The Conservative Party, which through multiple lockdowns ordered Britons to stay in their homes and businesses to close their doors, has been accused of an “ideological opposition to ‘nanny statism’.” Tory Lord James Bethell took his party to task for not being interventionist enough in terms of protecting the health of the British population. He said this mindset—one which prefers not to disturb peoples’ business; to ‘stay in one’s lane’, so to speak—was responsible for discouraging ministers from addressing “the fundamental health of the nation.”
His assessment came amid heavy criticism of the National Health Service’s management. A report this week found that the NHS is performing “substantially less well” than similar countries on life expectancy, with numbers of MRI scanners and hospital beds among the lowest. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he is working to make the service “fit for the future” through further investment and plans to boost training in what he described as “one of the most significant announcements in the history of the NHS.”
But this approach, according to Lord Bethell, who is a former Conservative Party health minister, will only trim the fat of the issues surrounding the institution. He told The Times Health Commission that rather than work towards “getting the existing system to work harder,” the government should implement a preventative approach to reduce the rise in “costly” chronic illnesses.
The peer said:
There are millions and millions of people getting iller and iller all the time, 25% of the country has a chronic disease of some kind. And there is no way that you can devise a sickness service that can possibly keep up with that growing stock of illness.
His comments included the claim that “toxic environments … cause an enormous amount of disease but we turn our backs on sensible measures to try and reduce gambling, drinking, smoking and junk food.” Yet Bethell, among all other Britons, already cannot buy a packet of cigarettes without being told it could contribute to his death. Nor can he place a bet without being instructed to “gamble responsibly,” or hear the announcement for a test cricket “drinks” break without being directed to safety information at drinkaware.co.uk.
Lord Bethell made a passing reference to the impact of home life on the health of the nation, about which very much can be said. Reports over recent years have shown that a concerning number of parents put fizzy drinks in baby bottles, contributing to woeful tooth decay figures (damage, the vast majority of which is completely preventable, suffered by just under one-quarter of five year olds); that one-fifth of two-to-four year olds are obese; even that Britain, according to a 2016 paper in The Lancet, has the lowest breastfeeding rate in the world, which is understood to impact future health.
Given all this, it is questionable, at best, that attaching labels telling consumers—for example, ‘Big Macs kill’—would make much of a difference to the NHS given how embedded so many of our health problems are, and how deeply a good number of these stem from improper (or, sometimes, absent) parenting.
It is also telling, though not surprising, that a Conservative Party peer should call on his party’s government to introduce such finger-wagging measures as ‘deterrent’ labels rather than to address the roots of our health problems. After so many years of decline on the social level, any attempt at a fix will require much more than soundbites and newspaper interviews.
