The Latest Threat To Public Health - Freedom And Responsibility

Only a newspaper in the Guardian stable could possibly come out with an editorial - an editorial, no less, not some CiF fruitcake-scribbled psychobabble - which can send a chill down the spine of the free-thinking, while simultaneously exhibiting elements of profoundly subtle satire.

How else does one describe a paragraph such as this?

Barely 10 weeks into office, the coalition seems to have made it a priority to dismantle key elements of what most doctors thought was a settled consensus on key public health measures. Labour's use of intervention, exhortation and regulation has now been junked in favour of a reliance on individual freedom, personal responsibility and industry behaving itself.

And this is a bad thing?

By 'settled consensus', they presumably mean a circular jerk of doctors deciding how best to issue orders to those who pay their wages. All to produce a society where intervention and regulation are considered utopian goals, and - this concept truly baffles me - where individual freedom and personal responsibility are evil qualities which should be eradicated.

Oh, believe me, there's more where that came from. Straw men, absurd comparisons, opinions held up as fact, juvenile hyperbole, you name it.

It's like Orwell never existed.