An addendum: the new ‘underclass’
James Gubb, 1 October 2008
This blog last Thursday wrote about whether or not the government was pushing the public health agenda too far without proper debate on the implications for civil liberty. Apparently, this doesn’t seem to matter a jot to the Department of Health.
From 1 October, graphic picture warnings ‘illustrating the devastating effects that tobacco has on health’ will replace written warnings on cigarette packets. Probably not a bad move in itself; the evidence linking smoking to disease is strong and research from Canada – which already uses the idea – indicates that some 31 per cent of ex-smokers reported the picture warnings had motivated them to quit.
However, it is the tone of the DH’s press release that should be of cause for concern. The headline reads ‘smokers forced to face their demons’. The opening gambit reads ‘the UK’s 10 million smokers should brace themselves’. The language is telling. The State doesn’t tolerate you; it doesn’t like what you are doing to your bodies. You shouldn’t be doing it. I’m no personal fan of smoking – in fact I hate it – but is it not a personal choice for the individual to make?
There was a time when the left took the view that people’s private lives should be their own, even if they made ‘immoral’ or perverse choices, where the right thought it perfectly correct for the State to uphold moral code with the full rigour of law.
Was it not Roy Jenkins, the Labour Home Secretary, who helped push through the most radical package of private member bills ever to remove the State’s power over individual freedom? Under his patch in the 1960s hanging went; flogging was made illegal; laws on abortion were liberalised; homosexual acts between men over 21 were decriminalised; state censorship of plays was ended; and divorce law was eased, along with laws on suicide and alcohol licensing.
Yet, now it appears both major political parties are committed moralising like never before.
Indeed – but it is a peculiar form of morality. It seems to object to activities not on the ground of their intrinsic demerits – as regards health – but in so far as they have been catered for by mass marketing. I well recall a lecturer of mine – far left, of course – explaining that he objected to cigarettes more than to marijua simply because “big business” made a profit from tobacco. We will not go into the multiple delusions which this view involved. It simply goes to show that “political correctness” has no more title to respect as a logical system than any other system of ethics. Indeed, in so far as it represents an essentially marxist outlook, it is presumably as shallow and inconsistent as its parent philosophy. What worries me, however, is that in the name of this bundle of attitudes, personal freedoms are being eroded fast. Anyone in the employ of the government would have to think very carefully before propounding arguments in favour of restricting – say – male homosexual activity, despite the abundant evidence that it is certainly damaging to health. The tissues of the rectum and the anus are, as all doctors know, easily damaged when forced to play the role more usually associated with the vagina. Can it really be a healthy society in which one is freer to put one’s penis to unorthodox uses than one’s tongue? This is not the only body of opinion now under a semi-official cloud. Opposition to immigration, multiculturalism and European integration are all now nearer to the borders of illegality than is proper to a free society. Such developments have been facilitated, of course, by the preponderant and overbearing role of the state. It is because most of us now visit the doctor as apparent suppliants of government largesse that the doctor feels free to lecture us, rather than catering for our preferred lifestyle. It is because the pot of money assigned from taxation to medical care is rigidly unresponsive to actual demand that rationing creeps in. Combine these two influences and it comes as no surprise that patients are bossed around and the old are neglected – or more or less ordered to die. Freedom is underwritten by property and the first essential items of property are one’s body and one’s mind. From controlling medicine the state has moved on to a pretension to controlling our health. From here it will move towards the attempted control of our behaviour – according to its own cock-eyed, incoherent lights.