from a Spectator article titled Let Them Eat Gruel: Sometimes slippery slopes really do exist. Some folk warned that the public health industry – that is, the Government-Health-Security Complex – would never be satisfied with its battles against tobacco and alcohol and that it would, in time, launch fresh offensives against fast food, soft drinks, and all things salty an sweet. Don’t be silly, we were told. That’s different. Well, who looks stupid now? Like so much else this is also, in the end, a question of power and class. The NHS – treated as some kind of secular religion – is to be used as a means of shaming the population (especially the bestial lower orders) into behaving in a more comely, acceptable fashion. The class prejudice inherent in all this is rarely far from the surface. The common people are revolting. Their pleasures must be taxed or, wherever possible, suppressed entirely (see extending the ban on smoking in working-class clubs for example). And, always, the message is simple: the people – poor, lardy, wheezing, sods – are too stupid to make their own choices and it is government’s role to save them from themselves. I usually don’t see the War on Tobacco in class terms, but I suppose it is a class thing in some ways. The medical establishment, in Britain at least, are all Sir Charles This or Sir Ian That, and even Baroness Elaine The Other, so help me god. The English middle classes don’t go to pubs much more, except to eat, and they now expect them to be exactly like the restaurants they frequent, and they don’t want to see people standing around the bar drinking and smoking and laughing and throwing darts and playing pool. It doesn’t fit in with a quiet, decorous restaurant, and refined sensibilities. It’s not quite proper, is it? And now they’ve all been thrown out, it’s so much nicer, don’t you think? I can bring Aunt Maud, and know she won’t be mortally offended by bursts of raucous laughter and terrible bad language.
