This article titled “Fat chance of the Tories humiliating the real culprits” was written by Tanya Gold, for The Guardian on Friday 4th January 2013 21.00 Europe/London
Should Eric Pickles have to robot dance for his prescription glasses, for his pavements, for his road signage? It’s not as stupid a question as it sounds. In fact, down in Westminster council’s special designated brain room, where they scheme at the edges of the welfare state, in preparation for taking responsibility for public health from the NHS, the question probably obsesses them. The answer, I suspect is, tragically, no. Pickles, as Frank Skinner would say, is “Channel 5 fat”, but he is plainly too affluent for such humiliation.
Westminster has suggested that, should fat people on council tax and housing benefit refuse to go to the gym on their doctor’s advice, their welfare payments should be docked, as punishment for their expensive, degrading, unsightly fatness. Of all the London councils, Westminster seems the most desirous of becoming a sort of glossy spa hotel council, filled only with the lovely, as they bus those on housing benefit out and away.
The fact that making fat people homeless will mean councillors will have to see them more often seems to have escaped them as they write policy on the back of napkins. Read the policy document, and think of Winston Smith mindlessly doing his exercises in front of a box in 1984 because that is what the state required from him, among other things. Are these Tories aware that in their demonisation of poverty, they are beginning to sound like their own nightmare cartoon of the left?
There are two questions inside this ghastly story, and the first is the central question posed by this Tory-led coalition: who is entitled to the state’s largesse? What is it for? The answer, I think, is: bankers, bailed out; the royal family, whose income has risen in this recession thanks to the intervention of the chancellor; and those who should bridge the tax gap, estimated at £32bn in 2010-11 by HMRC, but don’t, and are only punished with a froth of meaningless rhetoric. (Do not expect those multi-national companies skilled at – legal – tax avoidance to lose their lobbying privileges any time soon.) People who earn £1m a year, too, have a tax break, as a sort of thank you for being so rich. None of these are considered a drain on the state by law-makers. For that, according to the rhetoric of this government, you have to look lower, and in the looking glass, because this policy suggestion is a significant change, and too often vomited up to stay a fantasy for ever.
Where will it end? Whose behaviour will be considered so self-destructive that the net will be removed? Drivers? Skiers? Yachtsmen? Rugby players? I doubt it. This is simply the criminalisation of misfortune. In this mindscape, the state is no longer an agency to relieve poverty, because poverty is uncivilised, but an arbiter of behaviour, a Dickensian psychopath, or god. The philosophy, of course, is cheap, and in the service of that greedy dream – low taxation. (That the fatty will have almost certainly paid tax at some point, and will possibly have a family, and a life in need of preserving is irrelevant; Tories do not mind impoverishing children to punish parents.)
It is a foolish idea, partly because fat is complex, and partly because it will not work. Some doctors are already enraged, and if the fatty will not exercise, should they be thrown on the street, homeless for want of cardio? What if the heart disease that made them fat will kill them on a treadmill? (Local government can fray in its attention to detail.) What will be the outcome? That is easy. More poverty, but that is not the state’s problem. You should not have been so fat, child.
The second question: where did the obesity crisis come from, and how to solve it? The British are already the fattest people in Europe. We have tripled our sugar consumption in 50 years. Six in 10 adults, and one in three children under 10 are overweight, which suggests it is toddlers, not welfare recipients, whom Westminster council should lock up in gyms. How to solve this? Exercise alone will do nothing; obesity comes from what you put in your mouth, and exercise is secondary, as the prime minister, who axed Labour’s two hours of compulsory sport a week in schools, seemed to acknowledge.
Perhaps greater regulation of the food industry, with its love of marketing at children with a pantheon of quite horrible cartoon characters and its happy facilitation of access to sugars and fats in inappropriate places, would help? Expect nothing of the sort from the Tories, who invited the chairman of Unilever, the evil genius behind Pot Noodle, to chair their public health commission in 2008. There is no public critique of those who actually sell the murderous food, no concerted campaign of information. McDonald’s and Coke sponsored, with a hubris I can barely swallow, the Olympics, the best days of all our lives.
So, not a health policy then; mere snobbery, and humiliation, and compounding of poverty. And so, I say again, Pickles, just for a distraction really, when will you dance?
Twitter: @TanyaGold1
Guardian
