Should we be turning Japanese?

JSOMETIMES I think those who wish to tell us how we should live would be happier running detention centres. Increasingly people with grievances about how we ought to behave and run our lives seek not to persuade, but force us to change.

Richard writes here about Extinction Rebellion, the movement which encourages us to save the planet by bullying us all and making our daily lives a misery.

Apparently police now believe the Queen may be forced to abandon the carriage in which she rides to perform her sovereign duty at the state opening of Parliament. Instead, she may travel in an armoured car as the protesters blockade the streets. But it’s not just “the environment” causing people to lose their common sense and common courtesy.

Dame Sally Davies, mercifully stepping down from her position as England’s Chief Medical Officer (aka the nation’s nannyin-chief) has issued her final draconian report.

She wants to ban eating or drinking on trains and buses. “Mindless snacking,” she calls it, adding that “calories are better controlled if you eat breakfast, lunch and tea or supper rather than snacking on the run”.

So, nothing but plain water allowed on urban public transport? Not even an apple? What about mothers who need to give their babies milk? Dame Sally doesn’t say.

Granted, some people eat annoyingly smelly snacks on buses and trains and irritatingly crunch on crisps and popcorn at the cinema. But what kind of world does Dame Sal want to live in? A place where we can have fun, a KitKat happily scoffed on the bus, a couple of sweeties given to placate a fractious tot on a train? Or somewhere like Japan which, much to Sally’s approval, bans snacking on public transport and has one of the lowest obesity levels in the world?

But this isn’t Japan.We have a spontaneous, up-yours attitude to authority. Boris Johnson, a chubby snacker if ever I saw one, doesn’t like “the continuing creep of the nanny state”. The nannyin-charge is leaving her post. I wish her luck – and a long, saintly life of self-denial.