The killjoy state

Ask not what the NHS can do for you, but what you can do for the NHS. This appears to be the closest thing our hollow PM, Keir Starmer, has to an ideology, following yet another miserable nanny-state announcement.

As of next October, ‘junk food’ advertising on TV will be banned before the watershed, while its online equivalent will be banned entirely. The alleged aim is to curb childhood obesity, but it is part and parcel of Starmer’s broader agenda to protect the NHS from the public.

This isn’t an original idea of Starmer’s. It’s not clear he’s capable of those. In fact, the ad ban has been knocking around the quangos and activist groups for years. Both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak signed up to it, but delayed its implementation – a reminder that whoever you vote for, the public-health creeps always get in.

Still, it’s fair to say that Labour is doing what it is told by the nanny-state blob with a zeal the Tories lacked.

Starmer is going to finish what Sunak started and pass the ‘generational’ ban on smoking. But even this policy – a phased-in, total prohibition of tobacco – isn’t illiberal enough for him, it seems. Hence his recently announced crackdown on smoking in… smoking areas. Which as we all know are places where non-smokers and small children notoriously tend to gather.

State-sanctioned fat-shaming is firmly on the agenda, too. A new scheme of ‘health MOTs’ will send NHS staff into workplaces to weigh people, and refer companies’ more portly colleagues to weight-loss clinics.

Such policies generally fit into one of two categories: the insane and the pointless.

Banning tobacco – that is, handing the entire cigarette market over to erstwhile drug dealers – is firmly in the first bucket. There’s a reason no nation has tried smoking prohibition in the modern age – other than Bhutan, in 2004. It abandoned it in 2021, after the black market exploded and smoking among kids went up.

A junk-food ad ban is in the latter category. While it will certainly hammer broadcasters, it’s not as if kids are going to suddenly forget that McDonald’s exists. In the two years after Transport for London introduced its own advertising ban on Tubes and buses, childhood obesity rose in London faster than the national average.

Even so, it is an alarming indication of where we are headed: a killjoy state in which even adults – this stuff never, ever stops at children – are patronised, cajoled, taxed and eventually even criminalised for what we choose to inhale, eat and drink in our own time.

Starmer is trying to fold this into his ‘tough decisions’ narrative – the idea that the Tories have so screwed the economy and the health service that desperate measures are needed. ‘Some of our changes won’t be universally popular, we know that’, he says, ‘but I will do the right thing for our NHS, our economy and our children’.

The logic here is slyly sinister: because of the dysfunctions and mismanagement of our healthcare system, ordinary people must have their choices curtailed. We must go without some of life’s great pleasures. As Christopher Snowdon has pithily put it, Starmer is ‘trying to reform the public, not the NHS’.

The New Statesman has dubbed this ‘the preventative state’ – the key to Starmer’s political worldview, apparently. Just as he supports schemes to combat the social and economic causes of crime, the PM wants to be equally tough on the lifestyle choices that will eventually put strain on public services.

This doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. For one thing, it is well-established that smokers cost the state less than non-smokers over the course of a lifetime – given smokers’ lifetimes tend to be significantly shorter.

What’s more, there is an obvious, yawning difference between trying to prevent someone from turning to crime and trying to prevent someone from overdoing it on the sausage rolls. For one thing, crime harms others, while scoffing and smoking too much only harms yourself.

Read between the lines of these announcements and you’ll see that any pretence of this being about the common good has been dropped now. It’s about pushing us around, for our own good.

The ‘preventative state’ is too anodyne a term for what’s going on here – the institutionalisation of the notion that it is the right, even the duty, of the state to dictate how we should live our lives. Worse still, that we must make sacrifices to compensate for the state’s myriad failings.

All the while, the only thing that’s really being prevented here is that thing we used to call ‘having a good time’.

The rise of the politics of lifestyle reflects a diminishment of actual politics. Just as New Labour handed independence to the Bank of England before banning smoking indoors – relinquishing control over the economy before seizing control of the smoking policies of every pub and club in the land – Starmer is drawn towards prohibitionism precisely because he lacks any transformative vision for society and the economy.

So we’ve ended up with a government that has given up on tackling structural issues and so obsesses over our waistlines. And we’ve ended up with a Labour Party that would rather clamp down on the habits of the lower orders – to demonise them and render them prohibitively expensive – than try to improve people’s economic lot.

After all, smoking rates are highest in the most deprived areas of Britain. And ‘junk food’ is just a class prejudice masquerading as a scientific designation. Many Pret sandwiches are more calorific than a Big Mac, but you never see news stories about obesity illustrated with images of a Chicken Caesar Bacon Baguette.

The great irony here is that raising living standards is the most effective ‘preventative’ policy of the lot, given poverty is a cast-iron predictor of poor health. Labour’s nanny statism is therefore a tacit admission that it doesn’t have the cure to what really ails Britain.

There have always been sections of bourgeois society repelled by the tastes of ordinary people and committed to foisting their puritanical values on everyone else. Now, after decades of ‘public health’ encroachments on our liberties, the business of government has become completely suffused with this petty lifestyle snobbery.

Keir Starmer’s killjoy state is what happens when politicians cannot solve society’s problems, and so decide that you are the problem.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater