Who all the pies?

Fatties are causing problems:

Figures released to the Conservatives under the Freedom of Information Act show that fire services were called out almost every day of the last five years to assist in lifting obese patients. In 1826 days there were 1784 call outs, and more than three quarters of the incidents involved NHS patients.

On one occasion the fire fighters were called to help move a patient from one hospital bed to another.

Fire trucks were also needed to help lift patients from their homes, from baths in which they had become stuck, and from upstairs parts of their houses.

Heh. Hehehehe. Okay, it's childish, but there's something deliciously, wickedly funny about actual fire engines being needed to assist the tubby.

In total the call outs cost fire authorities across the country £4 million over five years.

That's less funny. But luckily I have a simple solution: make the fat fuckers pay themselves. They can obviously afford industrial quantities of cake, chips and cheeseburgers so they can't be that skint.

But wait, there's a greater idiocy on its way...

Mike Penning, the shadow health minister, said: "As a former firefighter, I am concerned at these figures. They show the severe strain that the growing obesity epidemic is putting our emergency services under.

"Labour's complacent attitude to tackling obesity has meant that years have been wasted in our bid to deal with this growing problem. We urgently need action now, but unfortunately this Government's record has been one of obesity targets missed and scrapped, budgets for information campaigns being raided, and dithering over food labelling.

"It is about time that the Labour Government woke up and started to take obesity seriously."

Oh for God's sake. I hate this Government as much as anyone, but it's not their fault stupid people gorge themselves silly on chocolate bars and lard butties. It's individual responsibility - to which, incidentally, I am happy to extend to the NHS charging porkers for treating their self-inflicted condition.

And no, taxing Mars Bars won't work because you won't get a new generation of sleek beautiful people, you'll just get slightly poorer lardbuckets while the rest of us suffer.

Mindlessness, but not through drink...

This absolute sack of shit appears in today's Times, and is so unbearably depressing and stupid that nothing short of an absolute kicking will suffice.

Bars are to be banned from offering free alcohol to women and free wine and beer tastings will be curbed under a new system of government restrictions to cut public drunkenness.

"banned"..."curbed"..."government"..."restrictions" - and all in the first sentence. Not a promising start, is it?

There will also be rules to limit “happy hour” offers that encourage speed drinking and soft drinks will have to be sold at the same discount during promotions. Wine in restaurants will have to be served in glasses with marked measures.

Now that's actually a vaguely sensible - or least inoffensive - idea. Many of us can probably relate the frustration of a driver discovering that his soft drinks are costlier than alcoholic alternatives. Although I'd sooner see this being encouraged rather than legislated into existence.

The proposals, drafted by the Home Office and the Department of Health, seek to transform social attitudes towards drinking by breaking the association between drink and sexual, financial and social success.

Err...what? I drink a lot, but I don't imagine that it makes me alluring to the fairer sex (at least, not much), nor does it have a demonstrably positive impact upon my finances and societal standing. Of course advertisers seek to establish this link, but then they attempt to propogate the idea that selecting a certain brand of shaving gel will have a pouting model wearing nothing but one of your own shirts simperingly stroking your newly smooth chin as a precursor to boundless sex. To the best of my recollection, this is yet to occur.

A code for the drinks industry, leaked to The Sunday Times, marks a hardening in the government’s stance after the failure of a voluntary code to curb binge drinking. Hospital admissions linked to excess alcohol have more than doubled in the past 10 years.

Alcoholism has risen during New Labour's time in power? Really? Fuck me...

Threats by the government over the past four years to crack down on irresponsible behaviour by the drinks industry have foundered under the onslaught of aggressive discounting and promotions.

I like drinking. Alcohol producers like me drinking. And I haven't heard the Government complaining about the extorniate amount of tax they steal from me as a consequence.

The mandatory code of practice has alarmed the drinks industry with an elaborate series of rules including:

— Cigarette-style health warnings will have to be displayed wherever alcoholic drinks are sold. This would include shops, bars and, according to the industry, could force restaurants to place an official “sensible drinking message” on every table.

Oh dear God. A "sensible drinking message on every table" - aye, that's really going to cut down. I'd love to hear how this is going to be worded. "Dear drinker, please don't drink so much, love and kisses, Gordon Brown", perhaps? These people clearly don't know how pub culture works. Can they seriously envisage anyone saying "sorry lads, I'll sit this round out, this sensible drinking message has reminder me about the terrible damage that can be caused by excessive drinking"?

— A curb on promotional free wine, whisky and beer tastings. No samples may exceed 125ml and “care must be taken to ensure that customers do not return for further tastings and run the risk of becoming intoxicated”.

It is already illegal to serve to the intoxicated, so the second part of that is superfluous; and I fail to see what business it is of the government if people want to give away free stuff.

— A ban on drinking games, such as downing a glass in one, and “drink all you like” offers for those paying an entry fee will be abolished.

How the FUCK are they going to legislate on drinking games? Is some clipboard-wielding twat from the Department For Ruining Everyone's Fun going to lurk in every alehouse, looking out for people possibly enjoying themselves with drinking games?

— Wine in restaurants will have to be served in glasses with measures marked on the side.

Groan.

The government intervention represents a belated acknowledgment that hopes that Britain would adopt a civilised “cafe culture” with the introduction of 24-hour drinking have failed.

It uses disdainful language to describe the attitudes spread by Britain’s bar culture, which it blames for equating heavy drinking with personal success.

Britain doesn't have a café culture because on the whole, British people aren't terribly interested in that kind of thing. You can't impose a culture on people, however much these illiberal morons may think to the contrary.

And among my drinking companions, I know of none - NONE - who equate drinking with personal success. It is instead a way of relaxing after a day at work, or a means of increasing the enjoyment of a day at the football, or simply done for the obvious social benefits.

It warns that drinks should not be promoted as a means of boosting one’s “social, sexual, physical, mental, financial or sporting performance”.

The practice of selling cocktails called Sex on the Beach, or more sexually graphic names, will also be scrapped.

Oh for crying out loud. Will the aforementioned government nerd, doubtless sporting a little pencil moustache, also be on the look-out for vulgar drink names? And how the cunting hell can you actually design legislation for such an obviously grey area? Leaving aside the "why" - "HOW?!"

The safe drinking signs will have to include a statement from chief medical officers about safe daily drinking limits; a graphic showing the number of alcohol units contained within each glass or bottle and the address for a website offering information on drinking moderately.

I doubt there is a drinker in the land who doesn't know any of these things. A moderate, responsible drinker will roll his eyes in such pointless nannying; a serious problem drinker will not care. This rubbish has no obvious target.

Casual bar staff may be forced out by the proposed mandatory code, which will require all bar employees to undergo accredited training.

...raising costs for an industry struggling in the present climate. Clever.

It could become an offence to fail to ensure that staff have been trained in checking a customer’s age, turning away underage customers, refusing to serve customers who have overindulged and preventing drunken disorder.

It's already illegal to serve the underage or the drunk, and licencees are already compelled to ensure good behaviour on their premises. I'm not entirely sure what the aim of the above is.

Alcohol Concern has been calling for staff training in preventing excessive and underage drinking to be a requirement of a pub gaining its licence.

The mandatory code, which would be enforced by Trading Standards, was this weekend welcomed by health experts. Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “The voluntary partnerships of the drinks industry are clearly not working. Mandatory codes at this stage are essential.

Any organisation calling itself "Alcohol Concern" is going to have an obvious and partial agenda, so we can view its utterances through this skewed prism. That's not to wholly dismiss its intentions, merely we require the other side of the argument. Though one supposes the a Government with a mania for imposing rules on us is unlikely to listen anyway.

“I think the next step will be to tackle the heavy discounting through a minimum price for a unit of alcohol.”

Oh, fuck you. It is absolutely NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. If a retailer wishes to sell me a product at a lower price, that transaction is the concern of myself and the producers, and no-one else.

Mark Hastings, communications director of the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA), said the proposed rules could prevent students doing bar work during the summer holidays and could make it impossible to recruit enough staff for big sporting events, including the 2012 Olympics.

Quite.

“Most of these proposals are disproportionate and some are just plain daft. Every restaurant table and hotel room will need to have a detailed sensible drinking sign. Every document published by a drinks company will need to carry the sensible drinking message,” he said.

Exactly. It's an insane imposition by a deranged government with a psychotic need to boss us about.

This weekend The Sunday Times found bars were continuing to flout the voluntary code. At the Envy nightclub in Notting Hill, west London, groups of women were being offered free bottles of wine as part of the Crazy Sexy Cool Party promotion on Friday night.

So fucking what? People like free stuff, and those giving it away do so in the hope of future custom. That's a surprise because...?

I long for the day these horrible little fascists are swept from power, and yearn to be allowed to live my life how I want to, and not how some awful "experts", "advisers" and assorted cuntpipes want me to live it.

I'm so angry, I think I need a drink...

That'll be sixty quid and three points sir

Been away; ill, busy at work, and, umm, stuff.

But the world contains to anger. For it seems that another one of those "little things" that make life just a bit more shit is imminent:

A new generation of speed cameras that makes it harder for motorists to avoid being caught may soon get government approval, the manufacturers have said.

Geoff Collins of Speed Check Services said approval was now in the "end game" stage and some 35 local authorities had expressed an interest in the system.

It uses a network of cameras to work out average speed over a wide area.

Pressure group the Association of British Drivers (ABA) said the plans were "completely irrelevant to safety".

The Home Office and the Department of Transport said they could not comment until approval had been given.

Nggg.

Of course, this is one of those difficult things to actually oppose. Speeding is wrong, speeding is illegal, speeding causes the horrible mangly death of ten million innocent children per year, and so on.

Except that speeding is FUN. I don't drive much - this is because drinking is even more fun, and drink-driving is most assuredly not big and not clever.

But when I drive, in a modern car on modern motorways, 70mph feels numbingly slow. Any speed you can comfortably attain with another gear remaining surely cannot be a realistic upper limit.

So maybe the Government could compromise: they can bring in their horrible little speed cameras to reinforce speeds in the areas they should be enforced (ie, built-up areas), and make the speed limit on three-lane motorways (where speed should be allowed) 90mph - and make driving tests incorporate motorway driving so that new drivers are not unprepared for it.

That sounds fair to me. Which is probably why it'll never happen.

Nanny knows best

"Fat reports on children to be sent to parents", claims the Telegraph's website.

Not a promising headline, is it?

The subtitle offers little further encouragement:

Parents are to get school "fat reports" detailing their children's weight as part of the fight against childhood obesity.

Actually consider that term: "fat reports". When I went to school - and yes, that hasn't happened for over ten years - we used to get school reports, broken down into subsections for recording one's prowess (or otherwise) in maths, English, history, PE and so on. Nowhere did mine contain a box for my long-suffering teachers to comment upon my tubbiness. Which would have been redundant anyway - when I was at school we had this revolutionary approach to staying in shape by not eating too much and doing some exercise. Amazing, eh? And it worked! Perhaps I should make my fortune marketing this as the latest fad diet to gullible women in the Daily Mail's FeMail section?

On with the article:

Rules to be introduced at the start of the academic year in September will see the parents of all children aged between four and five, and 10 and 11 receive the reports, after Government-commissioned research suggested the weight problem among Britain's children is worse than originally thought.

The most recent figures available show that one in 10 children aged between four and five are obese and 13 per cent are overweight, with the figures rising to 17.5 per cent and 14.2 per cent by age 11.

Children are getting fatter. Now, this is not good. There are plenty of reasons why children shouldn't be fat. This evidently vexes the Government; much more than teaching them to read or write seems to. The difference being that state education is there to impart literacy and numeracy, not engage in this creepy monitoring of pre-pubescent porkiness. Fascinating prioritisation.

The research for the Department of Health reported that despite a well-publicised campaign to tackle childhood obesity and produce a comprehensive picture of the problem, the results "may underestimate the true population prevalence of obesity and overweight at national, regional and local level".

A Department of Health spokesman last night (SUN) said: "If you do not opt out and your child is measured at school you will automatically get feedback."

I am instantly suspicious whenever some bright spark pipes up with "yes, but you can opt out". The presumption should be that you already are opted out, unless you actively choose to opt in. Not the other way around. I am not surprised to hear that the Government is totally oblivious to this.

The British Medical Association is already warning that a quarter of all children in the UK will be obese by 2020, resulting in them having a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Then perhaps those parents should, I dunno, stop feeding them so many chips and send them off to the park more often? It's called parental responsibility.

Paul Sacher, a paediatric dietician at the Childhood Nutrition Research Centre in London, said many parents needed help in identifying that their children were overweight in the first place.

"If I was a parent I would want to know if my child was overweight or obese, then I could do something about it," he said.

What?! Seriously - what? You'd want to know if your child was overweight or obese? Have you tried using your fucking eyes?

What kind of total moron cannot see that their OWN CHILDREN are overweight? What type of utter blithering idiot is incapable of assessing their own flesh and blood to see if there's a bit too much of the former flopping around? Words (nearly) fail me.

"There is a major problem with parents' perception of their children's weight. As all children are getting bigger, it is becoming more difficult for parents to work out whether their children are overweight by just looking at them and comparing them to other kids. The only way we can work out whether children are getting bigger is to weigh them all."

No it isn't. Being overweight is an absolute condition, not a relative one. If you cannot spot it by the simple process of looking for a few seconds, it's a wonder you ever had children in the first place. I, for instance, can work out that Mr Sacher is a total idiot by looking at what he says. If I placed him alongside lots of other imbeciles this wouldn't somehow cancel out his own stupidity.

The Conservatives have opposed the plan, saying it should be left to parents to regulate the weight of their children.

Quite.