From The Free Society website
“Think! Recycle.” Good old Chiltern Council. There was I selfishly not thinking. I might, heavens above, have thrown a plastic bottle into the wrong bin. What a useful message to have on the side of a refuse lorry.
“Think! Watch your speed.” That got, me, that one. I was doing my normal 70 miles an hour on my cut-through, taking the kids to school (no point hanging about) and noticed that sign out of the corner of my eye. Brakes went on then I can tell you, what with me not thinking and all.
“Think! Don’t drink and drive.” Eight-thirty in the morning, after I’d dropped the children off, I was just on the point of leaving the motorway, popping down the offie, bashing the door down, half-inching a bottle of Scotch and knocking it back before starting work – I’m an ambulance driver, you know. Sets you up, half a bottle of Scotch. Silly me. Thank the Lord for the Highways Agency for putting me right on that one.
Indeed, are we not fortunate, in the first decade of the 21st century, to have so many people telling us to think?
That nice podgy Jamie Oliver has been touring our schools telling the (mainly skinny) school children to stop eating sausages. Naturally we’ve been told in no uncertain terms to stop smoking. Politicians are selflessly flying the world to the best air-conditioned hotels to attend global warming conferences to make sure the rest of desist from flying, driving, using plastic bags, eating meat. Campaigners are making sure we buy only fair trade coffee and bananas (although this isn’t particularly fair on the coffee growers who don’t have the support of a western charity telling them how to be fair trade coffee growers).
We’re told too not to be sexist, racist, homophobic. Not once, every day. Much of a child’s geography schoolwork now consists of being told that naughty naughty loggers are chopping down trees in the rain forest, a region an inhospitable region full of things that will kill you they’re told would be paradise, were it not for us (adopt tone of contempt here) greedy Westerners.
None of this has anything to do with thinking. This is to do with bossing us about. Patronising us. The exhortation Think! is letting you know that as far as the authorities are concerned you’re going about your life in some sort of gormless Neanderthal stupor that requires someone of greater intelligence and sensibility (theirs) to pull you out of.
But thinking is based upon drawing on an aggregation of facts and acting upon them. It’s called growing up.
In a free society, we educate our children by giving them the tools which to think and then put them out into the world to become responsible adults. In repressive societies run by men with moustaches, we brainwash them into believing a set of value judgments we have decided are absolutes by which we have to live. And then, not trusting them to be adults, we keep thrusting them down their throats by using patronising posters.
We should be horrified at the one that ours is most starting to resemble.
Saturday, 13 February 2010
Monday, 23 February 2009
Signs of our times
From Times Online
Cable Street, scene in 1936 of one of Britain’s most infamous civic confrontations when Sir Oswald Mosley attempted to lead his Blackshirts through the East End of London, is today a quiet, rather safe, modern road.
But you wouldn’t think so by the signage that’s erupted along its path. Along with all the parking permit signs and bus stops, a huge lurid green cycle lane stretches out for half a mile or so in both directions from Shadwell Underground Station. Blue lollipop signs alert you to the fact that the cycle lane is for cyclists and the pavement for pedestrians. The message is reinforced with pictures of bicycles on the green asphalt just in case you thought it might be, say, a six feet by 3,000 feet tennis court. Bus stands and black railings, speed limits and “CCTV in operation” signs complete a hideous array of paraphernalia that dominates just this one street in London.
We are assaulted by signs telling us to slow down; signs telling us to speed up; signs telling us not loiter; not to take photographs; not to park; not to sit on the wall; not to smoke; not to play golf (really); that we are being spied upon by cctv cameras.
“Kids cook quick” is the illiterate notice on a poster board at my children’s school, just in case parents had never considered sunburn before. They might have added: “The sun is a big yellow thing in the sky; don’t look at it or you’ll go blind.”
Across London we are introduced to similarly illiterate signs such as “Help us keep your Tube safe” (as if a Tube train is suddenly going to leave its depot and get beaten up by a mainline thug that has strayed from its Euston terminus for a spot of aggro), designed to “reassure passengers” and “boost” security on public transport. Then there’s “Less road traffic emissions: The Charge is making it happen”. A glance at the stationary traffic belching out fumes as they wait at traffic lights – almost permanently on red – will tell you this is a lie. Or here’s another from Transport for London urging us to leave our desks at lunchtime and “get out more” – give use half a chance and we poor wage slaves would be “out” for half the day.
Isn’t there something Stalinist about this crude propaganda? Although we’ll never again witness posters of smiling workers wielding their sickles, it would come as no surprise to see billboards of outreach workers at play, riding their bicycles alongside bendy buses, setting forth to non-smoking riverside cafés captured on a grainy video installation by Tracey Emin. Our functionaries have gone beyond offering useful information such as the fact that there’s a very busy main road at the end of the lane and if you cycle into it you’ll get your block knocked off. They are telling you to behave yourself. What possible use is there for “cctv in operation signs” other than to say, “We’re watching you, so don’t you dare be naughty”?
At Clapham Junction railway station there is a sign telling us to: “Be safe. Take care on the stairs” – as if stations users have never before had to grapple with that most dangerous of urban phenomena; the staircase.
If we need to be told how to use a staircase, then surely these signs have lost all meaning. At another station – Harrow on the Hill – a sign has broken so it now simply reads: “Avoid Risks.” Well, here’s an idea. Given that most signs – even those telling us to stop at a main road – are about avoiding risks, why not change them all to have the same message. Imagine: “Avoid risks” repeated 1,000 times over across the country; at every junction; at every staircase; at every cycle lane. Perhaps then it will sink in that, unless you’re going to spend your days slumped in front of the shopping channel, life is a risk. And we should be thankful for it.
Cable Street, scene in 1936 of one of Britain’s most infamous civic confrontations when Sir Oswald Mosley attempted to lead his Blackshirts through the East End of London, is today a quiet, rather safe, modern road.
But you wouldn’t think so by the signage that’s erupted along its path. Along with all the parking permit signs and bus stops, a huge lurid green cycle lane stretches out for half a mile or so in both directions from Shadwell Underground Station. Blue lollipop signs alert you to the fact that the cycle lane is for cyclists and the pavement for pedestrians. The message is reinforced with pictures of bicycles on the green asphalt just in case you thought it might be, say, a six feet by 3,000 feet tennis court. Bus stands and black railings, speed limits and “CCTV in operation” signs complete a hideous array of paraphernalia that dominates just this one street in London.
We are assaulted by signs telling us to slow down; signs telling us to speed up; signs telling us not loiter; not to take photographs; not to park; not to sit on the wall; not to smoke; not to play golf (really); that we are being spied upon by cctv cameras.
“Kids cook quick” is the illiterate notice on a poster board at my children’s school, just in case parents had never considered sunburn before. They might have added: “The sun is a big yellow thing in the sky; don’t look at it or you’ll go blind.”
Across London we are introduced to similarly illiterate signs such as “Help us keep your Tube safe” (as if a Tube train is suddenly going to leave its depot and get beaten up by a mainline thug that has strayed from its Euston terminus for a spot of aggro), designed to “reassure passengers” and “boost” security on public transport. Then there’s “Less road traffic emissions: The Charge is making it happen”. A glance at the stationary traffic belching out fumes as they wait at traffic lights – almost permanently on red – will tell you this is a lie. Or here’s another from Transport for London urging us to leave our desks at lunchtime and “get out more” – give use half a chance and we poor wage slaves would be “out” for half the day.
Isn’t there something Stalinist about this crude propaganda? Although we’ll never again witness posters of smiling workers wielding their sickles, it would come as no surprise to see billboards of outreach workers at play, riding their bicycles alongside bendy buses, setting forth to non-smoking riverside cafés captured on a grainy video installation by Tracey Emin. Our functionaries have gone beyond offering useful information such as the fact that there’s a very busy main road at the end of the lane and if you cycle into it you’ll get your block knocked off. They are telling you to behave yourself. What possible use is there for “cctv in operation signs” other than to say, “We’re watching you, so don’t you dare be naughty”?
At Clapham Junction railway station there is a sign telling us to: “Be safe. Take care on the stairs” – as if stations users have never before had to grapple with that most dangerous of urban phenomena; the staircase.
If we need to be told how to use a staircase, then surely these signs have lost all meaning. At another station – Harrow on the Hill – a sign has broken so it now simply reads: “Avoid Risks.” Well, here’s an idea. Given that most signs – even those telling us to stop at a main road – are about avoiding risks, why not change them all to have the same message. Imagine: “Avoid risks” repeated 1,000 times over across the country; at every junction; at every staircase; at every cycle lane. Perhaps then it will sink in that, unless you’re going to spend your days slumped in front of the shopping channel, life is a risk. And we should be thankful for it.
Forever waiting
From Times Online
The heat, even in October, was as clammy as the showers after a school swimming session, our bodies were pressed so close we couldn’t just feel each other’s wallets, we could count the loose change, too, and the sheer frustration of being stationary seemed to fizz its own energy like a van der graaf generator – we were all wondering, this time, was someone going to blow a fuse?
The scene, you’ve probably guessed is that magnificent feat of 20th century engineering, the Northern Line, and – train derailed at Morden wouldn’t you know? – we were somewhere between Clapham North and Stockwell, just waiting.
You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that after 150 years of underground train building, someone might just have got it right by now. But they haven’t. The managers of the Tube are about as adept as running their Underground system as Chihuahuas are at climbing trees.
It’s not just the underground, though is it? Heathrow and Manchester and Stansted – shiny architectural triumphs of the modern age – are principally shopping malls to divest air travellers of their hard-earned holiday cash. Why? Because we spend so much of our time in them waiting for delayed planes they might as well try and convince us to fork out on a pair of fair isle socks. In the age of the bullet train in Japan, we sit in stationary carriages (always in the dullest of railway cuttings) watching a Greggs paper bag being blown around like a clump of stinging nettles. And make an appointment at even the swankiest dentist – let alone the Stalinist slabs of concrete that house a multitude of waiting rooms in our hospitals – and you should take an outline of that novel you’d planned and get cracking.
Thousands of years of evolution, in other words and we’re standing about in the vain hope that a streamlined train with go-faster stripes might come into the station, or forcing down yet another Costa Coffee in the terminally boring Terminal 3 with the prospect of journeying across the Atlantic being pushed ever further into the future.
And when we’re not institutionally waiting, as it were, we’re waiting for our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our children, our boss, our plumber.
Which begs the question, are they late because of the institutional late-ism that pervades our country? Or does institutional late-ism exist because our institutions are populated by listless ne’er-do-wells whose principal activity seems to doing the minimal amount of work that remunerates them sufficiently to pay the mortgage and get leathered at All Bar One at the end of the day.
Well, is surely has to be the latter. In which case, the government must take action now. Legislation must be introduced forcing the managers of train companies, airlines, airport authorities and hospitals to take responsibility for wasting so many hours of our precious time. At time of delay, they will be forced to entertain us by dressing up in clothes of the opposite gender, walking on stilts and singing Ich bin ein Berliner to the tune of the 1812 Overture.
And is that doesn’t work then a stocks should be put on every platform, station concourse and hospital waiting room in the land. Rest assured, we’ll have the squashed tomatoes all ready to throw in our hand luggage.
The heat, even in October, was as clammy as the showers after a school swimming session, our bodies were pressed so close we couldn’t just feel each other’s wallets, we could count the loose change, too, and the sheer frustration of being stationary seemed to fizz its own energy like a van der graaf generator – we were all wondering, this time, was someone going to blow a fuse?
The scene, you’ve probably guessed is that magnificent feat of 20th century engineering, the Northern Line, and – train derailed at Morden wouldn’t you know? – we were somewhere between Clapham North and Stockwell, just waiting.
You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that after 150 years of underground train building, someone might just have got it right by now. But they haven’t. The managers of the Tube are about as adept as running their Underground system as Chihuahuas are at climbing trees.
It’s not just the underground, though is it? Heathrow and Manchester and Stansted – shiny architectural triumphs of the modern age – are principally shopping malls to divest air travellers of their hard-earned holiday cash. Why? Because we spend so much of our time in them waiting for delayed planes they might as well try and convince us to fork out on a pair of fair isle socks. In the age of the bullet train in Japan, we sit in stationary carriages (always in the dullest of railway cuttings) watching a Greggs paper bag being blown around like a clump of stinging nettles. And make an appointment at even the swankiest dentist – let alone the Stalinist slabs of concrete that house a multitude of waiting rooms in our hospitals – and you should take an outline of that novel you’d planned and get cracking.
Thousands of years of evolution, in other words and we’re standing about in the vain hope that a streamlined train with go-faster stripes might come into the station, or forcing down yet another Costa Coffee in the terminally boring Terminal 3 with the prospect of journeying across the Atlantic being pushed ever further into the future.
And when we’re not institutionally waiting, as it were, we’re waiting for our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our children, our boss, our plumber.
Which begs the question, are they late because of the institutional late-ism that pervades our country? Or does institutional late-ism exist because our institutions are populated by listless ne’er-do-wells whose principal activity seems to doing the minimal amount of work that remunerates them sufficiently to pay the mortgage and get leathered at All Bar One at the end of the day.
Well, is surely has to be the latter. In which case, the government must take action now. Legislation must be introduced forcing the managers of train companies, airlines, airport authorities and hospitals to take responsibility for wasting so many hours of our precious time. At time of delay, they will be forced to entertain us by dressing up in clothes of the opposite gender, walking on stilts and singing Ich bin ein Berliner to the tune of the 1812 Overture.
And is that doesn’t work then a stocks should be put on every platform, station concourse and hospital waiting room in the land. Rest assured, we’ll have the squashed tomatoes all ready to throw in our hand luggage.
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Licensed to drive very slowly
From Compass magazine
Liverpool Council has proposed sticking an X certificate on any film with smoking, which would rank all the classic Bond movies alongside pornography and Kung Fu violence. What future, then for 007 in the modern world? We present James bond, as approved by Liverpool City Council.
‘Ah, morning Mish Moneypenny, you’re looking as beautiful as Lake Geneva on a summer morning, perhaps I could treat you to a Swiss roll a little later.’
‘That’s enough, James, M wants to see you right away.’
‘Ah, Bond! Come in. Now, we have a bit of a problem with our diplomatic relations.’
‘Yesh, I heard rumour that SPECTRE has been interfering with MI6’s communications channels.’
‘No, no, no, Bond. Bit of an internal problem, it’s about Miss Moneypenny and sexual harassment.’
‘Sexshual harassment? I admit there might be a little, ah sexshual frishon, but I wouldn’t say she’s harassing me.’
‘Bond you’re stuck in another era. And put out that cigarette, please, this is a non-smoking building.’
‘Are you telling me sir that you’ve brought me back to base because of this?’
‘Well, partly, yes, but we do have a problem with SPECTRE. They’ve been buying up muesli factories using legitimate front companies and are selling products with extremely high salt levels. The entire population of the civilised world will suffer early and agonising deaths.’
‘Yikesh!’
‘We need to send you out to Monte Carlo, where we believe Nokiablokov is setting up meetings to distribute a new brand of cereal. Heavy on salt and sugar. Go and see Q, and he’ll sort you out with what you need.’
‘Morning Bond. Off on your travels again? Well, this little treasure is perfect for nipping in and out of the streets.’
‘It looksh like a teapot on wheels.’
‘You’re behind the times, Bond. The G-Wiz AEV (Automatic Electric Vehicle) is twice winner of the Best City Car award from the Environmental Transport Association.
‘Turbo-charged I preshume.’
‘Bond, Bond, we don’t turbo-charge our vehicles any more. There’s the environment to think of. It does have a range of 60 miles, though, and is exempt from car tax.’
‘Where’sh the button for the machine gun ports and the ejector seat?’
‘The boys over at Health & Safety aren’t going to countenance an ejector seat. And you must know it’s Foreign Office policy to have not links with the arms trade. We can issue you with this very high-powered catapult, though.’
‘I might as well cycle, Q.’
‘Ha ha, very funny, Bond. But good show, keeps dangerous emissions down, what. Moneypenny has your tickets.’
‘Here you are, James. Carbon offset has been paid. See you in court.’
Shot of plane landing at Nice airport. Cut to a casino. Inside a one-eyed Russian with a pile of chips looks menacingly at 007 as he takes a seat at the roulette table. A beautiful blonde places a hand on Nokiablokov’s shoulder, but looks at Bond. ‘Martini, shaken not shtirred, and whatever she’s having,’ he tells the waitress. ‘I’m sorry sir, it is management policy not serve anyone who has had more than three drinks.’ ‘Then get me the management,’ says Bond, sparking up a Morland’s. ‘And it’s strictly no-smoking, sir.’
The wheel spins and the Russian wins. He picks up his chips, and Bond tails him to the cashier and through the lobby. The G-Wiz is brought up to the forecourt. With the ‘Please fasten your seatbelt sign flashing’ he sets off in pursuit of Nokiablokov’s limo, but headlights fill his rear-view mirror. Bond puts the accelerator to the floor, cut to speedo showing 35mph. A speed-camera flashes. Bond is overtaken.
We cut to a huge underground bunker and technicians surround Bond’s G-Wiz.
At a desk in a control room is Blofeld, with the Russian and the blonde behind him. ‘Very ecological Mr Bond but too late, I’m afraid, the planet will soon be mine.’ Technicians in neo-communist uniforms adjust machinery churning out packets of ‘Sugar Pop Pops’ and ‘Spicy Salty Popcorn’. ‘The helpless fools who fall for these products will soon be craving sugar that only I can provide them with.’
‘You have the scruplesh of a boa constrictor, Blofeld.’
‘And you Bond, are history. Take him to the room we reserve for special guests, if you don’t mind Mr Nokiablokov.’
As Bond is being led down a raised gantry, he produces the catapult from his pocket, fires off two coins that fell guards in the distance, pushes Nokiablokov away, grabs the girl and they dash onto a small underground train pulling trucks of Sugar Pop Pops. They whiz down a shoot and out into the open, climb onto a tandem that’s waiting in a village and make their escape. The mountain explodes in a cascade of cereal.
Bond’s mobile rings. ‘I’m on my way shir,’ he answers. ‘I think we can say that we’ll all be back to having our oats again.’
This article first appeared in Compass magazine
Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine and author of Strictly No! How We’re Being Overrun by the Nanny State
Liverpool Council has proposed sticking an X certificate on any film with smoking, which would rank all the classic Bond movies alongside pornography and Kung Fu violence. What future, then for 007 in the modern world? We present James bond, as approved by Liverpool City Council.
‘Ah, morning Mish Moneypenny, you’re looking as beautiful as Lake Geneva on a summer morning, perhaps I could treat you to a Swiss roll a little later.’
‘That’s enough, James, M wants to see you right away.’
‘Ah, Bond! Come in. Now, we have a bit of a problem with our diplomatic relations.’
‘Yesh, I heard rumour that SPECTRE has been interfering with MI6’s communications channels.’
‘No, no, no, Bond. Bit of an internal problem, it’s about Miss Moneypenny and sexual harassment.’
‘Sexshual harassment? I admit there might be a little, ah sexshual frishon, but I wouldn’t say she’s harassing me.’
‘Bond you’re stuck in another era. And put out that cigarette, please, this is a non-smoking building.’
‘Are you telling me sir that you’ve brought me back to base because of this?’
‘Well, partly, yes, but we do have a problem with SPECTRE. They’ve been buying up muesli factories using legitimate front companies and are selling products with extremely high salt levels. The entire population of the civilised world will suffer early and agonising deaths.’
‘Yikesh!’
‘We need to send you out to Monte Carlo, where we believe Nokiablokov is setting up meetings to distribute a new brand of cereal. Heavy on salt and sugar. Go and see Q, and he’ll sort you out with what you need.’
‘Morning Bond. Off on your travels again? Well, this little treasure is perfect for nipping in and out of the streets.’
‘It looksh like a teapot on wheels.’
‘You’re behind the times, Bond. The G-Wiz AEV (Automatic Electric Vehicle) is twice winner of the Best City Car award from the Environmental Transport Association.
‘Turbo-charged I preshume.’
‘Bond, Bond, we don’t turbo-charge our vehicles any more. There’s the environment to think of. It does have a range of 60 miles, though, and is exempt from car tax.’
‘Where’sh the button for the machine gun ports and the ejector seat?’
‘The boys over at Health & Safety aren’t going to countenance an ejector seat. And you must know it’s Foreign Office policy to have not links with the arms trade. We can issue you with this very high-powered catapult, though.’
‘I might as well cycle, Q.’
‘Ha ha, very funny, Bond. But good show, keeps dangerous emissions down, what. Moneypenny has your tickets.’
‘Here you are, James. Carbon offset has been paid. See you in court.’
Shot of plane landing at Nice airport. Cut to a casino. Inside a one-eyed Russian with a pile of chips looks menacingly at 007 as he takes a seat at the roulette table. A beautiful blonde places a hand on Nokiablokov’s shoulder, but looks at Bond. ‘Martini, shaken not shtirred, and whatever she’s having,’ he tells the waitress. ‘I’m sorry sir, it is management policy not serve anyone who has had more than three drinks.’ ‘Then get me the management,’ says Bond, sparking up a Morland’s. ‘And it’s strictly no-smoking, sir.’
The wheel spins and the Russian wins. He picks up his chips, and Bond tails him to the cashier and through the lobby. The G-Wiz is brought up to the forecourt. With the ‘Please fasten your seatbelt sign flashing’ he sets off in pursuit of Nokiablokov’s limo, but headlights fill his rear-view mirror. Bond puts the accelerator to the floor, cut to speedo showing 35mph. A speed-camera flashes. Bond is overtaken.
We cut to a huge underground bunker and technicians surround Bond’s G-Wiz.
At a desk in a control room is Blofeld, with the Russian and the blonde behind him. ‘Very ecological Mr Bond but too late, I’m afraid, the planet will soon be mine.’ Technicians in neo-communist uniforms adjust machinery churning out packets of ‘Sugar Pop Pops’ and ‘Spicy Salty Popcorn’. ‘The helpless fools who fall for these products will soon be craving sugar that only I can provide them with.’
‘You have the scruplesh of a boa constrictor, Blofeld.’
‘And you Bond, are history. Take him to the room we reserve for special guests, if you don’t mind Mr Nokiablokov.’
As Bond is being led down a raised gantry, he produces the catapult from his pocket, fires off two coins that fell guards in the distance, pushes Nokiablokov away, grabs the girl and they dash onto a small underground train pulling trucks of Sugar Pop Pops. They whiz down a shoot and out into the open, climb onto a tandem that’s waiting in a village and make their escape. The mountain explodes in a cascade of cereal.
Bond’s mobile rings. ‘I’m on my way shir,’ he answers. ‘I think we can say that we’ll all be back to having our oats again.’
This article first appeared in Compass magazine
Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine and author of Strictly No! How We’re Being Overrun by the Nanny State
Thursday, 8 May 2008
Let's ban sausages now!
From The Free Society website
We learnt last month, thanks to the World Cancer Research Fund, that eating one sausage a day raises the likelihood of contracting bowel cancer by a fifth. Yes, processed meat’s a killer.
Indeed, Professor Martin Wiseman, the charity’s medical and scientific adviser, said: ‘We are more sure now than ever before that eating processed meat increases your risk of bowel cancer, and this is why SCRF recommends that people avoid eating it. The evidence is that whether you are talking about bacon, ham, or pastrami, the safest amount to eat is nothing at all.’
The trouble is, sausage-eating is socially acceptable in today’s society. The smell of cooking fat infects our bars and restaurants, even cinema lobbies. Pre-school children are offered sausages by their parents and then their peers, and before long they are hooked, perpetuating the cult of sausage eating.
Surely, now is the time to take action.
A new organisation ASH (Action on Sausages and Health) should be set up to push for a number of measures to be taken urgently. Firstly, there should be a vigorous campaign to point out the dangers of eating sausages.
It should as soon as is practicably possible (running down of freezer stocks etc) be illegal for anyone below the age of 18 to eat sausages. It will be an offence to sell sausages to anyone below this age. Hotlines will be set up so anyone seeing a butcher sneaking a chipolata to a minor can be reported to the authorities. Councils will be given government grants to employ sausage wardens to ensure the law is being complied with.
Sausages should be subject to a tax of 85 per cent. ASH believes the best way do discourage sausage-eaters is to hit them in the pocket.
Of course many people are unaware of the health risks associated with sausage eating. ASH therefore proposes signs taking up a minimum of 35 per cent of the packaging with wordings in association with the European Union Commission for Public Health. Suggested wordings include: ‘Sausages Kill’; ‘Sausage-eating harms you and those around you’; ‘Sausage-eaters die younger’
In time, it is envisaged that pictures of the results of sausage-eating should be shown – cancerous bowels in particular – and sausages should not be on public display but kept under counter. Butchers will of course claim that their livelihoods will be threatened, but the health of the nation is at stake.
These measures might seem draconian, but ultimately, what we are looking for is a society where sausage-eating is a socially unacceptable as smoking, and in time outlawed altogether.
We learnt last month, thanks to the World Cancer Research Fund, that eating one sausage a day raises the likelihood of contracting bowel cancer by a fifth. Yes, processed meat’s a killer.
Indeed, Professor Martin Wiseman, the charity’s medical and scientific adviser, said: ‘We are more sure now than ever before that eating processed meat increases your risk of bowel cancer, and this is why SCRF recommends that people avoid eating it. The evidence is that whether you are talking about bacon, ham, or pastrami, the safest amount to eat is nothing at all.’
The trouble is, sausage-eating is socially acceptable in today’s society. The smell of cooking fat infects our bars and restaurants, even cinema lobbies. Pre-school children are offered sausages by their parents and then their peers, and before long they are hooked, perpetuating the cult of sausage eating.
Surely, now is the time to take action.
A new organisation ASH (Action on Sausages and Health) should be set up to push for a number of measures to be taken urgently. Firstly, there should be a vigorous campaign to point out the dangers of eating sausages.
It should as soon as is practicably possible (running down of freezer stocks etc) be illegal for anyone below the age of 18 to eat sausages. It will be an offence to sell sausages to anyone below this age. Hotlines will be set up so anyone seeing a butcher sneaking a chipolata to a minor can be reported to the authorities. Councils will be given government grants to employ sausage wardens to ensure the law is being complied with.
Sausages should be subject to a tax of 85 per cent. ASH believes the best way do discourage sausage-eaters is to hit them in the pocket.
Of course many people are unaware of the health risks associated with sausage eating. ASH therefore proposes signs taking up a minimum of 35 per cent of the packaging with wordings in association with the European Union Commission for Public Health. Suggested wordings include: ‘Sausages Kill’; ‘Sausage-eating harms you and those around you’; ‘Sausage-eaters die younger’
In time, it is envisaged that pictures of the results of sausage-eating should be shown – cancerous bowels in particular – and sausages should not be on public display but kept under counter. Butchers will of course claim that their livelihoods will be threatened, but the health of the nation is at stake.
These measures might seem draconian, but ultimately, what we are looking for is a society where sausage-eating is a socially unacceptable as smoking, and in time outlawed altogether.
Friday, 11 April 2008
Pedal and be damned
From The Oldie
Cycling, if we are to believe our political masters, is as close as we’ll get to Godliness.
A country stroll is punctuated by a fluorescent fleet of velocipedes bearing the legends GIANT, KONA, TREK, RIDGEBACK, CANNONDALE on their Day-Glo frames, ridden by excited wholesome young professionals taking in the country air and politely but insistently pushing you to the side of the footpath.
No city or even most modest of towns is complete without a maze of lurid green paths – although as close to nature as Apollo 13 is to an elm – to denote its environmentally correct credentials. Special traffic lights, blue circular signs and dedicated cycle lanes have become part of the firmament of civic life.
Frankly, though, these huge injections of public money into cycling paths and the ever-increasing popularity of off-roading has turned cycling from being the pursuit of left-field eco warriors into something rather more establishment. As practised by the leader of the Conservative Party.
Enter, then, the fixed-wheel bicycle.
It has no truck with panniers and bells and a gentle pedal to the office. The fixed-wheel bicycle is so-called because it has no gears and in many cases no freewheel, either. Based on lightweight track bikes, if you want to slow it down, you pedal more slowly. If you want to stop you stop pedalling and hope you don’t go flying over the handlebars. A piddly front brake is grudgingly added only to make it street legal.
The cult of the fixed-wheel bicycle was started by couriers. For them mudguards, a set of brakes and some gears was as near as dammit driving a luxury saloon – strictly for squares. Far better to careen around town on a stripped-down piece of carbon fibre that looks like an oversized insect on wheels. Not only that, having your feet in motion all the time made them as hard to ride as an unbroken horse. A junction for the fixed-wheel cyclist is merely an inconvenience at which he pedals impatiently backwards and forwards like a unicyclist, his machine balanced beneath him, ready to spring as soon as the heel of the last pedestrian has gone past his front wheel. The fixed-wheel machine is the Johnny Rotten of bicycles, and has no truck with niceties of civic life.
It was inevitable that this couldn’t give a toss I-do-this-for-a-living elitism of its rider would transfer over to the mainstream commuter.
For a certain type of cosseted middle-class man, with only a spread sheet and a presentation to get the blood coursing, the bicycle already allows him a certain dweebish machismo. But with the purchase of the fixed-wheel Bianchi Pista Steel road bike he can satisfy his lust for machines (Aprebic AC-3033 butted CroMo forks; Wellgo LU-895 pedals, anyone?) and at the same time live out his Wild One fantasies, minus the nasty cigarettes and, God-forbid smelly, petrol burning engines.
Because fixed-wheel bicycles are extremely light and extremely fast, so it is, with a Brando-esque sneer, their riders have a better chance of overtaking cabs, white vans, bendy buses, articulated lorries etc while negotiating the Elephant and Castle.
“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets,” wrote the American essayist Christopher Morley in the early part of the last century.
Pah! Not any more, mate. The bicycle certainly is no longer the dignified conveyance favoured by Oxbridge undergraduates, artisan factory workers or Derek Guyler’s Corky the policeman in Eric Sykes. As we have become more dependent on our cars and at the same time more health-obsessed, the bicycle has become a political statement.
And this is where again the fixed-wheel cycle scores double eco Brownie points. Because you have to pedal all the time, you have to be very fit. So for your fixed-wheel cyclist the calm free-wheeling past the Radcliffe Camera to the verdant college quad, clicking down a trusty Sturmey-Archer gear to ease the pain of pedalling uphill is pleasure never-to-be-found.
This kind of commitment means that fixed-wheel riders also have to be young. Which is just as well. Because they’re so difficult to ride, especially in London traffic, you have to be young enough to have as much fear (and reckless bravado) as Eddie the Eagle. You will also be far too callow to have come across Mark Twain, who wrote,
“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.” You can’t help thinking that for the fixed-wheel cyclist, this aphorism is still terrifyingly apt.
Cycling, if we are to believe our political masters, is as close as we’ll get to Godliness.
A country stroll is punctuated by a fluorescent fleet of velocipedes bearing the legends GIANT, KONA, TREK, RIDGEBACK, CANNONDALE on their Day-Glo frames, ridden by excited wholesome young professionals taking in the country air and politely but insistently pushing you to the side of the footpath.
No city or even most modest of towns is complete without a maze of lurid green paths – although as close to nature as Apollo 13 is to an elm – to denote its environmentally correct credentials. Special traffic lights, blue circular signs and dedicated cycle lanes have become part of the firmament of civic life.
Frankly, though, these huge injections of public money into cycling paths and the ever-increasing popularity of off-roading has turned cycling from being the pursuit of left-field eco warriors into something rather more establishment. As practised by the leader of the Conservative Party.
Enter, then, the fixed-wheel bicycle.
It has no truck with panniers and bells and a gentle pedal to the office. The fixed-wheel bicycle is so-called because it has no gears and in many cases no freewheel, either. Based on lightweight track bikes, if you want to slow it down, you pedal more slowly. If you want to stop you stop pedalling and hope you don’t go flying over the handlebars. A piddly front brake is grudgingly added only to make it street legal.
The cult of the fixed-wheel bicycle was started by couriers. For them mudguards, a set of brakes and some gears was as near as dammit driving a luxury saloon – strictly for squares. Far better to careen around town on a stripped-down piece of carbon fibre that looks like an oversized insect on wheels. Not only that, having your feet in motion all the time made them as hard to ride as an unbroken horse. A junction for the fixed-wheel cyclist is merely an inconvenience at which he pedals impatiently backwards and forwards like a unicyclist, his machine balanced beneath him, ready to spring as soon as the heel of the last pedestrian has gone past his front wheel. The fixed-wheel machine is the Johnny Rotten of bicycles, and has no truck with niceties of civic life.
It was inevitable that this couldn’t give a toss I-do-this-for-a-living elitism of its rider would transfer over to the mainstream commuter.
For a certain type of cosseted middle-class man, with only a spread sheet and a presentation to get the blood coursing, the bicycle already allows him a certain dweebish machismo. But with the purchase of the fixed-wheel Bianchi Pista Steel road bike he can satisfy his lust for machines (Aprebic AC-3033 butted CroMo forks; Wellgo LU-895 pedals, anyone?) and at the same time live out his Wild One fantasies, minus the nasty cigarettes and, God-forbid smelly, petrol burning engines.
Because fixed-wheel bicycles are extremely light and extremely fast, so it is, with a Brando-esque sneer, their riders have a better chance of overtaking cabs, white vans, bendy buses, articulated lorries etc while negotiating the Elephant and Castle.
“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets,” wrote the American essayist Christopher Morley in the early part of the last century.
Pah! Not any more, mate. The bicycle certainly is no longer the dignified conveyance favoured by Oxbridge undergraduates, artisan factory workers or Derek Guyler’s Corky the policeman in Eric Sykes. As we have become more dependent on our cars and at the same time more health-obsessed, the bicycle has become a political statement.
And this is where again the fixed-wheel cycle scores double eco Brownie points. Because you have to pedal all the time, you have to be very fit. So for your fixed-wheel cyclist the calm free-wheeling past the Radcliffe Camera to the verdant college quad, clicking down a trusty Sturmey-Archer gear to ease the pain of pedalling uphill is pleasure never-to-be-found.
This kind of commitment means that fixed-wheel riders also have to be young. Which is just as well. Because they’re so difficult to ride, especially in London traffic, you have to be young enough to have as much fear (and reckless bravado) as Eddie the Eagle. You will also be far too callow to have come across Mark Twain, who wrote,
“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.” You can’t help thinking that for the fixed-wheel cyclist, this aphorism is still terrifyingly apt.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
Green Is The New Red
From The Free Society website
Do you remember the excitement of seeing, up close, your first Ferrari? Gleaming like a newly painted pillar box – so low slung it was only as high as your stomach even then – snarling at the traffic lights as if it was going to eat them?
Or your first Rolls-Royce, gliding past you on the pavement; only the hiss of tyres on tarmac telling you it was mechanical? Who was inside? Somebody famous? A Royal? A film star? Michael Caine, maybe, or Sean Connery, giving the old girl a bit of a spin while he was back in Blighty?
The excitement of these vehicles, the stomach-churning roar of the Ferrari or the whisper of the Rolls-Royce, were the embodiment of power, style and freedom. Oozing personality, they said that if you were rich enough, you could accelerate away down country roads with your hair standing on end, or sink into leather, switch on the radio and let the world glide by outside. They were about wealth, character, excitement, aspiration.
Now you can forget all that. Red Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has become Green Ken Livingstone, and that means these symbols of power and wealth will cease to set the heart racing of any young boy or girl walking the streets of London.
Green Ken’s Congestion charge is this month being adjusted so ‘gas guzzlers’ have to pay such prohibitive amounts either to enter (£25) or stay in central London (£6,000 a year) that their owners will simply transfer them to the house in the country. In the name of saving the planet, the charge has become a tax. Green Ken has for years persecuted motorists for having the temerity to pick the children up from school and go to Sainsbury’s and now, at last, is his chance to have us drive drab little proletarian vehicles in the fashion of East German Trabants and promote cycling to the extent that London will resemble 1960s Peking as the workers ring and ding their way to the office.
Green Ken, in other words, and Red Ken are one of the same without the need to mention the word – let’s whisper it – socialism.
Ken might not be able to stop the City Boys from larging it up at Spearmint Rhino, but by God he’s going to make sure they go there by bicycle. The politics are the same, it’s just the colour that has changed.
It is no surprise that it should be Hilary Benn, son of Tony, the man who would have had us nationalise the building industry and the banks (thus nipping in the bud any Ferrari-buying tendencies at source) who is our Secretary of State for the Environment. He came back from a gruelling conference on climate change in Bali (the facilities at Rotherham just weren’t up to it) at the end of last year telling us that the United Kingdom would make carbon emission cuts by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020.
Back he came warning not just of climate change, but ‘dangerous’ climate change. What does this mean? It means that cars are dangerous. Aircraft are dangerous. Nasty plastic bags are dangerous. Eating meat is dangerous – cows farting, heat from abattoirs, deforestation etc. Heating our buildings is so dangerous that Mr Benn’s department Defra is making taxpayers fork out £28.3 million to make two buildings in York, only constructed in 1994, sustainable, saving 15 tons of carbon a year – the equivalent emissions, we’re told of nine houses, yes nine houses.
We are led to believe that unless we genuflect before our green commissars and accept their burdensome edicts the world will come to an end.
Reviewing How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On by Gabrielle Walker and David King, Sunday Times reviewer Richard Girling wrote: ‘It will be said of this book that it should be pressed into the hands of all those who deny the reality of climate change, or who think that human activity is not contributing to it. But of course it won’t be and, even if it were, they wouldn’t open it. Those one Planet Exxon are beyond the pull of reason.’
The idea that should you question some the most dubious, propaganda-ridden scientific rhetoric every produced, then, makes you fit only for the asylum. The same reasoning, in other words, that sent dissenters of the great Socialist Revolution of Russian to mental institutions to get their heads fixed.
In fact, there is much debate to be had. The US Senate last year received reports from more than 400 scientists stating that the average surface temperature of the Earth has not changed statistically in the past decade. The global warming we have experienced since the 1970s is cyclical and nothing to do with man's activities, or CO2, they reported.
Even more significantly, many of these 400 scientists were, or are, members of the International Panel on Climate Change who have changed their minds as a result of observational fact.
Certainly more of these 400 would be joined by others around the world if it were not for fears of financial retribution from their political masters. Again is this not the touchy-feely equivalent of Stalin’s Great Purge? To have the temerity to criticise Green politics sets you up for the same opprobrium meted out to Soviet scientists who dared question, say, ruinous collective farming.
Instead of asking scientists to explain how – if as we were all told at school that water expands when turned to ice, and 90 per cent of the Arctic is under water – it is that this global catastrophe will cause floods, governments are fermenting a collective hysteria, ignoring dissenting voices, and pouring millions into climate change projects.
Ask for a grant to carry out research into the feeding habits of squirrels and you’d be unlikely to get a 20p piece. Ask for a grant to carry out research on how global warming is destroying the squirrels’ habitat, as Nigel Calder, former editor of The New Scientist pointed out, and you’re in. This is where the money is, boys. Climate change is a catch-all for more taxes, more quangoes and more government jobs. Just as communism was about the functionary rather than the proletariat, so green politics are empowering a whole new generation of busybodies.
Councils are deciding how they deploy bin police to make sure we’re putting our rubbish in the correct receptacles, and from next year will be allowed to employ bailiffs to collect unpaid ‘bin taxes’. Before we can sell our house we are to be visited by a functionary with a clipboard to work out our thermal output formula. Haringey Council lashed out £21,000 on an aeroplane porting heat-seeking cameras to find out which homes wasted the most energy. ‘This single study will play a key role in helping us address three of the biggest issues currently facing Haringey – climate change, fuel poverty and housing waiting lists,’ claimed Labour councillor Isidoros Diakides.
Well, councillor, the biggest issues facing most Haringey residents is the fact that your council is unable to clean its litter-strewn streets, feral youths make many of them impassable and your educational standards are lower than the Victoria Line.
Meanwhile just as the Communist Party used to subject schoolchildren to the horrors of capitalism and the ruination that was round the corner for the capitalist West, so today’s children are packed off to the local library to be told that the planet will cease to exist if they don’t recycle.
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, plans geography lessons that will ensure children will learn about man-made global warming in order to help ‘lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’.
But this isn’t really for the children, of course. It is for them to persuade their parents to become good greens, in the same way that Soviet children would persuade them to be good communists and die kinder in 1930s Germany would come back from camp demanding their parents play Wagner and give them a good scrub behind the ears every day.
Just as Communist Party leaders would take themselves off to their dachas to discuss the progress of the emancipation of the proletariat, our leaders burn huge quantities of carbon fuel building glass-clad office blocks and flying to conferences in Bali to discuss how we might worker harder to, as Alan Johnson simpered, ‘quite literally’ save the planet. London’s mayor and a coterie of 60 fly off Venezuela to blag a load of cheap oil from the people’s president Chavez, for example. Meanwhile Green Ken Livingstone’s version of Pravda, The Londoner, is offering a ‘light bulb amnesty’ to those of us destroying the planet by using a 60-watt Osram in our sitting rooms. An amnesty? Er, sorry, we didn’t know lighting our homes was a criminal offence.
These lightbulbs, anyway, will soon be unavailable in the United Kingdom thanks to Comrade Benn Jr, who is happily forcing us into a half-light paradise reminiscent of Seventies Leningrad.
As we descend into an era of unprecedented political control and a world in which citizens will be rewarded for shopping neighbours who put their empty bottles in the wrong bin, there is one sentence that surely should be writ large in every institution in the land. It comes from the American journalist H.L. Mencken, who wrote 100 years ago: ‘The desire to save mankind is almost always a false front for the desire to rule it.’
Do you remember the excitement of seeing, up close, your first Ferrari? Gleaming like a newly painted pillar box – so low slung it was only as high as your stomach even then – snarling at the traffic lights as if it was going to eat them?
Or your first Rolls-Royce, gliding past you on the pavement; only the hiss of tyres on tarmac telling you it was mechanical? Who was inside? Somebody famous? A Royal? A film star? Michael Caine, maybe, or Sean Connery, giving the old girl a bit of a spin while he was back in Blighty?
The excitement of these vehicles, the stomach-churning roar of the Ferrari or the whisper of the Rolls-Royce, were the embodiment of power, style and freedom. Oozing personality, they said that if you were rich enough, you could accelerate away down country roads with your hair standing on end, or sink into leather, switch on the radio and let the world glide by outside. They were about wealth, character, excitement, aspiration.
Now you can forget all that. Red Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has become Green Ken Livingstone, and that means these symbols of power and wealth will cease to set the heart racing of any young boy or girl walking the streets of London.
Green Ken’s Congestion charge is this month being adjusted so ‘gas guzzlers’ have to pay such prohibitive amounts either to enter (£25) or stay in central London (£6,000 a year) that their owners will simply transfer them to the house in the country. In the name of saving the planet, the charge has become a tax. Green Ken has for years persecuted motorists for having the temerity to pick the children up from school and go to Sainsbury’s and now, at last, is his chance to have us drive drab little proletarian vehicles in the fashion of East German Trabants and promote cycling to the extent that London will resemble 1960s Peking as the workers ring and ding their way to the office.
Green Ken, in other words, and Red Ken are one of the same without the need to mention the word – let’s whisper it – socialism.
Ken might not be able to stop the City Boys from larging it up at Spearmint Rhino, but by God he’s going to make sure they go there by bicycle. The politics are the same, it’s just the colour that has changed.
It is no surprise that it should be Hilary Benn, son of Tony, the man who would have had us nationalise the building industry and the banks (thus nipping in the bud any Ferrari-buying tendencies at source) who is our Secretary of State for the Environment. He came back from a gruelling conference on climate change in Bali (the facilities at Rotherham just weren’t up to it) at the end of last year telling us that the United Kingdom would make carbon emission cuts by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020.
Back he came warning not just of climate change, but ‘dangerous’ climate change. What does this mean? It means that cars are dangerous. Aircraft are dangerous. Nasty plastic bags are dangerous. Eating meat is dangerous – cows farting, heat from abattoirs, deforestation etc. Heating our buildings is so dangerous that Mr Benn’s department Defra is making taxpayers fork out £28.3 million to make two buildings in York, only constructed in 1994, sustainable, saving 15 tons of carbon a year – the equivalent emissions, we’re told of nine houses, yes nine houses.
We are led to believe that unless we genuflect before our green commissars and accept their burdensome edicts the world will come to an end.
Reviewing How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On by Gabrielle Walker and David King, Sunday Times reviewer Richard Girling wrote: ‘It will be said of this book that it should be pressed into the hands of all those who deny the reality of climate change, or who think that human activity is not contributing to it. But of course it won’t be and, even if it were, they wouldn’t open it. Those one Planet Exxon are beyond the pull of reason.’
The idea that should you question some the most dubious, propaganda-ridden scientific rhetoric every produced, then, makes you fit only for the asylum. The same reasoning, in other words, that sent dissenters of the great Socialist Revolution of Russian to mental institutions to get their heads fixed.
In fact, there is much debate to be had. The US Senate last year received reports from more than 400 scientists stating that the average surface temperature of the Earth has not changed statistically in the past decade. The global warming we have experienced since the 1970s is cyclical and nothing to do with man's activities, or CO2, they reported.
Even more significantly, many of these 400 scientists were, or are, members of the International Panel on Climate Change who have changed their minds as a result of observational fact.
Certainly more of these 400 would be joined by others around the world if it were not for fears of financial retribution from their political masters. Again is this not the touchy-feely equivalent of Stalin’s Great Purge? To have the temerity to criticise Green politics sets you up for the same opprobrium meted out to Soviet scientists who dared question, say, ruinous collective farming.
Instead of asking scientists to explain how – if as we were all told at school that water expands when turned to ice, and 90 per cent of the Arctic is under water – it is that this global catastrophe will cause floods, governments are fermenting a collective hysteria, ignoring dissenting voices, and pouring millions into climate change projects.
Ask for a grant to carry out research into the feeding habits of squirrels and you’d be unlikely to get a 20p piece. Ask for a grant to carry out research on how global warming is destroying the squirrels’ habitat, as Nigel Calder, former editor of The New Scientist pointed out, and you’re in. This is where the money is, boys. Climate change is a catch-all for more taxes, more quangoes and more government jobs. Just as communism was about the functionary rather than the proletariat, so green politics are empowering a whole new generation of busybodies.
Councils are deciding how they deploy bin police to make sure we’re putting our rubbish in the correct receptacles, and from next year will be allowed to employ bailiffs to collect unpaid ‘bin taxes’. Before we can sell our house we are to be visited by a functionary with a clipboard to work out our thermal output formula. Haringey Council lashed out £21,000 on an aeroplane porting heat-seeking cameras to find out which homes wasted the most energy. ‘This single study will play a key role in helping us address three of the biggest issues currently facing Haringey – climate change, fuel poverty and housing waiting lists,’ claimed Labour councillor Isidoros Diakides.
Well, councillor, the biggest issues facing most Haringey residents is the fact that your council is unable to clean its litter-strewn streets, feral youths make many of them impassable and your educational standards are lower than the Victoria Line.
Meanwhile just as the Communist Party used to subject schoolchildren to the horrors of capitalism and the ruination that was round the corner for the capitalist West, so today’s children are packed off to the local library to be told that the planet will cease to exist if they don’t recycle.
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, plans geography lessons that will ensure children will learn about man-made global warming in order to help ‘lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’.
But this isn’t really for the children, of course. It is for them to persuade their parents to become good greens, in the same way that Soviet children would persuade them to be good communists and die kinder in 1930s Germany would come back from camp demanding their parents play Wagner and give them a good scrub behind the ears every day.
Just as Communist Party leaders would take themselves off to their dachas to discuss the progress of the emancipation of the proletariat, our leaders burn huge quantities of carbon fuel building glass-clad office blocks and flying to conferences in Bali to discuss how we might worker harder to, as Alan Johnson simpered, ‘quite literally’ save the planet. London’s mayor and a coterie of 60 fly off Venezuela to blag a load of cheap oil from the people’s president Chavez, for example. Meanwhile Green Ken Livingstone’s version of Pravda, The Londoner, is offering a ‘light bulb amnesty’ to those of us destroying the planet by using a 60-watt Osram in our sitting rooms. An amnesty? Er, sorry, we didn’t know lighting our homes was a criminal offence.
These lightbulbs, anyway, will soon be unavailable in the United Kingdom thanks to Comrade Benn Jr, who is happily forcing us into a half-light paradise reminiscent of Seventies Leningrad.
As we descend into an era of unprecedented political control and a world in which citizens will be rewarded for shopping neighbours who put their empty bottles in the wrong bin, there is one sentence that surely should be writ large in every institution in the land. It comes from the American journalist H.L. Mencken, who wrote 100 years ago: ‘The desire to save mankind is almost always a false front for the desire to rule it.’
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