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Obesity? This is a job for Supernanny
Fat is not a feminist issue, as Susie Orbach once claimed. Fat is a class issue. Rich, educated people are not fat; you see almost no children in private schools who are overweight. Fatness and obesity are directly related to lower education and lower incomes.
What is sad is that at a time when this country is richer than ever and ought to have better schools than ever, we have far more fat people than ever — a dangerous explosion of flab. Last week the Department of Health issued a report grimly called Forecasting Obesity to 2010 and its findings were grotesque. Within four years, it predicts, a third of all adults — 13m people — will be obese. So will 1m children.
Obese means not just podgy, but dangerously, disablingly, distastefully fat, as in American fat.
This is not just shocking; it has also happened shockingly fast. As the report says, a third of all men will be obese by 2010; in 1993 the figure was only — if one can say only of such a large figure — 13%, rising to 24% in 2004.
The same is true of women, although the rate is rising more slowly; 16% were obese in 1993, 24% in 2004, and the trend is expected to rise until 2010. The proportion of boys who were obese stood at 17% in 2003 and is predicted to rise to 19% by 2010, while among girls it is expected to increase more swiftly from 16% to 22%.
This presents an awkward challenge to libertarians. The libertarian assumption is that we should all be free to do what we want, as far as possible, and if some people’s lifestyle choices involve snacking on deep-fried Mars bars and triple-processed cheeseburgers, other people have no business interfering, still less the government.
Besides, there is the embarrassing fact that those who eat and drink junk do so for cheap comfort and because they are either too poor or too ignorant (or both) to prepare healthy food. It doesn’t come well from the consumers of steamed organic asparagus and free-range ducks’ breasts to criticise those who can manage only frozen reconstituted chicken nuggets and sugary baked beans.
However, obesity does not concern only the obese. It concerns all of us. Obese parents produce obese children, and obesity places a crippling burden on the National Health Service, quite apart from the many personal miseries involved. Currently 10% of NHS resources are spent on diabetes (two-thirds of which is the avoidable type 2 associated with obesity) and this could easily double within the next four years to 20%.
This is quite apart from the increased risk among the obese of heart disease and other serious illness. More young people are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, something previously seen only in people over 40. In these circumstances even the most swivel-eyed libertarian would probably agree, for once, that something must be done and even perhaps by the government.
Curiously enough, however, in one of the few areas where our ever-intrusive government might for once justifiably intrude, new Labour does almost nothing. Possibly as a result of the ferocious lobbying of the food industry, ministers restrict themselves to making repetitive noises about healthy living and “small changes” that won’t cost anybody anything.
Tony Blair said last month that if the food industry did not agree to limit junk food advertisements by 2007 he would bring in mandatory rules, but he has said that before and more than once. Besides, why not bring them in straight away? His government has persistently ignored the demands of the Commons health select committee for a traffic light system of food labelling, enabling shoppers to make informed choices.
England’s chief medical officer warned in this year’s annual report that public health budgets were being raided to deal with deficits. That is the reality behind government talk of raising public awareness.
I have never been convinced that government health education has any effect. Despite the “five-a-day” campaign, only a quarter of people in England eat vegetables every day. About half of overweight men are in denial; they don’t see themselves as overweight, according to the report.
There is nothing complicated about being thin. Being fat is usually the result of eating too much junk food and taking too little exercise. Being thin means eating much less food, avoiding junk food altogether and taking exercise every day. It may be that nothing can be done about the plague of obesity; there is a growing epidemic in Europe and worldwide. Perhaps affluence is a disease to which only the fortunate few are immune. But if anything could be done about it, it would have to be radical.
Nobody who craves cheap comfort food will willingly give it up. But if over-processed, over-refined food and junk food were to become expensive while healthy fresh food became cheap — the opposite of the case today — people would be forced to eat well. This could be done through taxes or subsidies. Alternatively, you could ration unhealthy food.
There could be a public campaign against fattening food, just as there was against smoking, aimed at making everyone ashamed of consuming anything naughty but nice. I am just as greedy as anyone else but I have come to think of cakes, biscuits, crisps, sweets, white bread and puddings as more or less toxic. Foods like this should have health warnings — “cake can kill”. They are not just unnecessary, empty calories; they interfere with your blood sugar levels, affect your appetite and your mood; they may even induce food addiction. The same applies to alcohol: more than a modest amount makes you fat, interferes with your mood and is often addictive.
Just as there would need to be financial incentives to eat well, there should also be inducements to take exercise. The cost should be subsidised or declarable against tax. Employers should be required to give workers time off to go to the gym or jog. We could imitate the Japanese and have mass group exercises at work every day.
And that is the problem. Obesity, one of the trials of affluence, can be solved only, if at all, by the kind of interventionism that has been discredited by the failure of socialism. Liberty is indivisible; it belongs to the ignorant and the low paid just as much as to anyone else. Perhaps obesity is one of the many prices of liberty. Fat is a freedom issue.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 27, 2006 | Comments (3)
Our murderous migrant Tower of Babel
Last week, at long last, Damilola Taylor’s teenage killers were convicted of manslaughter after years of incompetence in the criminal justice system. Also last week, at long last, after years of incompetence — not to mention wilful blindness and dishonesty — the government admitted that the immigration system wasn’t working. The home secretary confessed as much in a speech on Wednesday. Even Polly Toynbee, La Pasionaria of The Guardian, at long last has agreed.
This coincidence isn’t just striking; it is shameful. For although Damilola was killed by the two Preddie brothers, a large part of the responsibility for his death lies with the sanctimonious irresponsibility at the heart of Britain’s immigration policy.
The estate where he died in Peckham, south London, was, and is, a disgraceful monument to it and to the dishonest thinking behind it. The government has been either unwilling or unable to control, or to admit to, or even to estimate the vast numbers of new arrivals. Only now is it beginning to wonder whether this influx was an entirely good thing.
At the time of Damilola’s death the ethnic composition of north Peckham in Southwark, where the estate lies, was 43.4% white, 15.9% black Caribbean, 26.6% black African, 4.1% black other, 7.9% Asian and 2.2% other. Today, in the borough of Southwark as a whole, about a third of the entire population comes from a black or ethnic minority “community”, as official figures so tendentiously put it, when the problem is precisely the lack of community. “More than 100 languages are spoken in our schools and 43% of our pupils speak English as an additional language,” says the council.
This shows, as the council says, a rich diversity and for many years in this country we have been required by the progressive establishment to celebrate this diversity. Yet such extreme diversity is quite obviously at odds with community. It is at odds with the development of shared culture and shared purpose, of shared language in shared school rooms and the creation of the ties that bind a community together.
To throw together such a hugely various collection of people from all over the world, in such numbers, from all kinds of different cultures speaking different languages, is to create a miserable, murderous Tower of Babel. So it has proved in Southwark and in other places like it. The result is racial tension of all kinds, bullying, crime and fear.
If you wanted to invent a way of demoralising people and setting them against each other in their deprivation, you could hardly have come up with anything better, short of bombing them. The ties of community are fragile; they are hard to weave but easy to break; they can’t be drawn together by wishful thinking.
Community needs a critical mass of familiarity, shared language, shared tradition and shared moral attitudes. A strong community can accept outsiders and is often enriched by them, as ours has been, but it also needs a high degree of common purpose and common culture. That might seem blindingly obvious, yet immigration policy has been based on a determined refusal to admit the obvious.
Southwark today is still considered a high crime area by the Home Office and a high youth crime area. Its crime rate has been rising since Damilola’s death, largely because crimes of violence against the person committed by the young and very young are rising. Violent crime there has risen from 10,000 incidents in 2000-01 to 12,500 in 2005-06, even though huge sums of money have been thrown at the problem.
The council’s Safer Southwark Partnership report describes well established youth gangs shamelessly in place, detailing their ethnic make-up and precise territory. These gangs are made up of the most wretched children, rather like Damilola’s feral killers — uncared for, uneducated, unremembered and directionless in a Dickensian urban wilderness. To call such lost boys “the scum of the earth”, as the Preddies were denounced last week, is to be wilfully ignorant of what has been done to them — of how they have been failed by society at every level, by their own cultures and by irresponsible political policies.
Meanwhile, it seems that Southwark’s educational attainments are “low”, by this country’s already low standards. That is hardly surprising. It is difficult to teach children of different ability in one class, let alone children who speak little English but many other languages. That’s another obvious fact that is rarely discussed.
It must also be difficult to teach (or protect) children who have been uprooted from elsewhere, to try to cope in a new and harsh environment, like Damilola, a recent arrival himself. One of the problems faced by inner-city schoolchildren, many of them migrants or from minorities, is constant movement. They hardly settle in one school when for various reasons they move to another, full of new strangers. This is another serious problem in the education system that is hardly discussed.
It may be that large sums of money cannot solve these intractable, government-made problems, but certainly money is a part of any solution. Last week, for instance, it emerged that the Youth Justice Board has told prison governors to try to identify young offenders in prison who might be suitable for early release, because we are about to run out of prison cells. So boys like Damilola’s killers, at an earlier stage of their criminal careers perhaps, could be set free. It defies belief.
Also last week Lord Bruce-Lockhart, chairman of the Local Government Association, wrote to the home secretary saying that council tax might have to rise because of Labour’s inability to work out how many immigrants were coming here. The government has seriously underestimated the numbers. As a result there is extreme pressure on some schools and social services. The same is true of hospitals.
John Reid has, at long last, begun to talk of “optimum levels” of immigration. This sounds faintly encouraging but he will have to be courageous if he means to do anything. The optimum number, for some time to come, is not far from zero — impossible though that would be. Damilola’s fate, and the fate of his killers, ought to remind us forcibly that we are not really able to look after the immigrants who are here already.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 13, 2006 | Comments (1)
An unliberated bias in favour of women
What is a woman worth? That is the question that has to be faced by divorcing couples and by their lawyers. The answers seem to be getting curiouser and curiouser
Last week a judge ordered an insurance broker to give his former wife a settlement of £48m. She had earlier refused his offer of about £20m, which is why the matter went to court. No doubt Beverley Charman was an exemplary wife in every way, and it is of course written in the Book of Proverbs that the price of a virtuous woman is above rubies, but even so, £48m seems a little steep. It would buy a couple of continents’ worth of rubies.
The same nasty question was lurking behind the sum of £800,000 awarded last week in compensation to Helen Green who had been bullied at Deutsche Bank by several colleagues. Why £800,000? Why are this young woman’s hurt feelings worth nearly £1m? It is distinctly more than she would get in state criminal injuries compensation if she lost a lung (£3,500), the use of all her limbs (£250,000) or all her lifetime’s earnings (£500,000 maximum and rarely granted). Something has gone wrong with the national sense of priorities.
Bullying is as wrong as it is common, and it is right that her employers should be held to account for allowing it to continue. So, however, should she. Mature women (and men) are responsible for defending themselves. Most women, or at any rate most women over 40, have had to handle constant bullying or sexual harassment at work without expecting compensation or even sympathy, still less a small fortune.
I think with regret back to the days when I could have claimed at least one rather large fortune, if only I had gone to an industrial tribunal. “You’re finished. You’re pregnant,” my head of department told me in front of several witnesses. If only I had developed the ferocious sense of entitlement that many women seem to have today. If only I had seen those L’Oréal advertisements for expensive face cream, in which a smirking woman murmurs, “ Because I’m worth it.”
What women are really worth is beset with confusion and contradiction. I’m not talking about our existential value: I mean a woman’s worth when money and portable property change hands — on employment, on unfair treatment, on paying taxes, on receiving pensions, on getting cash from her husband or, above all, on divorce.
There was a time, until about 20 years ago, when what women wanted — what women felt they were worth — was equal pay for equal work in a climate of equal opportunity and genuine meritocracy. One of the logical consequences was that no woman was entitled to take out of a marriage any more than she brought into it.
That view was later softened by a recognition that childbearing and childcare present a serious opportunity cost to most women — value lost, so to speak, although it represents tremendous value added to her children and family. So now people tend to agree that at divorce a woman should be compensated both for the real value that she brought to the marriage and for the opportunity cost to herself — her long slide down the career ladder, her loss of a personal pension, her reduced chances of finding another spouse. That all comes expensive, especially to a rich husband.
Even so I do not see how it could come to £48m, unless the wife had been directly involved in creating that wealth. No matter how swollen my self-esteem, no matter how exquisite my catering or cosseted my children, no matter how alpha my embonpoint, I would find it embarrassing to turn down a £20m divorce settlement on the grounds that I was worth more. Even Princess Diana settled for £17m.
My husband and I once tried to work out, purely commercially, what a particular wife was worth — she and her highly paid husband were old friends and she was by agreement a stay-at-home mother. We tried to figure out what her various services — housekeeping, administrative, catering, childcare, sexual, social and other — were worth as tactfully as possible, but the depressing truth was that he could easily have replaced her with nannies and caterers and a part-time PA, not to mention high-class sex workers, for a great deal less than the cash it cost him to support her as things were. In a happy marriage, of course, all this is meaningless; the value of a wife is above rubies and so is her husband’s, for richer and for poorer. The trouble starts when people start having to make estimates.
There is a surprisingly unliberated tendency among women, and among men, to make estimates that are unfairly biased in favour of women. The judge in the Charmans’ hearing said, rightly, that although both of them, starting with nothing, had played their part in the marriage, this was one of the “very small category of cases where, wholly exceptionally, the wealth created is of extraordinary proportions from extraordinary talent and energy” — which I take to mean that the wife did not have a lot to do with the success — and therefore the husband could keep more than half the assets.
That still left the wife with £48m (37% of the assets). But then the judge made some odd remarks about old-fashioned attitudes. Discussing John Charman’s determination “to protect what he regards as wealth generated entirely by his efforts”, he said: “In the narrow, old-fashioned sense, that perspective is understandable, if somewhat anachronistic. Nowadays it must attract little sympathy.”
Wrong. It is the judge who sounds old-fashioned. This country is awash with clever and hardworking men who earn or make huge sums of money while their wives do little — rather less than the average wife on an average income — to contribute to domestic comfort and not much to advance their husband’s careers. Often they do not work themselves.
That does not mean they are not entitled to proper compensation on divorce, but I think the assumption that they are entitled to half the fruits of the marriage, unless there is good reason why not, is absurd. If feminism means anything worthwhile at all, it means that women should try to be fair to men, just as they demand men be fair to them. Women should not try to inflate their value merely because men have deflated it for generations.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 06, 2006 | Comments (1)
