Old Git surveys the Fats

Mounjaro on the National Health

My beloved daughter Bee

has been campaigning for five years, with her Charity Tast-Ed, for better school food, and more awareness in schools of the perils of a bad diet.

And everyone, from Jamie Oliver upwards and downwards, can see what the problem is. Why, then, are our streets full of sad, waddling families, and children clamouring for burgers and fries? Why are our hospital beds groaning under the weight of overweight patients who have heart problems?

The story in the newspapers that Nice, the health watchdog, has ruled that 3.4 million adults in the UK are eligible for injections of a drug which makes you lose your appetite - Mounjaro - is deeply depressing. We all know, from looking about us in the train or the bus - and, more irritatingly, squeezing into our seats on an aeroplane next to a person who might be eligible for Mouniaro - that we are surrounded by people whose metabolism is a catastrophe . And we all know that (in so far as these things matter, or can be assessed) it is not entirely “their fault”.

Many of us must wonder if the answer to the questions why the poor are fat, and why a fifth of the population are on anti-depressants, and 3.4 million “need” slimming drugs is to be found in the magnificent essay by Tolstoy - “Why do People Stupefy Themselves?” But some of the phenomena afflicting us are new.

Governments of all persuasions, whether they call themselves left or right, love bossing us. The peculiar people who want to become professional politicians would not choose this career if they did not have the fantasy that they can control other people’s lives. In “normal” people, this unpleasant urge is satisfied by dog-ownership or marriage. (Just listen to the way in which dog-owners or the married speak to their charges! The peace of Hampstead Heath in the mornings is shattered by the dog-owners issuing unnecessary commands and instructions all the time as they stomp along).

Politicians are bossy-bootses on this scale, and then multiply it by ten. So, of course, the “conservatives” wanted to ban smoking cigarettes. Because the profits have gone out of tobacco, it was safe to do so, but it is not safe for them to ban the much more dangerous cheap foodstuffs purveyed by most supermarkets and fast-food joints. There are plenty of nonagenarian smokers, but NO old people who are obese as a result of eating junk food. All such people die young, costing the rest of us a fortune in drugs, care, etc. Yes, their lives are very sad, and we do not want to persecute THEM, but we should persecute those who made them fat, for the simple and cynical reason of making themselves very rich.

If any Government closed down Macdonalds and Burger King by punitive taxation, they would, of course, find themselves destroyed by the “money power”. Any attempt to do so would put Chancellor Reeves and PM Starmer in the position of Truss and Kwarteng, international pariahs. Any attempt, meanwhile, by a Health Secretary, to improve hospital foods, and to offer healthy snacks in the dismal little shops in our NHS hospitals would be welcome, but you can be sure, when this Labour Government goes, hospital shops will still be peddling crisps, chocolates etc and not a fresh apple in sight.

Likewise, we know that it would be more sensible to have a healthy diet, rather than popping expensive pills such as Mounjaro. But if the NHS said that its aim was to stop putting old people on Stattins and the rest of us on appetite-depressants, the pharmaceutical companies would not be happy. And all pension funds depend on the prosperity of pharmaceutical companies.

So, in order to insure what governments of left and right believe to be a good thing - “growth” - we live in a society where one group of capitalists feed up the poor with junk food. Huge profits accrue. Another group invent pills to make the poor overweight thin again. Even bigger profits. What a totally shitty world we have invented for ourselves.

Ted Heath, a former Conservative PM, lost an election by issuing a simple challenge to the coal-miners. “Who Governs?” He hoped the electorate would answer this question, “You, Ted!” Instead, because of his quite exceptionally unappealing personality, the country booted him out. Mrs Thatcher’s first act, on becoming PM some years later, was to ennoble Joe Gormley, the head of the National Union of Mine Workers, who had, in effect, defeated the awful Heath.

But you do not have to be William Morris or Karl Marx to know the answer to the question, “Who governs?” The answer is, The Money People. The people who are so cynical that they want to sell addictive foods which will make babies and toddlers obese, everlastingly craving the disgusting and harmful food available at these fast food joints. And the equally sinister people who peddle pharmaceuticals.

There was a really good discussion on Time Radio on the Stig Abell, Aasmah Mir show on 5th Dec. Kathleen Stock (in a sane world, of course, she would be given Absolute Power).

was arguing against people eating rubbish and then trying to cure themselves by taking pills. But Ed Vaizey - a nice chap, but utterly wrong-headed - confessed to being on Stattins, Mounjaro, the lot, and was speaking almost as if it was like Beef and Liberty, a free man’s right to be given all this poison. The obvious solution - Don’t eat and drink rubbish, and don’t take pills - had eluded this otherwise intelligent man.

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