Britain\’s 220,000 doctors are demanding a 20% increase in the cost of sugary drinks, fewer fast food outlets near schools and a ban on unhealthy food in hospitals to prevent the country\’s spiralling obesity crisis becoming unresolvable.
The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges is calling for action by ministers, the NHS, councils and food firms, as well as changes in parental behaviour, to break the cycle of \”generation after generation falling victim to obesity-related illnesses and death\”.
In a report spelling out the problem in stark terms, the academy says doctors are \”united in seeing the epidemic of obesity as the greatest public health crisis facing the UK.
Not that Trotsky particularly worried about obesity. But this is still Trotskyite.
The revolutionary vanguard, the small class that really understands the problem, self-selects to get on the committees. And then whatever the committee says is what all doctors say: must be, see, for democratic centralism says that whatever the committee says is what all members say. They are indeed the enlightened who know all, \’coz they\’re on the committee, see? How could it be otherwise?
No one at all has consulted all 220,000 doctors in the country. But the one GP whose colleagues agree is too stupid to be allowed to see patients, the one who actually adores committee work, has been selected to sit on the Lower Barsetshire GP\’s Committee To Think About Things. Which votes, along with the others too stupid to practise, for the All Barsetshire Committee To Consider Things which then selects from among its members for the East South Midlands Committee To Consider Things and so on up to the august personages who get to vote for those who sit upon the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges Committee To Consider Things who will tell us that they speak for all doctors.
Which they don\’t: this is an example of Worstall\’s Law. All organisations will end up being run by those who positively enjoy committee meetings.
And what Trotskyism does for you as a method of political organisation is concentrate power in the top committee. And you\’ve got to pass through all those lower committees to get there. Something that will only be done by those who do enjoy committee life more than a real one.
And thus are we ruled.
I think the progression is gauleiter to reichsleiter.
Really? Only 2 to 3 generations back to the 1950s, I believe? When every body was so fat, we kept rationing on just to stop everybody from dying of sugar poisoning.
Hyperbole is fine for a blog – it is appalling when it is used like this.
And how many of them are actual doctors? The standard “public health” hysteric these days is a Sociologist, or ‘Marxist’ in old money.
three posts around the fringes of this subject.
i was hoping to see some countering of the data/numbers.
Doug Casey, of Casey Research, an outfit you should know if you are serious about investments in Mineral Resources, maintains that in all organisations, government departments, private companies, etc. the Psychopaths eventually rise to top, and that at this moment in time, because we did not have the culling effect of wars for generations, we are being governed and controlled by Psychopaths.
A little bit more pessimistic than you view Tim, but looking at events around the world, more believable. The nodding useless chair warmers that you describe have been replaced by power-hunger Psychos
If we add a Carbon Tax on fuzzy drinks we can solve the obesity problem as well as have some spare cash to send to third world hell holes to keep them in their emaciated, undernourished natural state!
roym,
Yes, the “one in four are obese” line is so completely ridiculous that it shows how debased our media has become that it can be presented as fact without anyone questioning it.
Look around you. is one in every four people you see obese? Of course not. So where has this figure come from?
Three possibilities that I can see:
1) a flat out lie. Bit unlikely even for these times;
2) the definition of ‘obese’ has been watered down so much that it has lost any real meaning;
3) the real stat is “one in four are overweight or obese” and has been cut down to whip up more panic. This is a classic Leftist trick – cast the net as wide as possible yet portray the result as overwhelmingly consisting of the outliers.
Tin Foil hat time:
I am viewing a MacDonalds banner ad whilst reading this.
I bet the fucking BBC loves them.
I demand a 400% import tax on wine. Wine can be unhealthy if consumed to excess, is toxic, etc.
So, middle-class cunts, a cheap bottle of wine now costs £30. Bet you weren’t expecting that, eh? It was fine when you thought less limited to chips, burgers and Coke.
Oh, and coffee. If you drink 41 espressos in an hour you might die, so a 500% import tax on that, too. That’s £12 for your Latte this morning, Sir.
from
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2013/02/18/richard-lehmans-journal-review-18-february-2013/
“Most doctors are very uncomfortable with the fact that people over 65 who are overweight or obese live longer than those who are of
Er, um, where’s the rest of my heartfelt rant? Oh well, look at the link yourselves – scroll down to his remarks about the Lancet paper.
I do remember once sharing a house with about 10 people from a wide variety of countries. A big committee was held about the state of the shared kitchen sink and unwashed dishes. After half an hour of douchebaggery, Me and the yank cleaned the dishes went to the pub and came back in time for the end of the committee with the good news which looked as if it was about to turn nasty with no resolution in sight! Fun times
@Rob
Socialism has killed millions so 20 quid for the Guardian!
I like this logic 🙂
“A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don’t want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things.”
~H.L. Mencken
“I was hoping to see some countering of the data/numbers”
No, just no.
Do NOT engage with their terms of reference. Don’t fight on their ground – that way lies surrender, because they will never give up.
We don’t agree with the principle but disagree with the details, we disagree with the principle, on principle.
They do NOT have any business telling other people how to live their lives. End of.
It’s time we started taxing Doctors for every life they save to offset the extra TAX needed to pay for the additional old age pensions.
“i was hoping to see some countering of the data/numbers”
Don’t agree. That would be engaging with the argument on their terms.
We don’t care what the numbers are, we disagree on principle: it’s just none of their business, end of.
Don’t fight on the enemy’s ground.
Apologies for duplicate comment. Some sort of caching thing I guess.
I hope it’s not catching.
@ dearieme
Thanks – interesting reference although he does omit the argument that otherwise healthy robust individuals are more likely to get a heart attack if and just because they are overweight, so the recovery statistics for thin and fat people are not like-for-like. But he is totally right in his criticism.
Rather more incredible than the Grauniad (I observe quite a lot of overweight and obese individuals and the whole definition of obese is junk because BMI is based on the ratio of weight to the square of height instead of cube, so as average height increases so will the number alleged to be obese) is the NHS claim that 60% of all adults have excess cholesterol outside the “safe range” and so are liable to heart attacks and premature death in consequence.
“2) the definition of ‘obese’ has been watered down so much that it has lost any real meaning”
Rob, as john77 has pointed out, the use of BMI makes any statistic based on this as laughable and ‘reality based’ as those recommended alcohol units they pulled out of their fundaments a few years back.
In other words, NOT the outcome you were all hoping for
All this from the same bunch who have, for years, been over-prescribing antibiotics to the point that they are no longer of use to us…
When walking to the station this evening, and on the train home, I paid especial attention to spot any ‘obese’ people. I think I saw half a dozen, and I must have seen hundreds of people.
Where do all these ‘one in four obese’ people live?
Of course, I am assuming ‘obese’ to mean ‘very fat’, as opposed to someone who is perhaps a stone overweight, but then again I am not a Sociologist working in “public health”.
I’d hazard a guess that any breakdown of the statistics would also reveal something that the lefties wouldn’t like: that Africans, especially women, tend towards obese rather more often than their European counterparts once they become wealthy. No, I don’t have any statistics, but living here in Nigeria it strikes me how, when Nigerian women get wealthy, they tend to balloon. Those who don’t have a decent job stay skinny. I don’t know if it is because once they get rich they switch to eating more meat and their metabolisms are not used to it, or whether they just eat more in general, but it is a common complaint that any Nigerian woman rich enough to fly will spill over from her seat into yours. And in African societies, men tend to like their women a little on the porky side. And if observations of people in London or American television are anything to go by, this isn’t just restricted to Nigeria.
So, if doctors are going to be interfering in the lives of others in this way, I suspect they are going to be faced with the same discomfort as the police when handed their stop and search statistics.
@ Tim Newman
That’s something I’ve been thinking for ages.And it’s not just Africans & Afro-Caribs. It’s any from societies that have known food shortages. Asians, Turks, even some East Europeans. You even get it here in Spain with folk from the boonies. And I can remember the attitude of the Greeks I knew in London. The criticism I got from the womenfolk about needing to be fed properly if I expected to appeal as a prospective mate.
What’s the proportion of the UK population that’s immigrant now? Mostly from those backgrounds. Where a bit of lard’s a status symbol. Proof that you’ve made it.
There are 15 members on the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges Obesity Steering Group. 13 of them are medical doctors.
The software seems to have stolen the second half my comment #29, which was to the effect that the 25% figure is the proportion of people aged 16 or more with with BMI of 30 or above, and that the data come from the Health Survey for England, which sends out interviewers to measure people’s height and weight. There’s no obvious reason why this statistic should be wrong.
BMI is crude not meaningless. I am quite heavily built, but I would have to be nearly three stone over my slim weight to be obese according to the BMI definition. Sebastian Coe (who is not heavily built) would have to be about 6 stone over his competitive running weight.
BMI is scientifically meaningless. It’s not scientifically accurate as it doesn’t take into account ethnicity, it doesn’t measure mass properly (muscle vs fat), and is based on arbitrary numbers plucked out of thin air.
Most recommendation for BMI that I’ve seen also ignore sex and age – so obviously they must be tosh.
Not really Trotskyite. The Puritan-evangelical reformers were developing and deploying these tactics before Trotsky was even a spectacularly coiffed toddler.
Modern agitprop, entryism and so on may have been most thoroughly defined as a strategy (arguably) by Marxists, but the technic has been in heavy usage in Anglo (particularly) nations since the 1830s or so.
A famous example of course is alcohol temperance. Were the Anti-Saloon League marxists? No. Miserable puritanical fuckwads? Most definitely yes.