Alan’s erecting a straw man here:

“Academics and medical experts do not say that children are “at risk” of obesity or poverty because of political correctness - they say this because it’s an accurate assessment of the situation. A child who grows up in poverty, and whose parents have little or no aspiration for them, who doesn’t get to go to the best school, who isn’t blessed with an inspirational teacher, is by any definition “at risk” of becoming a poor adult. It’s not inevitable, but without some help and support, it’s highly likely.

It is simply wrong to suggest that the only solution to deep-rooted problems such as obesity is for people to be more responsible”

Cameron’s point was that the statistical trope of describing someone as ‘at risk’ - valid in as much as the figures show a greater likelihood of them suffering obesity - shouldn’t be allowed to obscure another component, namely personal choice. By no fair reading of his remarks was he suggesting it was the ‘only’ solution - simply that it was part of the solution.

The refusal to acknowledge this subtlety effectively invalidates this entire speech in so much as it’s a rebuttal to Camerons. The Health Minister should know better….

Leafy back gardens to play in? What rubbish. Here in the north, the terraced houses don’t have leafy back gardens, but guess what? It didn’t stop children playing out in the streets. They don’t do now because they’re afraid of getting stabbed. That’s the real failure of New Labour.

“They used the term “passive obesity,” and pointed out that it particularly effects the socially and economically disadvantaged.”

That doesn’t strike me as a very scientific idea, and more of a political slogan. But then, I suppose if government (and “industry”, whoever they are) bankroll the research, I suppose you can expect an answer that will include more government as part of the solution.

-

“Not every family can afford to buy fresh organic produce from the local farmer’s market, or to put food on the table that their children will refuse to eat.”

Agreed, but less talk of the organic (there is scarce evidence that it is anymore healthy than ordinary food from the supermarket). Why don’t you guys do something genuinely progressive and differentiate yourselves properly from the Tories at the same time: lower food prices for vegetables and fruit.

How? Reform, abolish or otherwise remove us from the Common Agricultural Policy so we can open our food markets to the rest of the world (give developing countries a chance to grow economically at the same time!), thus removing the current trade tariffs which disproportionately impact on foods other than meat and processed foods. I would do what government’s can actually do with relative ease (address the policies that create the underlying economic distortions that are effecting people’s lifestyle choices), rather than trying to gather a coalition of the willing from the coercive and voluntary sectors into some new leviathan state and social programme to fix a problem that government is already partly responsible for.

@Cox: I’m not sure you can place the blame for children no longer playing out in the streets, particularly in the North, at the feet of New Labour. The media has to take a fairly hefty portion of the blame. Motor vehicles, too, play a part.

“Why don’t you guys do something genuinely progressive and differentiate yourselves properly from the Tories at the same time: lower food prices for vegetables and fruit.”

Because that wouldn’t give them the free rein to put in place authoritarian, manipulative policies that the likes of the Fabians fall over themselves to applaud.

@ QuestionThat

I think you misunderstand my point. I was not saying that children no longer playing out has increased the risk of obesity. I was pointing out that it’s ridiculous to claim that only those children with “leafy back gardens” are able to play out, as it were some middle class privilege.

“The Foresight scientists highlighted the fact that for an increasing number of people, weight gain is inevitable and largely involuntary as a consequence of exposure to a modern lifestyle.”

Hopefully I might get some support from libertarians on this site when I say that a wonderful concept called ‘personal responsibility’ can go a long way. Weight gain is NOT inevitable, it is NOT involuntary, and the only thing it is a consequence of is people eating too much.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

“So how should a serious political party of the 21st century faced with the acute and growing problems [of obesity] react?”

Liberally. End of.

Well, ok, no, not end of. That would be silly.

AJ correctly interprets the Tory approach as paternalism, which is just the nanny state in blue flavour as far as I’m concerned. The operative word in personal responsibility is, er, *personal* - i.e. one’s *personal* choice can be to totally ignore whatever-it-is. Standing up and hectoring people to take personal responsibility is an idiotic contradiction in terms and underlines how poorly many Tories really understand liberalism.

So what to do instead?

“But rather than engage in oversimplification, government has to develop and implement a sustained response to a problem that will have profound and long-term consequences for health and well-being and major costs to the health budget and the wider economy.”

…and in this para and the successive ones is summed up everything that doesn’t worked about Labour. Why why WHY do they persist in this belief that it is possible for a central authority to generate a “movement” among supposedly free citizens? I find this the single most frustrating thing about the left. How many more years’ evidence to the contrary do they need? How many more polyclinics, eco-towns and the like before they actually look at the evidence in front of them?

I do like killing two birds with one stone.

This is a long post to simply say “please stop picking on fat people”, isn’t it? Or am I missing some substantive policy proposal hidden in the politician-speak here?

Also:

“This is an extract from a speech made to the Fabian Society yesterday, published with consent. The full version is here.”

I really, REALLY think this should be at the top so that it shows on the front page in these cases, oh editor mine. It’s disingenuous to let everybody think MPs are writing for us when they aren’t.

Perhaps the government should say that it will not tolerate obesity (and smoking) amongst public sector workers and the staff of people working for public sector contractors in the private and voluntary sectors. (Obviously there would have to be transitional provisions - perhaps a year to shape up or ship out…)

Perhaps the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green parties should say that obesity (and smoking) disqualify for party membership.

Illiberal? Of course: all public health policy is illiberal by nature. We nowardays think that anyone who is opposed to vaccination is a crank, but there was a politically significant anti-vaccination movement in the later part of the 19th century.

“This is an extract from a speech made to the Fabian Society yesterday, published with consent. The full version is here.”

Oh! Thanks for pointing that out. I was confused. When he said “Cameron is following a Tory tradition which would have been familiar to the Fabian progressives of the 20s and 30s, and which was distilled to create pure Thatcherism in the 80s”, I thought he was arguing AGAINST the Fabian tradition and trying to identify it with big-government Conservatism. After all, the “progressive” Fabians of the 20s and 30s had a very radical solution to social failure that went rather beyond the “hectoring” that Conservative solutions usually involve: http://blog.fair-use.org/category/fabian-society/

But I suppose, if he was talking to the Fabians, he must have been trying to draw a contrast between them, a contrast that I think, if you look into it, actually makes Thatcherites come out looking slightly less morally bankrupt.

“We nowardays think that anyone who is opposed to vaccination is a crank.”

Uhh… well I am a big fan of vaccination but I wouldn’t want it to be compulsory. That is what would make it illiberal, rather than simple good medical practice.

“all public health policy is illiberal by nature”

The comparison doesn’t work, though, because refusing a vaccination endangers others, thereby failing the basic liberalism test. Being overweight doesn’t endanger anybody else. The borderline case, if anything, is children with parents who don’t supply them with a decent diet.

Great, Alan. “We need to tackle obesity. We need to do it without preaching, but without neglecting.” So… what are you actually going to do? Oh yeah, right. You don’t know.

Damn. Out-liberalled.

their children will refuse to eat

Call me old fashioned, but I didn’t get to choose what or whether I ate.

You know, laughing at fat people probably isn’t that bad a way to encourage them to eat less .

Alan:

“‘[T]his is not a licence to hector and lecture people on how they should spend their lives”

I don’t suppose this mean that you’re going to tell the Chief Medical Officer to shut up and stop issuing demands for bans on pub happy hours, smoking, and just about anything else he thinks will grab a cheap headline in the Daily Mail.

Tackling obesity requires a much broader partnership, not only with families, but with employers, retailers, the leisure industry, the media, local government and the voluntary sector.

And this ‘partnership’ will do what, exactly? You don’t say…

“all public health policy is illiberal by nature”

What?? Public health policy is a joke because whoever uses the term is fooling themselves that such a thing exists, which it doesn’t because as far as health is concerned there is no ‘public’ only collected individuals for whose individual needs must be accounted for. But that’s not the way the centralised state bureaucracy works, is it?

So do ‘we’ need to ‘do something’ about obesity at all? Basically, no. What ‘we’ need to do is to get over our irrational prejudices and subconscious fears about body shapes and give people a fair chance of making healthy choices through a properly balanced education system with sufficient sufficiently accurate information which enables people to accept and deal with their own conclusions.

This speech is entirely consistent as a voice from a government whose weight of focus is concentrated on one end of the scales - a government which fails to accept the responsibility for the consequences of its own behaviour, so the irony seems completely lost on the high-flying author of it.

This speech wallows in its self-centred need for political gratification and a short-term fix on a flashy policy of dubious nutritional value. Such a policy just doesn’t digest - if ’something must be done’, why highlight the fact that the something wasn’t being done before during the previous decade in power?

If people want to eat loads then there’s nothing the government or any other partnership should be doing to try and stop that, it’s their decision. What the government should be concentrating on is the fact there isn’t enough incentive or (at least perception of) time to choose to undo obesity. With working the hours we do in the UK, commuting the level we do, people believe that getting in to shape is something that can’t be achieved.

Why do you think people fall for these things like the pink patch? Because ultimately they want the quick fix, not because it’s easy but because it’s the only way they see the way out of their problem. In all honesty TV Chefs like Ramsey and Oliver have done vastly more to combat this side of the obesity issue that government ever has. The breaking down of perceptions about how hard, expensive and/or time consuming making healthy food is, that is one of the greatest successes in health in the last decade but needs cultivating more.

Cookery lessons in school was a good start, and I hope that the wide raning inclusion of these is properly funded to ensure ALL schools have adequate facilities and ALL kids have the opportunity (I’ve written a piece on here about that before, you can read a version on my site here

Until this government tackles the issue of work life balance, and just how much time we have to spend on ourselves…I know that after work and commuting (thankfully short for me) I need to split my time down to relationship time, personal interest time, and essential activities (eating, sleeping, etc). I rarely have time to say “You know what I will go and do a 30 minute run now” or “Let’s do some weight training” or whatever, and I consider myself to be pretty lucky on the work-life balance scale.

We’ve been in fairly affluent times, and that means people treat themselves more and think less of consequences. This isn’t something government should be interfering in, it should simply be allowing an easier route for those that “see the error of their ways”, if you wish to portray it that way, to actually make the choices they need to get healthier.

Can I urge some caution among the uber-libertarians here?

It’s easy to push the line that governments have no business dictating what people eat - on one level that’s an obvious point. But to be fair to Alan (not something I’m naturally inclined towards) government (and hence us through taxes) end up footing the bill for the resultant health problems for individuals who don’t eat sensibly. It follows then that there’s some merit in governments trying to educate people about nutrition and diets etc.

Lee - is there really any correlation between working/commuting and obesity? Perhaps this is just my experience in London but the commuters I see seem to have a fairly “lean and hungry look”.

Liam - thats the great problem with socialised healthcare. You might want government to take on the responsibility of looking after people, but they can’t do that effectively without taking away people’s rights (in other words, telling them how to live their lives). It is the inherent dark side of state welfare.

Having said that, my impression is that the problems of obesity are to a great extent overstated and certainly not convincingly quantified (see note at the bottom): http://burningourmoney.blogspot.com/2008/07/taking-our-responsibilities-seriously.html

In fact, I am not even sure the current definitions of obesity are particularly good at picking out people with unhealthy lifestyles (body mass index or whatever they call it is quite notorious).

Remember too that this obesity crisis isn’t exactly making huge in-roads into our average life expectancy and end-of-life care is very expensive (and partly socialised) now. I am not a huge believer in forcing people to live absolutely as long as possible, especially if it involves not having as much fun!

“But rather than engage in oversimplification, government has to develop and implement a sustained response to a problem that will have profound …”

OK let’s hear it.

Tackling obesity requires a much broader partnership, not only with families, but with employers, retailers, the leisure industry, the media, local government and the voluntary sector….

This code for “We have no idea what to do.” What a pity.

I guess it will end up as whinging at industry for producing what people want to buy. Schemes to promote exercise which benefit mostly the people employed to implement them. Ring-fenced project money for local government, who clearly have less idea than you do what is most needed in Barrow in Furness. More ways for voluntary sector people to spend time filling in forms. Dontcha just love partnership.

This idea of partnership was an important stage in Labour Party development - it meant realising that the state wasn’t some great benefactor that could make things better on its own by fiat. But these days it seems to mean being seen to be doing something while having no idea what to do.

Now maybe doing nothing is right. It is certainly better than Cameron’s body fascism. But if that is the plan, then admit it.

Tackling obesity requires a much broader partnership, not only with families, but with employers, retailers, the leisure industry, the media, local government and the voluntary sector.

Erm, this rather smacks of those CIF articles where people actually haven’t read it properly. If you look at the related headlines, this is exactly what he proposes and is trying to do.

“But to be fair to Alan (not something I’m naturally inclined towards) government (and hence us through taxes) end up footing the bill for the resultant health problems for individuals who don’t eat sensibly. It follows then that there’s some merit in governments trying to educate people about nutrition and diets etc.”

I don’t think anyone disagrees with education on the issues of health and nutrition. But if people are fully informed and choose not to follow advice, why should they be stopped?

Certainly not for cost reasons, if the government wasn’t letting people get away with buying ready meals and sandwiches without paying tax then the impact of food (i.e, the more you eat, the more you give the government to deal with eating related health problems) then there would be more than enough money to pay for the cost of obesity treatment. They only have themselves to blame on this one.

And ..

“Lee - is there really any correlation between working/commuting and obesity? Perhaps this is just my experience in London but the commuters I see seem to have a fairly “lean and hungry look”.”

I never said working long hours and community long journeys is a link to obesity, only I believe it to be a link to lessened likelihood of returning to a healthy weight. As a side issue, do you think it’s right that people currently go to the gym during their lunch hour rather than actually “do lunch” because that’s the only time of the day they can viably fit that activity in? There’s a balance to be made, too much free time (from my experience) can lead to an unhealthy lifestyle, while too little time can also do so. Somewhere in the middle is the balance that needs to be achieved and I’m not confident that enough employees in this country do.

“do you think it’s right that people currently go to the gym during their lunch hour rather than actually “do lunch” because that’s the only time of the day they can viably fit that activity in?”

I don’t think its any of my business what people choose to do with their free time (of which, on the whole, I believe people have more than they used to).

I’m not asking in the sense of “oh my god, those health loving bastards, stop them”, I’m asking if it is right that it is the only chance they may feel they have. It’s not much of a choice at all if it is.

Lee - I am not sure how people who can afford gym membership can be so completely lacking in “choice” of that type and whether we should really be focusing our policy on them. What it means is, they feel that given their priorities (to work, to family, to friends, to everything else) they don’t have more time to go to the gym.

There are immigrant workers who work what we would think of as 2 full-time jobs and then sleep in a room with 4 or 5 other people so that they can save enough to send a remittance back to their family. They don’t forgo gym membership, but personal privacy and any free time at all. I wouldn’t deny them that choice either (we are hardly going to ban them from working as hard as they choose to and we shouldn’t stop them from supporting whoever they want around the world).

But it does mean that I am going to consider concerns for Julia and Tristam who struggle to get to the gym as much as they would like to be a probable example of middle class myopia (how did the telegraph put it, the “coping class”?). The best thing we could do for them, probably, is lower their tax burden and deregulate the housing market so that they don’t have such a huge mortgage burden to keep them at their work desks doing overtime. The best thing we could do for those poorer than that is to lower food prices (as I said above).

You’re missing the point, the point is that it doesn’t matter if you’re middle class, working class or whatever. The situation of free time and work-life balance is an almost classless problem, and relates much more with the make up of a persons immediate family than of their economic standing.

Obesity may be more prevalent in poorer families but the opportunities and education for getting any obese person back to good health are poor for all, regardless of their “poverty”, or lack thereof.

It’s not mortgages causing the problem it is employers. People have very little opportunity to choose to take up employment for unconventional lengths of time (say 30 hours a week), if someone thinks they can live on the proportionate wage then that’s fine, but if employers are unwilling to take the hit of employing two “part time” people, at more money than one full time person, then that option just won’t physically exist.

Lowering food prices is also precisely the *wrong* thing to do. Increasing the price of non-basic foods (things that aren’t veg, fruit, bread, you know what I’m talking about) will be a great way, if this link between obesity and poverty is true, to really push people towards actually cooking healthier meals. Obviously they can cook unhealthy meals too but at least the “ready meal” type situation will be dissuaded and, at the least, contributing to the NHS burden.

Umm… or lowering the price of healthy basic foods which is what I advocated above, as they are proportionately more expensive than they should be at the moment compared to their processed and meat counterparts.

Fair enough ;)

They used the term “passive obesity,” and pointed out that it particularly effects the socially and economically disadvantaged.Not every child is lucky enough to live in an environment that promotes good health. Not every family has a leafy back garden for their kids to play in. Not every family can afford to buy fresh organic produce from the local farmer’s market, or to put food on the table that their children will refuse to eat.