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I honestly think I have grossly underestimated the entrepreunerial skills of the social-working class. It must take a certain talent to keep inventing new make-work schemes and then successfully sell them to the government.
I cannot imagine how I would begin to pitch this one:
The Government is losing its war against flab after spending £9.6 billion on projects to tackle obesity across all departments.
I just love the idea of porcine civil servants being sent to huff and puff their way around an army assault course but I rather think they are not the intended target of this new ‘war’.
Anyway, it seems the government is losing the war. They cannot make fat people slim again by bureaucratic means. I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you.
The fat epidemic shows no sign of abating.
‘Epidemic’! Now there’s a panic-inducing trigger-word if ever there was one. I bet that was the deal-closer. ‘Minister, unless you write out a blank cheque there’s going to be an epidemic!’.
Obesity is serious.
At £9.6 billion, yeah I would say that’s bloody serious.
It kills 34,000 people a year in Britain…
And HMG is going to keep spending money until the target of Zero deaths from all causes is reached.
…and costs the economy in England £2.6 billion a year, estimated to rise to £3.6 billion by 2010.
How can they possibly know that?
It cannot, however, be tackled by the Department of Health alone.
Well, it might be helped by fat people going on a diet but we wouldn’t want them taking the law into their own hands, would we.
Strategies to deal with obesity in children and adults now involve four Government departments with support at Cabinet level.
The Department of Health and the Health Development Agency, the Department for Education and Skills, the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are all players in the anti-fat campaign.
Defeating the Third Reich didn’t require this many people.
And, therein lies the rub because even this public admission of failure will do nothing to stop the flab-fighting government juggernaut now that it has been sent rumbling forth onto the highway of national life. The conspicuous failure of fat children to shrink to normal size will merely prompt demands for ‘more resources’ to fight yet another phoney war. Problems are not meant to be solved because careers aren’t built that way. Problems are to be fabricated and then carefully nurtured and maintained until…well, ever.
The £9.6 billion wasted thus far was merely the appetiser. Small change. Petty cash. Mere peanuts already swallowed up with a forest’s worth of reports, initiatives, projections, surveys, committee minutes and action plans. This is Britain where the new national ethos is to throw good money after bad into the bottomless sinkhole of guilt and paranoia.
If any reader is tempted to laugh out loud at the Swiftian absurdity of it all then I can hardly blame them. But really it isn’t funny, it’s pathetic and it is only a matter of time before it moves beyond the sad to the downright nasty:
One is the Food and Health Action Plan which aims to promote healthy eating in all age groups.
An aspect of this is the schools fruit programme, now being implemented, which aims to give all primary school children in their first three years, a portion of fruit a day.
The second is the Game Plan, a strategy for promoting physical activity with the somewhat vague target of ensuring that 70 per cent of the population is “reasonably active” by 2020.
This is what they call a ‘consciousness raising exercise’, a customary pre-cursor to new expansions of state power. ‘The voluntary approach hasn’t worked’, they will cry. ‘What we need is tough legislation’. And they will most likely get it too and disapproved products will start to be pulled from supermarket shelves and nobody will be allowed to open a bank account until they can produce a ‘Physical Fitness Certificate’. This may sound alarmist but the one thing I have never underestimated is the vanity and ambition of our political classes.
Britain isn’t obese, it’s anaemic. It’s life-blood is being drained from it by an army of worthless, self-propogating parasites.
Colour me cynical (it suits me to a tee) but my opinion of the capabilities and ethics of the British public sector has sunk so low, that I am now inclined to regard their frequent pronouncements as a sort of inverse benchmark.
So when the Food Standards Agency issues an official warning about the allged perils of the Atkins Diet, my instincts tell me to draw the very opposite conclusion:
The first official warning about the dangers of the Atkins diet has been issued by the Government amid concern about the rising number of people opting for the high-fat, high-protein regime.
The Food Standards Agency, which is responsible for all the Government’s nutritional guidance, has published a statement alerting the public to the health risks of low-carbohydrate diets, including Atkins, claiming that they are linked to heart disease, cancer and even obesity
Surely ‘obesity’ is the one thing that devotees of the late Dr.Atkins claim to have conquered? And that word ‘linked’ again. It is fast developing a reputation as quite the most manipulative term in the English language. By employing the word ‘linked’ in any sort of press release one can convey a sense of ominous threat without the bothersome necessity of explaining precise details or producing so much as one iota of empirical evidence.
I am not sufficiently familiar with these people to question their motives but their methods alone are sufficient to leave me with the firm impression that the Atkins diet is not only healthy but also very effective. Get guzzling that protein.
Every time there is even a semi-serious debate in this country about the provision of health care and reform of the NHS, the reactionaries cry ‘Do we want to be like America?’. It is the British equivalent of ‘Do you want Farmer Jones back?’.
Well, do want to be like America?
Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study.
The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds.
One of these fine days, that plaintive, theatrical and bogus rhetorical bleat is going to result in a resounding ‘yes’.
I first came across this story in the dead tree Times, and although the virtual Times probably has it too, we have a policy here at Samizdata about linking to that which is that we don’t.
So here is the same story from canada.com:
Researchers have discovered a genetic glitch that makes some smokers up to 10 times more likely to develop lung cancer than others, a finding that may explain why only 10 per cent of heavy smokers develop the deadly disease.
A simple blood test that will be able to detect which smokers are at an especially high risk of developing lung cancer could be on the market within three years, researchers told the Times of London.
Ah look, they got it from the Times too.
In other words, it will separate ordinary, high-risk smokers from extra high-risk smokers.
It will be interesting to see what the anti-smoking lobby makes of this. They ought to rejoice. But I think they will be angry.
Their starting axiom is that cigarettes are evil. If this discovery makes it that cigarettes actually do less harm than hitherto, that will be bad. They will react like hellfire preachers who have been informed that hell, for many sinners (now identifiable in advance), is not as hot as they had previously supposed, and that sin is accordingly less frightening for these particular sinners to indulge in.
Overall, smokers with low levels of the DNA-repairing enzyme were 120 times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers with normal OGG levels. Smokers with the genetic risk factor were also five to 10 times more likely to develop the disease than smokers with normal DNA repair activity.
So smokers with normal levels of DNA-repairing enzyme will now be sinning like there’s no tomorrow. Bad. Very bad.
It’ll be fun to watch.
Well, at least the language is sort of getting there:
John Reid, the health secretary, has embarked on the biggest ever programme of ministerial visits to NHS hospitals to persuade staff to accept fundamental changes in working practices to improve the service to patients.
He has told colleagues that the public will not accept there has been genuine improvement in the NHS until patients are treated with the same promptness and respect that they get as consumers of other goods and services.
As ‘consumers of other goods and services’ they are the paying the piper and therefore calling the tune. Contrast the NHS where the paying customer is the government and the patients are units of production.
Health ministers think their biggest political challenge is to engineer this change in the working culture of NHS organisations. They want them to tailor services to suit the preferences of the individual instead of expecting patients to adjust to the convenience of the professionals.
Fat chance! Public services are not run for the benefit of the public they are run for the benefit of the public sector. If you want ‘services to suit the preferences of the individual’ you need a free market in healthcare.
So another doomed ‘initiative’ will shortly bite the dust but not before, I hope, Mr.Reid and his advisers reach the logical conclusions of their own ideas.
Oh no, the elephants are at the watering hole again.
The government’s National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) says that In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment should be free, whatever the heck ‘free’ means, which I suppose in this case means I have to pay for it whether I want to or not.
Here’s one of those hot medical areas which it is easy to avoid discussing. But being one who is constantly trying to seek the best position on any particular ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ position, I was wondering if anyone out there is willing to offer me further guidance? My current views on ‘free’ IVF treatment are as follows. → Continue reading: NHS ‘should offer free IVF’
There can be few afflictions more tragic and debilitating than blindness.
So I sincerely hope that this qualifies as some sort of breakthrough:
A blind man can see again after being given a stem cell transplant.
Mike May, of California, had been blind for 40 years since an accident at the age of three where he lost one eye and was blinded in the other.
The operation transplanted corneal and limbal stem cells into his right eye.
My very best wishes to Mr.May and to medical team who restored his sight. The possibility that this technique can be used to help blind people everywhere is something that is worth hoping and praying for.
The UK state has long been scared of the effects of cannabis, especially its anti-state effect on people who want the freedom to eat, and smoke, and drink, whatever the hell they like.
But soon, specially selected National Health Service patients are to be given cannabis as part of a government-funded trial, costing half a million pounds, to see if it can work as an effective pain relief drug.
Of course, all of the sufferers from long-term pain who regularly use cannabis right now, illegally, to get themselves through the long days and nights of multiple sclerosis, and other painful complaints, could have told them this years ago. And have done so, many times. But not to worry. Spending half a million of other people’s money costs the government absolutely nothing, after all, so where’s the worry?
It should be interesting however, if Her Majesty’s Government do legitimise ‘medical cannabis’. Expect to see queues out the door of most General Practitioners’ surgeries filled with ‘migraine’ sufferers, for whom Nurofen doesn’t quite cut the mustard anymore.
Actually, I can feel this throbbing pain in my left temple, right this second, probably from all this cheese I’m eating on the Atkins diet. Maybe I should chuck the diet in, and get back to carbohydrates? Anybody got any ‘interesting’ chocolate cake mixture recipes?
Here’s one trend that’s going the opposite from the US that’s actually good news for the Brits. A new private Accident & Emergency unit is to be opened this October in Brentford, West London. To non-British readers, that’s a private Emergency Room.
This has been widely reported as the first attempt to set up ER in the UK wrongly as it turns out. I contacted the BBC and the wording has changed to it claims to be the first. Obviously emergency healthcare in Britain existed before the state nationalized hospitals in 1948.
This report from 1998 shows that at least one serious attempt has been made to charge people for access to emergency healthcare in Britain. It failed for two reasons: the location was not ideal. The middle of Hampstead Heath is not the most obvious demand area for ER services and the Manor House Hospital (owned by a trade union) was sold to property developers.
The other interesting point in the BBC report is the view of the British Medical Association, the monopolistic body that represents the producer interests of doctors in the UK.
A Department of Health survey published in July found 6% of hospital patients waited at least 12 hours in A&E on a trolley or a chair. The government wants 90% of A&E patients to be assessed, treated, discharged or admitted within four hours. But doctors attending the British Medical Association’s annual conference in June denounced the target and said it would damage patient care.
So let me see if I have this straight – doctors believe that reducing the amount of time patients lie on trolleys or blood-splattered chairs in the waiting-room (I’ve sat on some of them), from 12 hours to four hours, being denied treatment, will damage patient care.
Dr Shipman I presume?
It must have been about a decade ago that I first became aware of the alleged dangers of exposure to the sun and the ‘link’ between over-exposure to ultra-violet radiation and skin cancer*. Looking back, it was a ‘consciousness raising exercise’ that mushroomed from ‘never heard of it’ to widespread health-panic with remarkable speed.
Assisted, perhaps, by the miserabalisit anti-hedonism of the Nineties and the suspiciously convenient dovetailing with the doleful predictions about ‘global warming’, we should have been more sceptical. But medical opinion was converted and few people have the confidence to fly in the face of such an august edifice. The new orthodoxy was nailed down with copious amounts of ‘official’ advice to stay in, wrap up, cover up and, if you are foolhardy enough to venture out in the sun, only do so after smothering yourself with gallons of sunblock.
But that was then, and this is now:
A scientist is claiming too much sunscreen can lead to vitamin deficiency.
Professor Michael Holick of Boston University is advising people to spend up to 10 minutes a day in the sun unprotected to guard against a lack of vitamin D.
He said: “In our efforts to protect people from the sun we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”
So Professor Holick just a publicity-seeking iconoclast or is this the heretical opening shot of a debunking campaign?
Perhaps the only danger we really need to worry about are the risks arising from an over-exposure to ‘experts’.
[Note to professional scare-mongers: ‘cancer’ is the panic word of our age. Linking lifestyle choices to heart disease or kidney failure just doesn’t cut the mustard.]
…the state does, in the person of Mr. Justice Sumner, that is who owns your body.
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign
– J.S. Mill, On Liberty, 1859
Given that so many in the ‘free world’ are subject to compulsory educational conscription, how many people are in fact ‘sovereign’ over their own minds? And in an era in which the state can force you to put certain chemicals in your body regardless of your wishes, are you sovereign over your own body? If you are a child, clearly not… and even if you are an adult, clearly not.
The mothers, the sole carers of their daughters, argued that immunisation should be voluntary and it was not right to impose it against the wishes of a caring parent and it would cause them great distress.
The elder girl had asked not to be given the MMR jab but had asked for meningitis protection. Some parents fear the MMR vaccine could be linked to autism, even though doctors and most experts say there is no evidence of a link.
Mr Justice Sumner decided both children should receive the jab because the benefits outweighed the risks.
But her views obviously count for nothing. If you do not truly own the insides of your body, then what are you? “The elder girl had asked not to be given the MMR jab”. Is she a slave? A serf? A chattel? I have fulminated before on that particular issue when confronted with people arguing for mandated mass medication… the issue is not one of health but rather ‘who owns your body’. What the judges and doctors who would use the violence of state to force other people to change the chemistry of their own bodies show us is not that they care, but rather their totalitarian mindset.
Can it really surprise us that the state does not respect individual property rights or the right of self-defense if it does not even respect the right of individuals to judge what chemicals should or should not be put in your own body? This is not a minor issue because it goes to the very heart of whether your perception of freedom is an illusion or not.
I think it safe to say that all those people in the British political and media classes who want this country to be ‘more European’ have good cause to feel quietly satisfied today because parts of Britain are, indeed, starting to resemble East Germany:
The image of hundreds of people queuing to register with an NHS dentist provided a stark reminder of the problems people encounter in finding an NHS dentist, experts say.
They need ‘experts’ to tell them this?
The queue was prompted by the announcement that a practice in Carmarthen, Wales, could take on 300 more patients – but many more were hoping to register.
The TV news has now picked up on this story and are reporting that over 600 people turned up in the hope of getting state dental treatment. They lined up along the street and had to be issued with lottery tickets in order to prevent disputes breaking out. Over half of them were turned away.
Dr John Renshaw of the British Dental Association told BBC News Online: “That picture evoked a Third World country, where you have to queue to access what ought to be part of NHS care.”
No, that picture evoked life behind the Iron Curtain where people queued up all day to get a meal. And for the same reasons!
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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