Defiantly dying

Minister, don't preach! - and keep your hands off their deaths and lives.

(sorry, wrong minister; but I'll leave him here, for provocational purposes)

A cabinet minister is concerned about the health gap between the north and the south of England (the Northerners insist on dying younger). The politico says that the regional variation “cannot continue unchecked” (ha! ha! - says who?) and urges councils to work harder on public health*”.

Someone else reminds somewhere else of some really comic stuff: “Local councils recently took over responsibility for public health, including initiatives to cut smoking and drinking and lower obesity rates, from the NHS. They are now under pressure to improve in order to achieve Government targets of saving 30,000 lives a year by 2020."

Bollocks! All bollocks!

The no-nonsense working class people of Northern England will, I am sure, show the finger to the minister and their local councils. They have been consistent in showing it for decades, just as they have been defiant in ignoring all the government-sponsored, offensive, totalitarian bother about salt, eggs, sugar, ciggies, booze and what have you.

Have local ministers learnt nothing? The proud Northerners live defiantly and die defianlty. If they want to die earlier, they will. (By the way: who wouldn't, with this level of fiscal oppression??)

And they are bloody right! If you let governments tell you when to die, next they’ll start to tell you when to live.


 

 "This is how much freedom I'd like to give to the proud smoking and drinking

people of the North of England."

(this is the right minister, who is wrong)

*there is no such thing as a ‘public health', there’s only private, individual health; the whole thing, by the way, is not about a geographical divide, but class divide; as some people have noticed, but not many people have focused on.

Top photo: alex.calder.2 (flikr)

Bottom photo: Geoff Newton/Allstar