Who put them in charge?

The list of things we cannot or must not do these days grows every lengthier, from the amount we drink to the way we attempt to chastise our children. I don’t exactly know I how I feel about the smacking ban in Scotland; generally, I would say it is a good thing in the wider context that we don’t expect people of any size and age to get away with going around hitting each other. And I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say that I was smacked at home as a child and it never did me any harm, although I was, occasionally, and it didn’t.

In school, my primary music teacher had a couple of leather Lochgelly specials, nicknamed Horace and Cecil, whose effects tended to be limited to show rather than blow. The threat of them was enough for me, as it was for most of us; I was a girlie wuss and a bit of a goody-two-shoes, anyway, so I never actually got the belt, although various of my classmates did. Usually for misdemeanours that wouldn’t even get a teacher’s blood pressure twitching these days.

I was, however, a bit of a talker – little has changed, I hear you cry. I was once described by a well-travelled teacher who had come from New Zealand to do a year’s secondment in Scotland, as sounding “like a Spanish woman on a train”. If you’ve ever been on a train in Spain (mainly in the plain, of course), you’ll know exactly what she meant.

She never resorted to violence to shut me up – I worshipped her with a passion because she had a beehive hairdo and wore beatnik black – but others weren’t so easily diverted. I remember once being called out to the front of the class and having a ruler twanged across the back of my legs which struck me (literally and metaphorically) at the time and ever since as having an element of inventive sadism about it. The belt was what it was and it did what it did; but to take an item specifically designed for something else completely and turn it into an instrument for inflicting pain and applying discipline has never sat well with me. Of course, some of our teachers back then were well strange. The war, you know…

Be that as it may, I don’t agree with hitting anyone if it can be avoided but I also don’t see the point in criminalising perfectly good and reasonable parents if they tap their child on the leg or the hand to bring to their attention that there are things up with which they will not put. It’s a fine line, I know, the creating of boundaries, and it just makes me glad I am not, and have never been, a parent.

But, then, there are always people who like to tell us what they think is good for us. In some – perhaps even many – cases, they may well be right. But that doesn’t make it any easier to stomach. On which happy note, and given the increasingly parlous state of the NHS and its funding, I suppose it’s no surprise that some health authorities in Englandshire are again talking about instituting a ban on certain surgical procedures for the obese and those who smoke. Unless, of course, they quickly cease to be obese or give up the fags for long enough (eight weeks, I hear), to pass a kind of breathalyser test of worthiness.

Now, I know and fully accept that being fat and smoking like a lum are not good for anyone and that the resulting cost to already stretched services is aptly immense. Of course, people ought to be encouraged to look after themselves better and take a bit of responsibility; let’s face it, we’d all like to be perfect and perfectly healthy. But if you start apportioning blanket blame, where does it end? And who, at which point in the health care process, actually makes the decisions about who gets what and when? Then if you are refused, will those who can afford it pay for what they need, anyway, leaving the rest to, literally, lump it? This smacks, to me, of thin end of the wedge stuff, to mix a few metaphors.

Doctors are perfectly entitled to ask you about your eating, smoking and drinking habits and to give advice as hard-hitting as it needs to be. But should we really be putting in place tick-box-style interrogations about whether or not we “deserve” to be helped, like some kind of good-cop, bad-cop whodunnit? Or maybe that should be who-doughnut? And that’s without asking to see your passport to see if you’re “entitled” to be treated at all.

I would defend, passionately and to the end, the basic principles of the NHS. As we approach the third decade of the 21st Century, I do think it needs restructured and rebalanced. But not when that balance, without being unduly cynical, seems to be tipping towards favouring those with the weightiest wallets rather than the greatest need.

But, then, there are always people who like to tell us what they think is good for us

Picture: Getty Images. The NHS may need to be restructured but not so that it is weighted against those most in need.