safe. Turn the page and that nannying fussbucketry hits you in the face. We are presented with yet another judgemental dismissal of things other people (mostly other people from lower social classes) enjoy.

The businesses on a healthy high street would not only enable basic needs, including access to affordable healthy food and affordable financial services to be met, but would actively promote healthy choices. There would be access to essential services whether that is health services, cultural amenities, places to be active, leisure centres or green spaces, for example. A healthy high street would also create opportunities to minimise harm whether that is ensuring that health is included as a condition for licensing and a consideration for planning consent. 

We have arrived at the crunch. The health high street isn't about a clean, green, safe space at all but is rather about public authorities - through licensing or planning controls - deciding what sort of business is fit to grace our town centres. To justify this particular branch of health fascism the Royal Society of Public Health has cooked up some of its own pseudo-science - what they call 'the Richter scale of health'. This scale (unlike the actual Richter Scale) is an entirely subjective, opinion-based scale. A business can score somewhere between -8 and +8 on the basis of researchers allocating a score from -2 to +2 against four 'areas of health': encourages healthy lifestyle choices; promotes social interaction; allows greater access to health care services and/or health advice; and promotes mental well-being.

Now you'll have noticed that most high street retailers will score zero (since this, our researchers tell us, is what is given where 'the category is not relevent to the outlet'). Your typical shoe shop, assuming we're not running a campaign on the health impact of high heels, is entirely neutral on matters relating to health. Mostly because it's a place where you go to buy shoes.  And the same goes for building societies, charity shops, clothing shops, hairdressers and hardware stores.

As a measure then this is worse than useless. Unless of course your objective is to use your status and authority (this is a 'Royal Society' after all) to promote a given political agenda around your intrusive and judgemental definition of public health. It will come as no surprise to discover that the 'research' identifies betting shops, tanning shops, payday lenders and fast food takeaways as the dark evil on the high street, the causes of unhealthy high streets. And the healthy stuff - leisure centres, health centres, pharmacists, health clubs, museums and pubs (the inclusion of which will be giving various in the Church of Public Health palpitations - in the authors defence they did manage to find a picture from inside a pub that didn't show anyone actually drinking*).

The authors then go on to set out in lurid detail the evils of gambling, burgers, fake tans and high interest borrowing before settling down to create a little ranking of the most and least 'healthy' high streets in England. Unsurprisingly the resulting ranking show that high streets in northern towns where people like a flutter and eat take-away kebabs are much more unhealthy than high streets in the nice, comfortable market towns where the researchers and their friends are likely to live. This time it's Preston that gets the devil's mark resulting in the usual slew of sneering broadsheet articles and this from the local paper:

OFFICIAL: Preston has unhealthiest city centre in the UK

Followed by people from Preston agreeing:

Coun John Swindells, deputy leader of Preston City Council, said: “The results of this survey mirror our own concerns. Indeed the Royal Society for Public Health is campaigning to allow local authorities greater planning powers to deal with this issue. It is something the council, along with 92 other local authorities, has and will continue to lobby the Government for."

This is the saddest thing about the report - not that a bunch of London-based nannying fussbuckets has produced 'research' designed to show the awfulness of northern cities and towns but that the leaders of those places fall over eachother to say just how much they're doing to make Preston more like Salisbury (as if that was either achievable or desirable). If places like Preston and Middlesbrough - number two in this particular ranking of evilness - are doing badly it's got more to do with the relative poverty of the place than it has to to with whether the council has powers to ban betting shops or fast food takeaways.

Finally the report goes into full 'something must be done' mode listing a veritable cornucopia of fussbucketry. This opens with planning and licensing controls including specific powers around health as a reason for refusing a licence (having been nice about pubs earlier in the report they include alcohol licensing in this demand) as well as a general power to stop 'clustering' - presumably that wouldn't apply to Bond Street or Saville Row.

We then get assorted nudges and bans (including the entirely stupid proposal for a ban on displays of vaping products) before the entirely predictable for differential business rates, mandatory health warnings and limits on stakes all while repeating the familiar litany of lies about these products and services ('crack cocaine of gambling'). All of this is deeply depressing and reminds us that too many - the leader of Preston City Council for one - are taken in by this New Puritan agenda of public health.

This research (truly awful and unscientific research) will be rolled out again and again - by the LGA, by the BBC, by assorted groups of fussbuckets - to support the argument for ever more restrictions on who can do what and where. It will be accompanied by the continuing sound of moaning as high streets continue to decline - with the sort of outlets derided here forming the last vestiges of a town centre economy. And rather than look for a completely different approach, we'll trog along behind the health fascists and control freaks as they nail the last few nails into what's left of our high streets.


*Although the eagle-eyed will note that it's a very old photograph as it contains images of smoking!

Petty bans and pointless policing...nannying fussbucketry Northern Ireland style!

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The story's about the Northern Ireland cops (how times have changed) threatening a couple of skinny-dippers with being put on the sex offenders register. But tagged on the end is another bit of tin-pottism and microcosm of pointless policing:

Police in the North Down town also warned that they were on the lookout for people bringing alcohol to the beach, with officers patrolling the platform at Helen's Bay railway station. 

Yesterday Kathryn and I went up to the RHS Gardens at Harlow Carr near Harrogate to listen to a little light jazz and eat a picnic. Along with hundreds of others we sat in the sunshine drinking beer and wine without any bother, any need for dire police warnings and certainly no trouble. It's really about time we trusted people to behave sensible on a public beach and to stop this nannying and unnecessary clampdown on taking a couple of beers to drink on the beach.

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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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'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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We have IVF technology why shouldn't women use it?

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The Chief Medical Officer has put on her official frown and wagged her finger at women:

Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, said she was concerned about the “steady shift” towards women choosing to postpone starting a family until their late 30s and early 40s, reducing their chance of conception, and increasing their medical risks. 

To be fair to Dame Sally, this was just a warning that fertility declines with age and IVF doesn't always work (I suspect most women sort of know this). However, the result is some weapons grade fussbucketry from Lara Prendergast in the Spectator:

Like it or not, women must stop seeing fertility treatment as a lifestyle choice. It is wonderful that such treatment exists, but to see it as a ‘quick fix’ is wrong. Selling people fertility on the tube suggests we have taken a step in the wrong direction.

Why on earth not? Women live, on average, into their eighties providing more than adequate time to successfully raise a child to adulthood. And I don't think that fertility treatment represents any sort of 'quick fix' - it's intrusive, risky and the results are uncertain.

Presumably Ms Prendergast hasn't hit the point of panic - perhaps if she does she'll understand that, for most who use it, IVF treatment isn't some sort of cosy lifestyle choice but the consequence of careful discussion, stress and the failure to conceive.

So if there is technology that can help women in their 40s conceive, why on earth should judgemental fussbuckets like Ms Prendergast think it OK - without the first thought about women using these services - to suggest that somehow these women shouldn't think about having a baby. And worse to suggest they should have got pregnant when they were younger?

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