David Cameron: Clock-Watching Puppet Prime Minister

Is David Cameron the most naïve and manipulated Prime Minister this country has ever seen? Or is he just buying time strutting around number 10 - following unavoidable orders from unelected supranational bodies - until he can command the same fees as Tony Blair?

It has to be one of the above following his latest astonishingly illiberal utterance.

Denmark recently became the first country in the world to impose a surcharge on foods that contain more than 2.3 per cent saturated fat. The levy targets high-fat products such as butter, milk, cheese, pizza, meat, oil and processed food.

Mr Cameron told the Conservative conference that a similar move should not be ruled out in the UK.

“I think it is something that we should look at,” he said in an interview with Five Live. “The problem in the past when people have looked at using the tax system in this way is the impact it can have on people on low incomes. But frankly, do we have a problem with the growing level of obesity? Yes.

“I am worried about the costs to the health service, the fact that some people are going to have shorter lives than their parents.”

Firstly, it must be pointed out that Cameron has swallowed one of the biggest lies ever to be placed in front of the British public with that last sentence. He may have wisely downgraded superlative fucktard Jamie Oliver's quite absurd claim that "this will be the first generation in which children are predicted to die before their parents", to just some children. But then, there will always - in any generation - be some children who die earlier than their parents, and our ever-increasing longevity as a population shows that anyone trying to force such a nonsensical terror on us is quite loopy. Brendan O'Neill put it best last year.

The Oliver campaign summed up so much that was wrong with the frequently illiberal and patronising political agendas of the Blair and then Brown regimes.

It ... captured the New Labour government’s reliance on fearmongering over facts in its campaign to make us all change our behaviour. The Oliver campaign was built on the utterly unfounded, pseudo-scientific idea that today’s children would die before their parents if they didn’t start eating Oliver-approved Italian-style food instead of the stodgy so-called meat invented by Bernard Matthews. Oliver repeated this shrill, evidence-lite ‘children dying’ shtick in his response to Lansley yesterday – scaremongering disguised once more as ‘science’.

The reference to Lansley is that the Health Minister had, at the time, quite rightly dismissed Oliver's narcissistic hyperbole as being emotional poppycock which has no place in making policy.

Cameron yesterday swept all that away in siding with the old New Labour approach of substituting validity with, err, whatever self-serving berks with loud-hailers are barking about at the moment.

This is a total abandonment of the 'nudge' principle which he had trumpeted prior to the General Election. And how the blithering fuck does this square with the Coalition's promise to restore civil liberties and end the incessant nanny state mentality?

Don't even attempt to answer that, it'll raise your blood pressure to unacceptable levels and I'm not insured against your no win, no fee claim.

The explanation, of course, is that his hands are tied, as a must-read article at The Economic Voice describes.

It has now been announced that there is a global discussion on having a fat tax. However, nobody told the public that discussions about taxing our most popular foods commenced some time ago by unelected bureaucrats. Is this what now passes for democracy? All EU Countries signed up to the European Charter on Counteracting Obesity at the Counteracting Obesity Conference in Istanbul, Turkey in 2006. That event was promoted by the World Health Organization, so expect to see similar programs in other regions. The treaty commits signatory nations to “economic measures that facilitate healthier food choices”, which is precisely what we see here in Denmark.

Is it becoming a bit clearer now?

And for those hoping to get Danish butter exports on the cheap, think again. The ironically named Hungary has already jumped on the bandwagon with its own fat tax. It has also been proposed for the UK by the BBC and others. We even see a fat tax discussed for the USA.

There is also currently a bill passing through Parliament called the Public Bodies (Sustainable Food) Bill, which will enforce low fat, high carb diets upon all public institutions, including schools, hospitals, care homes and prisons.

This is a done deal. You have as much chance of stopping it - with your one cross in a box every five years - as you have halting a four-tonner hurtling up the motorway at 90mph by throwing Doris the lollipop lady in front of it and telling her to adopt her fiercest stare.

We who lurk on this blog might be secretly preening ourselves that the same demonisation meted out to smokers - which we did warn, repeatedly, would be coming to others very soon - is now being driven at a very fast pace towards lardies, but then it's not just they who will be punished with a fat tax, is it? Commensurate with the modern way of politics, we all will. Whether you're fat, average, or stick thin, if you enjoy consuming products which have a fat content over an arbitrary level decided by government ... government thieves are going to collectively rob you.

We're firmly into post-democratic territory here. And this is without even a passing mention to the widely-accepted shortcomings of the BMI system used to gather 'evidence' of imminent adipose armageddon, nor of the debate that is still raging as to whether fat - or salt, sugar, carbohydrates - can be made a culprit, whether a tax would make a blind bit of difference, or even whether there really is that much of a problem in the first place.

Talking anecdotally, I'm currently in the process of a second year of secondary school open days which many of you may identify with. We parents trudge around mostly similar schools to be presented with their best facets as the state sector - who all follow the same curriculum and enjoy egalitarian funding - try to create the illusion of some kind of competition by showing off their best graphs and happy, smiling children. Thing is, just like last year, I certainly don't seem to be witnessing a whole load of heavyweight kids. Perhaps they lock them in the basement or something, I dunno, but the year 7 & 8 'tour guides' I've seen in the past couple of years are more likely to have been painfully anaemic than obese. I've got a couple more to go yet this time round, but am tempted to pack my pockets with a few Mars bars to shovel their way on the sly rather than nag them to start eating butternut squash and lentils.

What we really need from a government who boasts of restoring civil liberties and curtailing the nanny state, oddly enough, is a PM who will stubbornly reject further intrusions into our current liberties and stand up against nanny statists.

Instead, we're landed with a middle-of-the-road consensualist, willing to be a puppet to unelected eugenicists by throwing the odd juicy tidbit at slavering health bullies, as he watches the clock and marks time before the book deal and lucrative world speaking tour.

What ever happened to that promise of change?