And The Lectures Continue

You might think that a government as utterly incompetent as this one might be a little less confident about telling us how best to run our own lives. Two stores in recent days suggest this is not the case.

Earlier in the week (as reported by the lovely Caroline Hunt) they announced a ban on advertising of powdered milk for babies on television and in the national press. This, as we might expect, has the fingerprints of the EU all over it, seeing as there's an EU directive on infant formula at its root.

And today, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, we learn that Brown's Babysitting Brigade are planning to teach our five-year-olds about the effects of alcohol and the influence of advertising. Children identified by teachers as problem drinkers may be given one-to-one sessions and referred to specialist counsellors. What's more, we lucky parents going to be given guidance and training from those NICE people at the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence on how to talk to our children about alcohol. Give me strength.

Both of these stories tell an all-too-familiar tale of those in government thinking that they know far better than us how to run our lives. Obviously women cannot be trusted to make informed decisions about how to feed their own babies, and need to be given every "encouragement" to breast feed. Any alternative has to be kept as quiet as possible, and information about powdered milk needs to be severely restricted, in the same sort of way that opposition views are suppressed in a military dictatorship.

When they can't get away with suppression of information, they'd rather lecture us instead, hence the move to start blethering on about alcohol abuse in our primary schools. This approach rarely works: they tell our kids endlessly about drugs, and yet drug abuse among young people continues to rise; they talk about STDs, and sexual health continues to decline; they lecture children about healthy eating, and obesity continues to...expand. You'd think they'd have learned the lesson by now. If a government continually tells children to do one thing, they invariably end up doing the opposite.

It'll never happen,. but maybe, just maybe, the government should leave us completely free and unencumbered to make our our own decisions. Those who get it right benefit. Those who don't, don't. What's the problem with that ?