Opinion

Anita Robinson: Nanny State is affecting our quality of life

When they’ve finished lecturing us on health, they start nagging on safety
When they’ve finished lecturing us on health, they start nagging on safety When they’ve finished lecturing us on health, they start nagging on safety

A sure sign of increasing age is an impatient tetchiness with the state of society.

To the best of my knowledge, I have never broken the law. I have kept off the grass, never dropped litter, jaywalked or vandalised; never trespassed, shoplifted or left a restaurant without paying; never exceeded the speed limit or driven through a red light; never even got a parking ticket. I am a model citizen with a social conscience – mostly because I’m afraid of the consequences of getting my name in the paper, except at the top of this column.

But I’m getting perilously close to running amok with a pair of kitchen scissors and shearing the heads off the civic daffodils.

The Nanny State, in the guise of well-intentioned guidance, is insidiously and invidiously undermining our autonomy and quality of life and lately it’s begun to manifest its displeasure with our apparent unwillingness to conform. We are suffocating under the weight of legislation major and minor, petty regulations, irritating directives and self-evident recommendations, ostensibly framed for our own good.

It’s obvious they believe we are not to be trusted. There’s barely any aspect left of our lives on which we’re not alerted, admonished and advised and the number of ‘watchdog’ bodies grows apace, monitoring our every action, from what we put in our mouths to what we put in our bins. George Orwell, thou shouldst be living at this hour! Surely history shows the more constraints put upon any society, the greater the likelihood of disaffection. The more laws made, the more people seek to subvert them.

The public press colludes with this ‘Nanny Knows Best’ policy. My daily trawl through newspapers proves ever more dispiriting, particularly with regard to health and safety. Last week’s crop of articles alone suggests that, rather than celebrate a workplace colleague’s birthday with cake, one should bring in cucumber, carrots, celery sticks or fruit.

The public health watchdog ‘recommends’ our optimum daily calorie intake should be a breakfast maximum of 400, lunch and dinner 600 each – and salt’s a killer, even if you eat healthily. It’s also asking – no, demanding - that the food and restaurant trade slash their calorie content by a fifth by reducing portion sizes. (I’m reminded at this point of the Loving Spouse reading aloud the label on one of the very few ‘convenience’ dinners I ever foisted on him. “Serves two – or one husband.”)

Try to cheer yourself up with a bit of telly and, in the course of a single evening’s viewing, you can watch, sometimes sequentially, sugar, starch and fat-laden cooking-fests, bootcamp fitness regimes, sobering science-based documentaries on processed foods and surgical fat-vacuuming procedures for the clinically obese.

Robert Peston’s relaxed weekend breakfast political discussion programme features tempting pyramids of glossy croissants on its communal desk, but I suspect they’re only there for show, since there’s no evidence of plates or knives, much less butter or jam. Maybe they use the same ones each week.

‘Gogglebox’ shows a suspiciously undisturbed bowl of fruit on most resident critics’ coffee-tables – possibly a subtle, subliminal message to us viewers who are watching people watch television, but probably with a takeaway and a bag of Revels.

But I digress…… Wouldn’t the Nannies be better employed reining in the advertisers, whose motives are maximum sales and profits? With very few exceptions, fat children are the result of over-indulgent parenting and fat adults the result of coffee culture, ‘grazing’, the disappearance of set mealtimes, fast food, weak will and a sedentary lifestyle.

When they’ve finished lecturing us on health, they start nagging on safety. From cricket to conkers, from swimming to cycling to snowballing, no leisure activity can be undertaken without being hampered by helmets, goggles, gloves and high-vis tabards. I recently watched primary schoolchildren run their daily supervised mile round a playground ‘for their health’ - like little convicts exercising in a prison yard. What a sterile joyless exercise.

Of course, we’ve brought all this on ourselves. Two generations of relative prosperity have sapped our collective self-control. Perhaps it’s necessary for our own good? Maybe Nanny does know best?