Sue Kedgley says your diet is not your responsibility!

Frogblog has this astonishing post from Sue Kedgley where she damns a new UK government policy because:

"The idea is to shift responsibility for health and improving diets from the state to society and to convince people that public health is all about personal responsibility"

Yes you read it right. Sue Kedgley does not think people should be primarily responsible for their own health and their own diets.  She wants responsibility to be held by the state.  Not only that, she also thinks you all agree with her, you want to be treated like children, because she follows her comment with:

"And no, this isn’t a joke, it is for real. And since its happening over there, we will probably see a version of it happening over here soon."

You mean New Zealand might see an end to finger pointing joyless control freaks using force and regulation to control people's diets, smoking, exercise (or lack of)?  Speed the day!!  

The question is, how does Sue get up in the morning without having the state organising her meals for the day?  Maybe she simply uses Bellamys and other state owned eating houses to get reassurance that she is eating correctly. 

You see, not having had much attention lately, she has turned her attention to events outside New Zealand (because being an elected New Zealand MP means you should comment on what are basically internal policies of other liberal democracies).  She is having her perennial panic about consensual collectives of multi-ethnic adults seeking to make a living out of investing in capital and selling goods without regard for borders, race, nationality, religion or background - in other words multinational corporations.   Those despicable evil companies that sell people want they want, at prices they can afford at conveniently located stores.

Her concern is that the British Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government has invited the food industry to develop policies to encourage healthier eating or as she describes it "will focus on persuading –or ‘nudging’—people to make healthier choices without force or regulation"

This is when her synapses short circuit.  One shouldn't persuade people to eat healthier now, she disapproves of persuasion when there are the glorious tools of state "force and regulation" to compel people to eat healthier.  Presumably she wont take this as far as it has gone historically, when the Khmer Rouge had communal kitchens and cafeterias for the hard working proletariat (no disparities of wealth or inequality!) to eat the same rice gruel every day. 

Though why should I be surprised, Sue is legendary for being the greatest proponent of the use of force in Parliament.   Her dismay at the UK government not wanting to use force is because:

Apparently it’s all part of a wider Conservative agenda to replace state intervention with private and corporate action!

Her beloved Nanny State is threatened, and the exclamation mark shows how outrageous she thinks it is!

Now I have a beef about governments getting involved in this at all.  Producers of healthy foods are able enough themselves to promote their products.  Consumer and health lobby groups are also able to pay for campaigns to promote healthier eating.  The state shouldn't even be doing this.

However what is astonishing is that the Green Party thinks you shouldn't be responsible for your own health - you should be like a child, who guzzles what it feels like, on a whim, and needs the carrot and stick of the Nanny State to force you to do what is right.

She thinks the lumpenproletariat are stupid little people who need the state to force them (she doesn't like persuasion according to that article), like gullible children, to eat more fruit and vegetables, stop smoking, exercise more and get strength through the joy of being healthy.

Kedgley and her health bureaucrats wet themselves with excitement at being able to control how people live their lives, in the name of "public health" because to them, personal responsibility is a failure.  Personal responsibility means some people don't do the "right thing", and so only the state can make sure they do.  She can't stomach that lots of people LIKE McDonalds, LIKE chocolate, LIKE smoking, LIKE getting drunk, LIKE high fat high sugar food.  

Of course there is something even more sinister behind this.  Like a patronising imperial empress, she and other health busybodies, treat Maori and Pacific Islanders as children, because they disproportionately tend to eat less healthily etc, she wants to help because she thinks she should be responsible for people's lives.  Sadly she hasn't picked up that the hectoring she has advocated fails, and that people by and large know what are the healthier things to do, but don't always want to do so.  Their lives though, NOT Sue's.

Go to hell Sue, the sooner New Zealand sees the back of joyless, finger pointing, busybodies like you from Parliament, the better.  Go peddle your hectoring bullying, force people to do that, regulate this, philosophy somewhere where it is warmly welcomed - Rangoon, Pyongyang, Ashgabat or Minsk.