Blair's nanny govt leaves little choice

To paraphrase Isaac Bashevis Singer, modern Britain has to believe in free will. It has no choice. The options are pretty much like the Model-T Ford car cheerily advertised thus by its maker — any colour, so long as it's black. So, the average adult in Tony Blair's Britain now has the choice to have a fag, fatty food or fornicate, just as long as he doesn't actually do it.The notion that millennial European man and woman and the overstretched health budget of their country can be saved through spinach, smoke-free lungs and sexual conservatism is spreading like a dangerous virus across the continent. The Finns, arguably started it, many decades ago. And now the famously eccentric English and fabulously drunken, fried-food-bingeing Scots have been offered this remarkable lifestyle choice too: smoke if you want to, just don't do it this side of the Suez unless you're prepared to break the law and get spat upon by passive smokers angry they're being denied the right to clean air. So where are we at? Labour, the most nannying government in British history, has begun a campaign to re-brand the very word choice. Like 'Animal Farm', choice now means ban. Or a command issued by the 'servants of the people' for the greater common good. When Blair's government recently issued a White Paper on public health, 'choice' was mentioned twice in the title and 35 times within the document. There is the choice to do one's duty and as an act of patriotism give up eating too many chips; walk or cycle rather than loll in front of the TV; drink little or not at all and spit in the face of "tobacco capitalism". Where and when have we heard that before? Alarmingly enough, in Hitler's Germany, back in the 1940s. The Third Reich depended on wholesomeness. Every individual had to do his "duty" by being healthy. To this end, the government insisted on "the primacy of the public good over individual liberties". Fast forward to Blair, who handsomely acknowledges the rights of both smokers and non-smokers (and presumably couch potatoes, junk food consumers and binge drinkers too), but insists they "have responsibilities — to themselves, to each other, to their families, and to the wider community". Don't get me wrong. Modern governments need to re-jig the law and run public health campaigns in order to point their citizens in the right direction and help them lead happier lives. Often, government action achieves remarkable results. Nearly 40 years after Britain banned TV tobacco advertising, the number of smokers has fallen from 45 per cent of the population to 26 per cent. And there was a 7 per cent fall in fatal alcohol-related road accidents barely two years after the 1967 Road Safety Act made it illegal to drink and drive. But it cannot and must not be government business to tell a people what to eat, how much to drink; where and with whom to have sex. Dressing it up as nirvana for the nation's soul is just a thinly-disguised tyranny.