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Biscuit control It is hard to know where to begin. This story has everything. Facepalm-inducing levels of stupidity; obviously unworkable policies; nannying; doctors who would rather control people than patch them up; meaningless statistics; government interference in minutiae; this old chestnut:
Ministers have suggested that if companies fail to sign up to the Responsibility Deal voluntarily the government could legislate to force them to act.
So far these are plans “seen by The Telegraph” to introduce more control over food by, say, making biscuits smaller. In a sane world it will never happen but it is an insight into the direction that those in power would like to see things go. I have noticed how quickly what once would have seemed unbelievable can become normal: would a smoker on a plane in 1998 have believed it would be banned in pubs nine years later?
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Thank god the government can’t tell my wife how to bake cookies.
I wonder how long before the nanny state requires people to have licenses to cook in their own kitchens? If you think about it, some people are complete amateurs! Given access to sharp instruments! And they might not be properly trained in decoding warning labels, or knowing how many calories are good for them- or their unsuspecting victims (i.e. other members of the house)! SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!!!!
In the UK Armed Forces, an ‘interview without biscuits’ can be a euphemism for a severe rollicking. Perhaps now, biscuits will be force-fed as punishment.
East Germany appears not so much to have disappeared as moved west like Angles, Saxons and Jutes some 1,500 years ago.
However, once you accept that the State provides health care, the State then decides how it is provided, and that means extending itself into what the citizenry eat, drink and do, so that its targets are met, or matters can be said to be on course for targets. The same mentality gave wooden blast furnaces under Stalin to meet quotas, and slaughter on a scale greater than Srebrenica in NHS hospitals throughout the UK.
This is not laughable, it is very sinister. A State that regulates biscuits will regulate anything. UK National Debt c. £1,191,000,000,000 and rising.
So if you don’t do something voluntarily you must be forced to do it? Nothing changes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2004/sep/28/leadersandreply.mainsection
Here’s that link again. Altogether now, “The current voluntary option has failed”.
Rob Fisher is correct – once one concedes on the PRINCIPLE then everything else follows.
For example, the words “Political Correctness gone mad!” implies (concedes) that there is a form of Political Correctness (i.e. the work of the Frankfurt School of “cultural” Marxism) that is not “mad”. When I first started to see the words “Political Correctness gone mad” (back in the 1980s) I knew the struggle against P.C. had been LOST (indeed it could be argued that it have been lost back in the 1960s when establishment conservatives conceded the PRINCIPLE of “anti discrimination” edicts and started to argue over details).
Food is the same – once it is conceded that people being fat is a POLITICAL matter, then the detailed stuff will inevitablly follow.
Only if the line is held – only if the PRINCIPLE that “people being fat is NOT a political matter” is there any hope.
The doctrine (principle) that the state has a function to “do people good” must be REJECTED – otherwise all is lost.
Short version…..
Once you have broken the spine of a cat, skinning the cat is not difficult – the cat can not do much about it.
Manufacturers should get together and voluntarily agree to standards of size, content, packaging, and pricing of their products. What could be fairer than that, especially with government approval.
At some point, someone will have to take a stand and tell them to fuck off–that is to say “No we are not going to be forced by legislation or any other means”. The act of arresting biscuit-makers for not making smaller biscuits will be seen as the state thuggery that it is. The “unbelievable to real” scenario works both ways–eg the Berlin Wall.
The part that disturbs me most about this story is the fact that phenominally stupid people are being elevated to positions of authority over the rest of us. In a sense this has always been the way, I used to work under a boss who literaly had a problem counting up to four*. Really, how can anyone be such an imbecile as to imagine that reducing the size of biscuits would have the slightest effect upon actual biscuit intake?
*He was getting on my case about my department’s inability to cope with the workload. The supervisor had retired and I had taken over as supervisor. One guy stayed in the same job, one guy took over my old job, and we got a new guy in to cover the job of the guy who took my old job. We had four guys in the department, one guy retired and one new guy was recruited. We had four guys in the deparment before, we had four guys in the department after. The idiot actually thought that we had one more guy in our department than we had before and so had no excuse for not staying on top of the workload.
Producers and retailers will support this if it enables them to make biscuits (or packets) smaller but without reducing prices.
The knock on effects could be drastic. Previously secret reports will be released admitting that Wagon Wheels have shrunk and Creme Eggs are indeed smaller than they used to be. The Office of National Statistics will incorporate reduced portion sizes into their calculations and the Bank of England’s inflation targeting will be thrown into turmoil for another 12 months. And they were so close! George Osborne’s entire five year economic plan will have to be reworked because of this. Garibaldi George nobody will call him.
In time we will be told that Kit-Kats have always been single fingered, digestives were never too big to dunk in a mug and we have always paid VAT on Jaffa Cakes. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a packet of Custard Creams… forever.
“digestives were never too big to dunk in a mug”
Not that anyone will know what dunking was, caffeine based beverages having long since been banned.
“imagine a boot stamping on a packet of Custard Creams”
Ooh broken biscuits ! I remember when you could buy them loose in a bag, that was in the days before Ingsoc of course.