Nick Timothy:
Unfashionable ideas like individual responsibility are vital to improving quality of life in Britain
When I visited a primary school some years ago, its head teacher told me an unpleasant but revealing story. “On Mondays we have to clean the toilets several times through the day,” she said, “because of the appalling diets the children have at home. We don’t need to do it for the rest of the week, because they have breakfast and lunch here.”
This anecdote, and the ignorance and poor parenting that explains it, is unfortunately not unusual. One in 10 children starting primary school in England is obese, and by the time they head to secondary school the number rises to one in five.
Many schools now provide not only free lunches for pupils but free breakfasts, too. Recognising that there is little point teaching children elementary cooking if they go home to consume sugary drinks, processed meat and fast-food takeaways, some schools teach parents alongside pupils how to prepare and cook healthy family meals.
As Covid-19 has demonstrated, Britain’s obesity crisis is very real. We are one of the unhealthiest and fattest countries in Europe, with almost two thirds of adults overweight or obese. Research shows that overweight patients are more likely to become seriously ill and die from Covid-19.
And the risk is not limited to the virus. Health conditions connected to weight problems cost the NHS around £6billion annually. There were nearly 900,000 obesity-related hospital admissions last year. Obesity is a serious factor in several chronic illnesses, including cancer, diabetes, and liver and respiratory disease.
Ministers will repeat statistics such as these as they launch the Government’s new anti-obesity drive. But agreeing the extent of the problem is not the same thing as agreeing the solutions. Do we really believe obesity can be fixed by restricting fast-food advertising, preventing supermarket promotions on unhealthy food, and making restaurants publish the calorie content of their dishes?
Many will be irritated by the idea of ministers nannying us in this way, but none of the proposals mooted is an especially significant intrusion into our personal freedom. The more relevant question is whether they will achieve very much.
A nudge here and there will help a little, as it did with regulations and restrictions on advertising harmful products such as tobacco. But it will be impossible to address obesity as the crisis it is without recognising that it is a symptom of a wider sickness in our society.
How can it be that parents who love their children allow them to grow obese before they have left primary school? How are so many adults incapable of cooking a simple, healthy meal? Why do so many families resort to fast food and ready meals? And why are so many of us – adults and children – physically inactive? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that our economic and social model – which causes financial and emotional insecurity, and means a “just-in-time” approach to both family finances and childcare – deserves a large portion of the blame.
For too many people, ours is a low-skill, low-wage economy that, combined with vast regional disparities in prosperity and hugely expensive housing, means few families have anything like resilience in their finances. We need to reform our economy so more young people are equipped with the skills and training to enjoy stable and well-paid work, and we need to put ownership of family-sized homes within reach for more couples.
We also have an attitude to the family that means policy pushes parents into work without giving them the support they need to care for their children. Professional childcare is expensive and often difficult to find. There is next to no recognition of parents who stay at home to look after their kids, or grandparents who share the strain. We can extend and increase maternity pay, frontload child benefit so parents get more money when they most need it, and establish a Frenchstyle national crèche network. We should set up a neutral “family fund” to subsidise childcare, give parents transferable tax allowances, and recognise parents and grandparents in other ways, to reduce childcare costs without forcing parents into the workplace or out of it.
Some families have forgotten what most of us consider “the basics”. The mothers and fathers who send their children to schools that provide cookery classes for pupils and parents together are not feckless people. But in some families, over the course of a generation or two, the recipes and knowledge needed in shops and the kitchen have been lost. We need targeted interventions – in schools, yes, but in the home, too – to restore this lost knowledge and confidence.
But we also need to ask ourselves more searching questions. The great conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, once wrote that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites”. He warned: “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”
This is a lesson we would do well to heed today in relation to obesity, but also other issues – from the way we accept social-distancing rules and opt to wear masks, to the way we deal with unruly behaviour in the classroom and anti-social behaviour on the streets. If we do not accept that we are obliged to take responsibility and restrain ourselves in the face of greed, temptation and selfishness, we have to recognise that society, represented by government, will impose constraints upon us.
This demands unfashionable ideas such as individual responsibility, social norms that bluntly criticise poor behaviour instead of seeking always to understand it, and leadership that is prepared to declare what is right and wrong. But it will also require kindness as well as firmness. We need to reshape our economy and society so both do more for families, and we need to do far more to help the parents who struggle most. Ministers can ban fast-food advertisements if they wish, but to fix the obesity crisis they need to cure our greater sickness.