Thursday 15 July 2021

NOW 'BIG BROTHER' THREATENS OUR FOOD.

Drip, drip, drip.

There was a time when people were allowed to take responsibility for their own lives, to make decisions about their children and what they ate, who they liked and what they said. No longer it seems.

We've already been subjected to ludicrous laws around the various 'hate crimes', laws which effectively require police, judges and juries to decide the motivations of offenders by inferring their thought processes. A variety of words which were commonplace in my youth, words that may have been intended as offensive but were frequently used without malice, have now been effectively banned and anyone using them may well find themselves with police knocking on the door. Our children are no longer educated in traditional subjects or ways but are indoctrinated with a mish-mash of left wing ideologies, while parents are powerless to intervene. 

Increasingly, responsibility for children and their welfare has moved from parents to the State with ever greater state provision for nursery care and 'free' school meals while a myriad of rules and regulations now control what children can and can't do as well as who can be trusted to be with them.

Today, the latest piece of potential state sponsored nonsense has hit the headlines in the shape of a National Food Strategy. Ostensibly intended to tackle inherent poor diets and obesity, the strategy proposes that government should impose taxes on whatever foodstuffs are considered to be unhealthy, while our GP's should offer prescriptions for fruit and vegetables to those in need. That the strategy, produced by Henry Dimbleby, a grandson of the less than svelte Richard, is a step, actually several miles, too far seems to have been the reaction of many, not least Prime Minister Boris Johnson who has reportedly said that he does not find the idea of taxes on food 'attractive'.

To my mind, taxes should never be attractive, Taxes should only ever be essential and should never be used to impose particular behaviours on the populace. It is morally wrong to try to promote any particular action by way of financial rewards or disincentives and it is a grotesque misuse of government authority so to do, at least in a democracy.

By all means, government should encourage people to adopt safe and healthy lifestyles but they should only ever do so by way of education and information. Any other approach smacks of the methods of the Chinese Communist Party and George Orwell's 'Big Brother' society.

We all have free choice in how we live our lives and if we choose to make wrong choices, so be it. It is not for governments to promote, or even enforce, whatever happens to be the latest faddish nonsense. Today's fad too often turns out to be tomorrow's catastrophe and governments should get on with running the country, not telling us all how to live our lives. Or do we all want to live in the ultimate 'Nanny State' ?