Over the course of history, many individual rights and privileges have been temporarily given up in order to surmount a massive obstacle, which makes perfect sense at the time. Massive amounts of personal and property rights were given up to allow the UK to continue to fight the Second World War, for example, which was necessary at the time to free Europe and stay as a country. The problems arise later, when the example set by such sacrifice is used to steal rights on a more permanent basis, in pursuit of a less tangible goal. Like ‘eradicating poverty’, which can never happen unless everyone in the world has exactly the same amount of everything.
This sort of creep happens in many cases, and is a classic example of ‘give an inch, take a mile’. And the more paranoid sort of folk look for things like it happening.
Being one of those paranoid folk, I’ve often blathered on about how we’re all going to be asked1 to give up quite a few freedoms in the name of ‘climate change’, because it’s obviously going to kill everyone unless we are good little sheep and do exactly what the half-baked policy advisers tell the politicians to tell us to do.
And after that, the freedoms given up in that name will be demanded in the name of something else, with the excuse well you did it for climate change, why is this any different.
Think I’m kidding? Because Alan Johnson clearly doesn’t.
The public health threat posed by obesity in the UK is a “potential crisis on the scale of climate change”, the health secretary has warned.
Alan Johnson said the magnitude of the problem was becoming clear for the first time and “it is in everybody’s interest to turn things round”.
And because it’s in everybody’s interest, it’ll be everybody’s legal obligation. Because that’s how things seem to be working these days.
Which is slightly annoying.
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1 – For which, read “be made to do under threat of government violence”