Saturday 5 January 2013

Pasties, Chocolate Oranges, Chicken, And Now Sugar Puffs

A week is a long time in politics? Ha! Try a few hours, Harold.

The title above didn't include any cereals when I penned it as a draft last night, but then this turned up on the BBC early today.
Labour has urged the government to consider introducing legal limits on sugar, salt and fat content in food.
Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said current voluntary agreements with the food industry were not working and the obesity problem was worsening,
First of all, it's not worsening, dickhead, try reading the ONS stats we pay for out of the taxes you steal from us.
Mr Burnham denied Labour were promoting a "nanny state", insisting parents must "decide for themselves" on food choices for their children. 
"I'm not talking about banning anything... my argument is, shouldn't we just bring down those fat, salt sugar levels to make them more healthier (sic) than they are?" he added.
Nanny Beeb was very careful not to highlight the fact that Burnham was talking about products like Frosties and Sugar Puffs which have been on the market for over half a century, but that is what this entails.

Via Lawson
Burnham is a front bench MP - part of a government overseeing 60+ million people - yet he apparently can't read the back of a box of cereal. Hmm, do you think he might be lying there? Or is he really so dense as to be able to bend light?

Just the day before, Brendan O'Neill was writing (beautifully) at the Telegraph about the laughable contorted wibblings of another in the shadow health team (ably fisked at the Cat Counters). You know her, she's the svelte example of perfect human form known as Diane Abbott. You really should read all of O'Neill's piece if you can, but here is something I found to be somewhat familiar.
To appreciate just how bizarre it is to have a well-known politician kick off a new year by declaring war on fried chicken, try to imagine if a minister or shadow minister did something like this a few decades ago. Cast your minds back before New Labour; before the emergence of what Labour MP Frank Field christened "the politics of behaviour"; before all the major parties made nannying and nudging the centrepieces of their political programmes; back to a time when politics was a more serious business concerned with class, power, wealth – imagine if, back then, a minister announced that she (or more likely, he) would wage war against chippies, or pie shops perhaps, in the name of helping the masses see the error of their gluttonous ways. People would be bamboozled. They'd think the minister was mad. They'd certainly ask why he or she was banging on about chips when such serious problems as poverty, homelessness and inequality were rife. It is testament to the extraordinary shrinking of the political imagination, to the shift from a politics concerned with changing the world to a politics obsessed with changing the habits and waistlines of the people who live in that world, that Ms Abbott's anti-chicken rant could be nodded through without so much as a "Whaaat?"
You see, I wish I could write like that. Because I said much the same thing a year ago but with more economic vocabulary.
Here we have two walking, talking broom handle politicians exhibiting how extremely wrong British politics has become. 
Chocolate Oranges are one of life's little treats. The overwhelming majority of the public like them. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't like chocolate. 
Yet here we are with two leading politicians arrogantly competing to be the one who appears toughest on making that treat more difficult to enjoy. This isn't a mind-altering drug we're talking about here - legal or otherwise - merely a fucking Chocolate Orange! 
Statisticians would punch you in the face if you suggested they waste their time calculating the risk of death from 30p off a fucking Chocolate Orange from WH Smith's, yet the Prime Minister - let me say that again, the fucking Prime fucking Minister - and the leader of the bastard opposition both consider this subject worthy of creating policy.
And guess what! Faced with an open goal with which to kick Burnham's credibility into the middle of next year, Jeremy Hunt - yes, Jeremy Hunt, the Tory - decided to fucking agree even as the vast majority of the nation were laughing or cursing into their Coco Pops at the fucking cheek of these arrogant morons.

The country is in trillions of pounds of debt; fallout from the EU collapse has yet to fully bite us on the arse; youth unemployment is rocketing; they are fighting wars in two countries with perhaps others to come; they are widely despised by just about every breathing human in the British Isles, yet what have been pressing issues for these monumentally stupid wooden-topped suits recently?

Gregg's pasties, chocolate fucking oranges, chicken and chips, and Golden poxy Nuggets.

There is, however, a silver lining - well, if there ever could be one with a Westminster packed full of nodding dogs doing their best to shit the nation and its culture down the nearest sewer - and it's the fact that Burnham and his pals have made it extremely easy to explain to youngsters why MPs should be despised and never, ever be respected.

Simply tell your kids they are trying to ban Sugar Puffs. That should be enough to ensure a whole new generation views them as dangerous as axe murderers for a long time to come, which is definitely a very good thing on today's evidence.


9 comments:

ajb7876 said...

Dear God,dont these bastards ever quit?
Whats it going to take to get the message across? violence?

Paul_M said...

Quite right Mr. Puddlecote. Why don't these effing pollies just leave us alone? I'm in my seventh decade, and reasonably fit and healthy. I drink far too much, according to the powers that be, but sod them! I cycle / walk several miles every day. When I need advice about diet from the likes of (Fl)Abbott I think I'll end it all!

barnacle bill said...

Dick I couldn't believe when I saw the reports that Hunt was agreeing to look into it!
Like you say, an open goal to remind the sheeple of nuLabor's control freakery and the Boy Hunt passes the ball to the keeper.
But then again this coalition have been very "nice" towards the last lot that were in power. If the boot had been on the other foot we would have had hour long documentaries on the Beeb every day about the horrors of the last Tory administration.
I'm beginning to wonder if Cast Iron's plugging of gay marriage is because there's so many pansies in the Westminster Conservative party.

Broadsword said...

Dick me old mucker, you know how there is so little for our elected 'representatives' to do these days, what with responsibility for legislating within virtually every area of modern life (actually, scratch the virtually) resting with the EU and its institutions? Well, very little, if anything that can be described as a 'debate' happens spontaneously amongst the bunch of cockweasels at Westminster anymore either. As soon as a story begins "*insert politician or political party here* has urged..." you can almost guarantee that the 'urging' has come about not because of any genuine insight, conviction or innovative thought process on the part of the cockweasel or his fellow chimps, but because he/she/it is just following a pre-approved EU legislative process schedule by staging a theatrical production for the media and our consumption.

As you recently found out with plain packs, it matters not a jot which party forms the UK part of our government or, heaven forfend, what the public want, the rules are made for us regardless.

Have you heard of the EU 'Strategy on nutrition, overweight and obesity-related health issues'? No? Me neither until I started sniffing around this. You can virtually guarantee that every 'new' initiative or policy proposal dreamed up by both the incumbent government and, laughably, even the so-called opposition parties has originated at EU level or beyond at one global organisation or another. Plus, it probably benefits hugely one of the plethora of megacorps out there as a benign coincidence.


Of course, politicians and their chums in the MSM never mention that food period is an exclusive EU competence.

JuliaM said...

"Faced with an open goal with which to kick Burnham's credibility into the middle of next year, Jeremy Hunt - yes, Jeremy Hunt, the Tory - decided to fucking agree even as the vast majority of the nation were laughing or cursing into their Coco Pops at the fucking cheek of these arrogant morons."


'Tory'..? Well, a modern one, I suppose.

c777 said...

Now. Abbott, Burnham, about that 1.1 Trillion deficit you left behind?
Lets do something about that eh?

Sam Duncan said...

Amen, Dick.

“the obesity problem was worsening”

Yeah, and... ? What damn business is it of Andy bloody Burnham's? If more people are getting fat, that's their problem, not the government's.

Seriously. This is not Public Health. Public Health issues arise when people can't avoid things that are harmful: air and water pollution, for example, or epidemics of contagious disease. As far as I'm aware, Kelloggs doesn't force-feed Frosties to hapless gangs of kidnapped Britons. (Nor, for that matter, was anybody ever forced at gunpoint to enter pubs that allowed smoking.)

c777 said...

Who are the OECD and why do they seem to have such influence over the health minister, Hunt, and the shadow health minister, Burnham.
More on them here......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_for_Economic_Co-operation_and_Development

So basically the OECD are a suprantional organisation formed from, you guessed it, the EU.
So what is happening here is that our elected representatives are taking their orders from the OECD and showing their usual utter contempt for the British electorate.
See how it works yet?
Now wonder these types will never give us a true in out referendum eh?
They take their orders from elsewhere.

Alan Bates said...

All politicians want to be seen doing "something important". They want a legacy.
All the really important things are difficult and painful (not to them except where it hits them where it hurts - in the ballot box). Hence they can't/wont do anything about:
our financial state
immigration
the undermining of our culture by foreign philosophy
violent crime
the ever increasing effect of Europe and "Human Rights"
emphasising that rights come along with RESPONSIBILITIES
and so on ad nauseum ...
So they look around for something that will show a "result" in a month or so ( government is so inefficient they will accept a year or two).

All the stuff they have been doing is the "something" that fits into this need (for politicians to show they are important / useful / powerful / truly concerned about the peepul).
Can't see it changing in my lifetime (67).