We're All Idiots!

So we're all so stupid and self destructive to the point where we have to be protected from ourselves, or so it would seem. Now we have the spectre of cigarettes no longer being allowed to be in sight of customers in shops, or indeed for the packets to have any colour other than white, so as to ensure we will not be seduced by the pretty colours, to take up this evil habit. This is despite the fact that this same Government sees fit to rest some £11 billion a year from smokers wallets, who then go on to cost society a mere £3.6 billion in health care. Seems pretty much a bargain to me!

No, I do not encourage smoking, it is dangerous and destructive of health. It has been established that smoking can and does cause lung cancer, that I accept. It also causes Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, probably more often than Cancer, but that is not the point. Banning the display of anything, has no foundation in the evidence of prevention, be it Tobacco, Alcohol or indeed anything, and has been counter productive or even dangerous. One only has to look at the Prohibition of Alcohol in the US to form that opinion. Placing things 'under the counter' has usually created a vicarious desire to obtain said things whatever they may be. Not gifting people with the brains with which they were born is worse. But more, personal freedom is curtailed. We no longer have any liberals in Government only a few Liberals.

Politicians, especially the draconian regimes we have enjoyed since 1979, have not been able to resist the pleasure of forbidding things, they feel to be injurious to health, despite the fact that they often continued in those same pleasures (sins), behind the closed doors of Government themselves. Maggie herself liked a few whiskies and without doubt John Major, enjoyed pleasuring Edwina, despite his public condemnation of others who enjoyed extra marital 'hobbies'. There is of course considerable evidence, that drinking moderately is in fact healthful (and sex is both good for the mind and body) but politicians seem to feel it essential to regiment the behaviour of the 'proles' just because they have it in their gift to do so. Most of the time their efforts not only have been in vain, but wrong.

They have preached that 'fat' is bad and makes you fat and gives you heart disease, unless of course it is a fat sanctioned by the 'health police' at the Food Standards Agency (now DH), which will be a vegetable oil then. That helps get rid of the enormous surplus of this Government subsidised crop extract, that is only fit for biodiesel, not human consumption. In fact, look only to the arable farming lobby to see that we are entreated to eat. Grains, or extracts of grains, with some more, err... grains.

Red Meat, well that's bad too, but it isn't of course. It just isn't part of the Farming Lobby (anymore) because that has been 'hijacked' by the arable crop magnates, who can run several thousands acres of heavily subsidised grain producing land with two men and a vast array of machinery. Look to where the money is, and where it isn't, you will find that which is 'bad' for you. So the livestock producers, of lamb, beef, pork et al, are all struggling to make ends meet.

As for milk, well the same goes. Producers of high quality grass fed (the cows that is) milk, especially high fat Jersey, Guernsey and Buffalo milk are dwindling, because the Dairy magnates just want cheap, bulk milk with low nutritional value, to process into that 'white water' that is stacked on the supermarket shelves, all because we are told not consume dairy fat.

There is always an agenda, always motivation beneath the surface, even if it seems benign or co-incidental. We no longer have any liberal minded politicians, just the Neo-Thatcherites, the inheritors of the Blairite agenda. There is little 'real' opposition, just arguments about the position of the deckchairs on 'Titanic' UK, between a bunch of bickering 'toffs' and academics, who cannot resist the temptation to micromanage the lives of their people. Trouble is, they're s**t at it.