It may sound anachronistic but working-class communities are experiencing an invasion of the public health toffs (PHTs). The primary object of the PHTs' ire is Average Joe, the stereotypical, overweight, working-class male who's a junk food addict and a betting shop regular, when he isn't impersonating a beer-swilling, chain-smoking couch potato – and they're also not fond of Average Jane's "addiction" to an artificial tan.And those are uniquely ‘working class’ attributes are they..?
Nice start, chaps…
Joe and Jane are the subject of a PHT-designed regulatory experiment to improve their habits and preferences in order to improve the nation's health.You are quite correct, but to paint this as an attack on ‘working class culture’ is quite wrong.
This assault on their culture is justified by the PHTs' acceptance of health paternalism, which provides the driving force behind the regulatory assault on inappropriate eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, and even tanning. For the PHTs, all of these activities are inappropriate because they pose unacceptable risks to healthy living.
These NuPuritans would be quite happy to turn their fire on the average middle class drinker/smoker/red meat eater too.
Health paternalism is committed to using the mechanisms of social engineering to ease the pleasures of working-class life gradually out of existence. Today, it's sufficient for PHTs to simply utter the dreaded U-word – "unhealthy" – and pleasures of whatever pedigree are doomed.Well, at least until those scientists they’ve based their diktats on have a sudden change of heart, anyway…
And why just blame the PHTs - there's planty of 'ordinary' people who are more than capable of muscling in on this new game, as Dick Puddlecote points out with the saga of the chip-vending machines and the Netmums campaign.
… there's a growing sense in working-class communities of suffering endless condescension, a feeling that urbane Britain has written off their culture as aberrant or worse.It’s not just in working class communities, chaps. Not by a long chalk…
11 comments:
Juliam, we received, through school, forms to fill in for the North Derbyshire PCT NHS FLIP (Family Lifestyle Intervention program) from an apparatchik styleing herself as the Childhood Obesity Co-ordinator.
Needless to say, I will not be completing these forms. I'm going to have them scanned and will send them and my response to the NHS apapratchik to my local Conservative PPC (most likely to win on Thurs), as well as Messrs Cameron and Clegg.
If you would like to receive a copy of my response (and boy it's gonna a be a good one), please email me henrycrun dot mcfc at gmail dot com) and I'll BCC you in.
Ooooh, nice one!
"If you would like to receive a copy of my response (and boy it's gonna a be a good one), please email me henrycrun dot mcfc at gmail dot com) and I'll BCC you in."
Oh, indeed, have done so.
But better yet, you should blog it! After suitable redaction, of course.
Though if patently's example of asking awkward questions is anything to go by, don't expect a speedy reply...
Go on, Henry! Give 'em Hell!
Good for you Henry. Blog it and let us all see the response, but as Julia says don't hold your breath for a reply.
I have evidence that, during the collapse of the banks, Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown's staff never even opened emails. They just deleted them unread - hundreds of them.
OK, I'll blog it.
I'll have to set up a new one though, Grumpy Old Sod's Law is no more. Put out to grass by blogger's block and tired of being angry at everything all the time.
It may now arise, but in a different guise.
I'm (unusually) not totally convinced about this one, Julia. Yes, Healthism does target the middle classes as well, but it is hard to deny there is a strong element of middle-class snobbery involved in the targeting of McDonalds and bogof Carling offers at ASDA.
Got to say I agree with Curmudgeon on this one.
Class is not a perfect descriptor of the divide but it's close enough. More importantly, it provides a good angle to fight back upon. Just as calling your supporters bigots creates a gap between Labour and its supporters, so too does treating them as too stupid to look after themselves. Not that Labour are alone here.
"These NuPuritans would be quite happy to turn their fire on the average middle class drinker/smoker/red meat eater too."
Ah but the CiF mob don't believe that nice MC people have those kinds of habits, rather that they are all themselves NuPuritan wholesome green recycling baby factories with every right to get stroppy about other peoples' habits (for the children, obviously).
I think it's just a case of there being too many quangos and well-meaning public sector departments. These organisations have to justify their existence. One day there will be a news story on middle-class binge drinkers being a greater problem than pub-and-club yobbery. Two days later a think-tank will be lecturing the working class about how eating pie and chips is bad for them. Comrades, the state knows best.
Even if Cameron manages to win a by a slender margin, we're stuck with this unelected nomenklatura. The Tory ideal of minimal state interference will never again be realised.
"...but it is hard to deny there is a strong element of middle-class snobbery involved in the targeting of McDonalds and bogof Carling offers at ASDA."
Oh, indeed.
But that's just a starting point. Anyone who thinks this particular crocodile isn't planning to eat them too - ablbeit last - is kidding themselves...
"Class is not a perfect descriptor of the divide but it's close enough. More importantly, it provides a good angle to fight back upon. Just as calling your supporters bigots creates a gap between Labour and its supporters, so too does treating them as too stupid to look after themselves."
Except some of them undoubtedly are!
The problem being, the progressives think this can - and should - be fixed.
"I think it's just a case of there being too many quangos and well-meaning public sector departments. These organisations have to justify their existence."
Got it in one. A lot of people are hoping that, like the Cylons, iDave has a plan.
I'm not so sure...
Except some of them undoubtedly are!
So what?
If someone wants to drink themselves insensible or eat themselves to an early grave then let them do it. Provided they don't bother me on the way, I don't care.
Equally if some do-gooder wants to tell people the correct food to eat or about the harmful effects of sun beds, again I don't care.
I object to two things:
1. being taxed to pay for the do-gooder and
2. the slippery slope from "giving advice" through "nudging" to forcing people to comply.
This is all of a piece with political correctness. The same people are telling us how to think and act. I'm happy to concede that the average Mail reader is middle class yet they might as well be working class for all the elite care.
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