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Individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity, according to a recent BBC headline. Because of the abundance of food today and our sedentary lifestyles, it is not the problem of fatness that should amaze us as much as the fact that anyone succeeds in remaining lean, says Dr Susan Jebb of the Medical Research Council. The Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, comments that “s olutions will not be found in exhortations to greater individual responsibility”. Although nearly a quarter of the British population is now obese, a threefold increase since 1980, he asserts that people today are not more gluttonous than previous generations. In fact, from evidence in a recent report commissioned by government, it is clear that individual choices lie at the heart of the problem. For example, the Japanese and the Koreans, despite being wealthy and desk-bound, are hardly affected by the world’s obesity epidemic. Within Europe the British are fatter than any other nation, and in the world league table the Americans come top, of course. Within the UK there is a strong correlation between poverty, poor education and fatness. So the issue is cultural not genetic or environmental. If we are going to reduce the risks posed by obesity to public health and our economy, it is profoundly unhelpful to imply that being overweight is inevitable, understandable or not anyone’s fault. Pretty much everyone has the potential to be trim and to bring up fit children. We have the right to be disapproving of obesity because the costs to public health and to national productivity are borne by us all. We should stigmatise those who bring up a fat child because it is a form of abuse, which probably condemns it to a shorter and less healthy life. The view that people are not to blame for their own actions debilitates any society. It is the most pernicious form of political correctness. Recently, in the United States brain-scan evidence was presented in court in an attempt to establish diminished responsibility in a serial rape trial. In essence the defence argued that the brain rather than the accused was responsible for his violent attacks. On the other hand, the think tank The Future Laboratory claims to detect in Britain a revival of communities which take more responsibility for their own destinies. Concerned citizens, it seems, are grouping together to save the local pub or post office from closure, perhaps by investing their own money and time. In one instance outraged neighbours fought back against plans approved by their council for a hideous burger bar on the town’s seafront. They bought the site from the fast food chain and erected an architecturally significant building in which, reportedly, they now serve wholesome food. The think tankers would probably not wish to be told that the new trend which they have detected is essentially Thatcherite. In a famous interview for Woman’s Own magazine in 1987 she said: “Too many…. people have been given to understand: ‘I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!’ ….They are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people…. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour.” Margaret Thatcher was not arguing, as her detractors claimed, that human beings are feral creatures without social obligations. Rather she was attacking the idea that we can shuffle off our responsibilities on to some amorphous thing which lazily we dub “society”. It is exactly what the Health Secretary is saying today about fatness. Society is to blame for people being obese, and exhortations to personal responsibility are therefore pointless. Last Thursday a statue of David Lloyd George was unveiled in Parliament Square. As Chancellor of the Exchequer before World War I he was the instigator of the welfare state, introducing both old age pensions and national insurance. His initiatives survive in recognisable form to this day. In 1942 William Beveridge built on those ideas with proposals to protect people’s living standards “from cradle to grave”. The sentiment was admirable, but as the notion that the state must aid us from birth to death has penetrated the national psyche, it has brought its problems. All our great social reformers foresaw the potential moral hazard of induced dependency on the state and a diminished sense of personal responsibility. But for all their prescience the catastrophe was not avoided. Nor could even Margaret Thatcher do much to alter it. “Aspiration” is a popular word in British politics today. All parties claim to believe in it. They want people from humble backgrounds to be able to rise, probably through education, to a better and more fulfilling life. But aspiration has no meaning unless we first assert that people have personal responsibility. Unless it is clear that people can – indeed must – do things for themselves, then ideas of hard work, commitment and application will be incomprehensible. On a recent visit to Colombia, I was struck that city mayors build impressive libraries in the slums. Those fine buildings fill up with eager children who want to read books or work on the banks of computers. It was clear to me that the youngsters believed that learning offered the best route out of their parents’ poverty. In Britain, however, I get little sense of that. The country seems generally anti-intellectual, and the poorest in our society display little interest or faith in education. Our society’s cultural leaders have to regain self-confidence. They have too readily descended into cultural relativism, a belief that the elite has no right to impose its values and standards on the rest. The result has been merely to perpetuate the elite, by making its world impenetrable. The dumbing down of media, of television in particular, has done the poor no favours. They have been fed a diet of low-brow entertainment and offered a series of uninspiring role-models by programme-makers who display lofty condescension, even cynicism. Instead of spending time and energy debating how television channels have defrauded viewers of a few million pounds in rigged competitions, we might discuss the broader issue of what they owe our society. What part do they play in discouraging social responsibility, and on the other hand, how might they seek to raise people’s self-esteem and aspirations? Also, our welfare systems make few demands on recipients. We continue to hand out money in what American social reformers now call “something for nothing” systems. “Something for something”, by contrast, might require youngsters to attend a certain number of hours of class and to demonstrate achievement before they could receive their benefit. Voters complain that in British politics today there is little to distinguish the parties. I generally fall back on replying that now, as ever, Labour believes that most social improvement comes from government, and the Conservatives think that it mainly originates with people. But even that has been less clear of late, partly because the Tories have been chastened by defeats, and partly because Tony Blair put some faith in markets. The arrival of Gordon Brown gives the Conservatives new options. As Chancellor he was the exponent par excellence of government-organised change. He redistributed wealth through tax credits and spent hugely on public services, with limited success in both cases. Johnson’s attitude to personal responsibility shows the Brown administration to be not-so-new Labour after all. Now the Tories are becoming bolder. In education, particularly, they are charting a new course, opening the way for state-funded pupils to go to new schools run outside the public sector. Parents will recover the responsibility for making choices for their children. The Conservatives want to revive school uniforms too, as a proxy for discipline and rigour. Schools should aspire for children even when parents do not. Conflicting views between Brown and David Cameron about how far people should be held responsible for themselves could again supply the essential difference between the parties. As the lady said twenty years ago, people are casting their problems on society. That has to stop, because that way lies only social decadence.
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