STRENGTH THROUGH JOY

By Rob Hendry
Contact the author via the editor by e-mail at christopher.johnstone@ntlworld.com

Sitting in a smoke filled pub for what may be the last time, I read with interest of the current plan to provide personal health trainers on the NHS. The vision of battalions of Lycra clad, clean living, fit, and ideologically sound young men and women descending upon the nation bears witness to the profound shift in the way our society views the responsibility of individuals and government towards the health of the nation.

As a stroll round any shopping mall will remind you, we have become a fat and indolent people who are eating, drinking and smoking our way to the top of the European morbidity charts. Our consumerist society, which is characterised by rampant individualism and shallow materialism is in crisis at the dawn of the 21st century. This latter day bread and circuses culture has left a bitter and toxic inheritance to the population. The volatile mixture of quarter of a century of Thatcherite style capitalism, which looked across the Altantic to America for inspiration and guidance and an almost Marxist style vision of collective entitlement to free healthcare has produced one of the most expensive and least effective health care systems in the world.

So should we rejoice then that the government is driving a centralised shift for the masses away from their current forms of consumption to what might be seen as more culturally pure ones? The hitherto quintessentially bourgeois activities of living the good life, characterised by fine dining, attending the gym and consulting lifestyle gurus are now to be transplanted from leafy Hampstead and Islington and grafted onto our most deprived communities.

The new NHS, it appears, will take a greater interest in how the people spend their leisure time by imposing on them what the politicians know are clearly better ways of organising and conducting themselves. Everyone is to be given the opportunity to develop a personalised health guide. In the Brave New Britain this organisation will give the people a better understanding of the world , awaken new life interests within them and give them genuine life joy. Those whose current life style might be seen as hopeless will see that as long as they accept the leader' example their lot will be improved. As the adoring public fall in behind this march to a better life, perhaps Labour will do more to achieve the 'classless society' than Thatcher's sell off of council houses and Major's exhortations ever did. As the evil chip shop owners and the last of the tobacconists disappear from our streets (perhaps they are being re-settled in the East), I feel I ought to be more enthusiastic than I am and wonder if I am the only one who feels there is something vaguely sinister going on.

Other online articles by Rob Hendry can be found at:
hoolet edition 45 - Goodbye...
hoolet edition 45 - The Knife Man
hoolet edition 43 - Strength Through Joy
hoolet edition 32 - The Drugs War

hoolet is the magazine of RCGP Scotland. It is supported intellectually, financially and emotionally by RCGP Scotland.

This issue maintained by Robert Hallam.