Colonel Gaddafi and his mad bald son are not the only has-been regime desperately clinging to power. In Britain, too, a gaggle of once-powerful but now isolated authoritarians is doing everything it can to continue dominating people’s lives. These unelected know-it-alls exerted an extraordinary and baleful influence over public life during the 13 years of New Labour rule — banning things they didn’t like, scaring the public witless, demonising fat kids as the great evil of our age — but they have seen their power wane in the Liberal-Conservative era. And they aren’t happy.
Yes, it’s the nanny staters, those public health officials and their journalistic cheerleaders who took killjoyism to dizzy new heights between 1997 and 2010. Once invited to advise government officials, to provide data to justify illiberal initiatives such as the public smoking ban, to lecture the British masses about how flabby and feckless we are, this nanny lobby now finds itself elbowed aside by a nudge lobby, with David Cameron and his coterie preferring to ‘nudge’ people towards healthy living rather than strongarm us towards five-a-day, safe-sex, no-booze purity in the fashion of those old monstrous Mary Poppinses. The nannies are fighting back. They have declared a dirty war on the nudgers, desperately hoping that they can win back their throne of moaning about the state of public health.
The unseemly civil war between nannies and nudgers kicked off last year, as it became clear that the new Lib-Con government would dispense with much of New Labour’s ban-happy, legislation-heavy nannying. David Cameron set up a Behavioural Insight Team in Downing Street, inspired by the ideas contained in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s post-nanny state tome Nudge: Improving Decisions about Wealth, Health and Happiness. Not two months after the Lib-Cons took power, Cameron’s health secretary, Andrew Lansley, gave a speech to the British Medial Association — birthplace of much of New Labour’s nannying nonsense — in which he said that ‘constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do can be counterproductive’. He even took aim at the popular face of the nanny state — the lisping culinary megalomaniac and school-dinner obsessive Jamie Oliver — accusing him of ‘lecturing’ schoolkids and by extension their parents.
Cue much uncomfortable seat-shifting at the BMA and in other public-health institutions across the land. They could sense the flames licking at the foundations of their ancien regime. But hell hath no fury like a nanny-stater robbed of a job, and before long the nannies had launched a counterattack on the nudgers, using the weapon in their armoury that had stood them in such good stead in the New Labour era: the politics of fear.
Towards the end of 2010, public health officials started to plant stories in the media about how the elevation of nudging over nannying would condemn huge swathes of Britain to sickness and early death. On 4 December, under the headline ‘Nudge or fudge?’, the Independent faithfully reported the ‘concerns’ of various public health officials and doctors, including leading figures at the BMA, who said that nudging would not be enough to ‘overhaul Britain’s record as one of the fattest, unhealthiest countries in Europe’. No, in order to get the fatties and drunks of modern-day Britain on the straight and narrow we will apparently need ‘more action on pricing, taxation and advertising’ — which is a PC way of saying we will need to raise the price of booze (what John Stuart Mill referred to as a ‘sin tax’), tax junk food like we do cigarettes, and ban adverts for anything unhealthily pleasurable.
The central ideology of the nanny state is that people must be coerced into ‘healthy living’. Because we are all a bit thick and don’t know what is in our own best interests, it is not enough to nudge us towards the light, to invite us become more healthy — instead we must be forced. So for its part in the war on nudging, the Faculty of Public Health, the professional body for public health specialists in Britain, lambasted the Lib-Cons for using ‘lots of carrots but no sticks’; apparently the problem with the nudge approach is that there is no ‘explicit commitment to use force if necessary’. The nannies are outraged that their power to use sticks on the arses of the podgy, alcopop-downing masses, to wallop us with laws and bans, has been withdrawn from them by the Lib-Cons. They want their weapons back.
Diehard New Labourites in the media have sided with the nannies against the nudgers in the great war to control what people eat, drink and smoke. Catherine Bennett of the Observer summed up the nanny outlook when she said that nudging ‘smacks only of neglect’ and without healthy-living legislation ‘we can’t rule out a surge in obesity, hyperactivity or mass poisoning’. That is, the public is so dumb, so self-destructive, so instinctively drawn towards eating 20 hamburgers and smoking 400 fags a day, that the downgrading of the nanny state could inevitably lead to an ill-health bonanza. It’s a wonder that British people managed to survive at all prior to 1997, in the bc (Before Coercion) era.
Increasingly frustrated at the decommissioning of their right to boss the populace, the nannies have upped the ante in a rather demented fashion in recent weeks. Writing in the Lancet last month, Professor Ian Gilmore argued that 250,000 people will die as a result of booze consumption over the next 20 years… unless, that is, the government introduces a minimum price of 50p per unit. Yep, that’s right, the Lib-Cons can save quarter of a million people by embracing that sin tax beloved of the nanny staters. Gilmore’s report is best seen not as an airtight, accurate prediction of future deaths, but as kind of moral blackmail against the Lib-Cons: revert to nannying or people will die! It’s worth noting that Professor Gilmore was a key ear-chewer of the New Labour regime in the 2000s, overseeing working parties on booze and reports on binge-drinking, his key message being that alcohol consumption ‘should not be just a matter of individual choice’. Now he seems to be turning his stick on a government that has the temerity to say that nannies are not always right.
Gilmore’s report was followed up by a Guardian article written by Anna Gilmore (a New Labour-era warrior against smoking) and Jeff Collin (director of the Global Public Health Unit at Edinburgh University), who slated the Lib-Cons for allowing food and alcohol firms to have a say on public health policy. ‘Drinks companies spread liver disease as surely as mosquitoes do malaria,’ they said. It was unhinged stuff, stinking to the heavens of political desperation more than medical rationalism. Where Gaddafi responds to his loosening grip on power by railing against the ‘cockroaches’ that want to topple him, Britain’s isolated nannies rant about booze-promoting insects who will kill hundreds of thousands of stupid, unwitting cider-sippers.
But if anyone is dumb in this debate, it’s the nanny state. What these former lecturers of us losers fail to realise is that their illiberal, killjoy outlook is being carried on in the Lib-Cons’ policy of nudging — as evidenced by Andrew Lansley’s ban on tobacco displays in shops and his Responsibility Deal, which aims to do everything from inform (hector) the public about boozing to encourage workplace lunch halls to ditch doughnuts and replace them with fruit. The ugly civil war between nannies and nudgers is not a clash of principles; it’s a lowlife tussle to see which stripe of politician can most successfully remake the masses as sober, thin, condom-wearing, smoke-free, bike-riding, fruit-scoffing enormous bores.