Via the Englishman and Letters from a Tory, this little story.
Public health “mentors” will be enlisted by the NHS to offer ‘on the spot’ advice in their local neighbourhood when they see people smoking, eating or drinking too much.
Good God! Does it ever stop? Is there no end to the obsessive interfering of this government? Is there no place where they will not seek to poke and pry? Answers on a postage stamp, please…
The Government hopes that the volunteers will help to get across its messages on healthy living in a new and influential way but the plans have been criticised as evidence of the creeping ‘nanny state’.
Creeping? Creeping!?! Stomping with size fourteen hob-nails would be closer to the truth. They stopped creeping a long time ago, they’ve bashed the door down with a battering ram and are having a rave in your living room; creeping they are not.
Speaking at the Royal Society of Arts yesterday , Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, said mentors could be “amazingly successful” and that he hoped that they could revolutionise the nation’s health.
Alan Johnson is a deluded fuckwit of the highest order. How, exactly, is pissing people off going to be “amazingly successful”? And, be under no illusion, someone proffering advice when it has not been actively sought is generally unwelcome and a guaranteed way to earn a smack in the mouth.
The mentors, who as volunteers are not paid, are expected to work to influence the people around them, offering advice to workmates, family and friends about how they should change their unhealthy habits.
If you are thinking of becoming one of these mentors, it might be worth checking that you have adequate medical insurance for that eventuality when various items will have to be removed from unmentionable parts of your anatomy – having been inserted by those on the receiving end of your sanctimonious and ill-received advice.
Eating a third fried breakfast of the week in the office canteen, having a drink ‘for the road’ at your local pub or chain-smoking another cigarette while waiting for the bus could all see the mentors spring into action to offer the Government’s advice.
Anyone springing into action as a consequence of seeing me tucking into a fry-up will be given short shrift in very short order. If I am feeling amenable, you will get away with a sharp “fuck off and mind your own business”. I am the best person to make decisions about my lifestyle and health, not the government, not ministers and not bloody interfering prodnoses posing as mentors.
Ministers are concerned that some people are turned off by its traditional methods of advising on public health, including large-scale advertising drives such as the recent £75 million Change4Life campaign.
So, having noted that being hectored and lectured by the government turns us off, they come up with a brand new spiffing scheme to… hector and lecture us. Well done. Evidence if we wanted it that mankind does not learn by his mistakes – well, the political animal anyway. The rest of us tend to have to if we want to survive.
What part of “mind your own business” is it that is so difficult for the apparatchiks of New Labour to comprehend? Don’t all shout at once…
I could fit the answer to your very first question on the postage stamp itself. Written with a quarter inch chisel tip marker.
And do these fools not know that lighting up at a bus stop is the best way of ensuring that a bus turns up a few seconds later, giving you the tough choice of wasting a cigarette or waiting for the next bus?
Oh please let it be true. A “public health mentor” offering me “on the spot advice” in my local neighbourhood when they see me smoking is exactly what I need.
I hope they enjoy eating through a straw.
“… large-scale advertising drives such as the recent £75 million Change4Life campaign.
You know one of the advantages of not having a TV, and listening to little radio apart from the news, is that I wasn’t even aware that there had been such a campaign. Ignorance is indeed bliss.
No. Ignorance isn’t bliss when these idiotic campaigns are being funded with your taxes. You should be out there lobbying your MP to get all this governmental profligacy stopped.
This government is autistic. I’m autistic and even I have learnt to keep my fucking nose out of other people’s business. The government, unfortunately, does not have to learn this lesson. Utter fuck-knuckles all.
I look foward very much to the first hospitalization of one of the drab and tragic interfering twots that invariably volunteer to do this sort of work.
In all seriousness: apart from super-fit athletes, who has the fucking right to lecture their neighbour on health?
May they die screaming.