ON Radio 4’s Today programme last week, Nicola Sturgeon was under pressure over the Scottish Government’s handling of the coronavirus and the wider problem of health inequalities.
Look at the “appalling” life expectancy of men in the east end of Glasgow, the interviewer pushed. The First Minister’s voice, unusually, quivered for a second, before she replied that in fact her Government had introduced, “ground-breaking public health steps, minimum pricing of alcohol being one”.
In the not too distant past the life expectancy of the poorest sections of society would have triggered a response about unemployment, poverty and social inequality in general.
The idea that you can overcome poverty by increasing the price of anything would have seemed perverse. And there would have been questions raised about this strange thing – “health inequalities”.
Perhaps the reason there was no questioning of this strange concept on the Today programme is that both the First Minister and the interviewer are part of what some call the “new class”, a class who understand the world, politics and what is right and wrong through the prism of another modern concept, that of “lifestyle choices”.
The new class, it has been noted, tend to be preoccupied with their health to the point of obsession, often to the point where their exercise regime, body fat monitoring and cholesterol counting leaves them emaciated.
They sip their wine or boutique beers, and are appalled by binge drinking, fast food guzzling and perhaps most of all by smoking.
Interestingly, unlike the old moralists who would denounce excess, this new class have a seemingly caring approach to those who make “incorrect” lifestyle choices.
Alcoholism, for example, is not a sin, but a “disease” and politicians discussing this “illness” hang their heads and demonstrate a teary eye.
It appears to be contradictory, that the disdain for those who make “incorrect choices” is mixed with an empathy for the alcoholic and the addict.
The reality is that both outlooks are based on a degraded view of people and one that sees us all as diminished beings, more like animals than humans, as vile, but also as “poor dears” who cannot be reasoned with or condemned nor indeed allowed to make our own decisions, as lab rats who must be constantly nudged to behave correctly.
With no sense of either social or individual transformation the end result is the new elites’ “ground-breaking” policies enforced upon us to cure our “health inequalities”.
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