Health and hyperbole

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. (Full story HERE.) On the scale of climate change? That's a relief. For a nanosecond I was genuinely worried.

On a more serious note, expect more cataclysmic warnings from a government desperate for a "vision" to explain all those new rules and regulations it intends to roll out over the next few years. It's also a perfect excuse to tax anything that moves (or tastes nice!).

This is how modern government works. They scare us to death with a load of scientific mumbo-jumbo and phoney statistics, then introduce legislation to resolve a "problem" that has been hyped out of all proportion to the actual risk. This, in turn, enables them to appear proactive and justifies their existence.

Proclamations such as this are part and parcel of today's political news management. I know, because I've read Alastair Campbell's absorbing book, The Blair Years. The aim is to dictate and dominate the news by issuing an endless stream of soundbites while announcing a million new initiatives.

Today's "warning" is a classic of its kind. It is clearly intended to grab back the initiative from the Conservatives (who have enjoyed their best week for years) and put the government in the driving seat, albeit by frightening us into an early grave!

The story led BBC News last night but was only third top story on ITV. Compare this to the coverage of Prime Minister's Questions last week. Gordon Brown's humiliation at the hands of David Cameron was top story on ITV News, but over on the BBC it was relegated to third place. Make of that what you will.

Cool on global warming

Russell Lewis, former Daily Mail leader writer whose impressive CV includes stints as director of the Conservative Political Centre and general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, has sent me a copy of the speech he gave to a fringe meeting I attended in Blackpool last week. 

The meeting - entitled 'Let Cooler Heads Prevail' - was organised by the Freedom Association and chaired by TFA chairman Roger Helmer MEP, who spoke at our reception the previous evening. It tackled the thorny issue of climate change and provided a platform for those of us who are sceptical about global warming or, at the very least, the impact of global warming. (See Guardian report HERE.)

I hope that Russell, who is also on the board of Forest,  will be a regular contributor to the new Free Society website when it is launched. In the meantime, here's a snippet from his speech:

"What started me on the sceptical path was the family likeness of this scare to so many other scares, which have turned up in the last few decades. Only forty years ago there was great alarm about the imminence of an ice age, which would kill billions of people. Some of its most prominent publicists, like James Lovelock, have since become equally avid propagandists  for global warming. 

We were also told,  back in the seventies that there would be mass starvation through overpopulation and food shortages. The whole world population was apparently fated to die of cancer due to DDT. The  forests, we were told, were destined to die because of acid rain, at a time when in America they were expanding. At the same time there was the angst about depleting resources. President Carter no less said that we would run out of oil by 1990. All these doomsday forecasts were completely wrong."

See also The Great Global Warming Swindle.