Burnham’s Moral Rhetoric: Vote Labour to stop Tony The Tiger abusing your children
Remember when fat meant jolly and thin was mean? Well, it’s over. Now fat is a sign of failure: you and your parents’ grinding failure.
In March 2014, Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham said: “We are going to have quite bold new thinking around children’s diets.”
We? Who we?
In June he looked at a bowl of Frosties (they’re Grrrrrrrrrrrreat!!!!) and said:
“I’m not comfortable with the idea that any child in my constituency sits down at breakfast time to a bowl of food that is 38 per cent sugar. And if people are comfortable with that, well I’m going to disagree with them. I don’t think any child should be regularly taking in sugar of that level.”
Cancel that breakfast invite for Miserable Andy and his wife – get this for nominative determinism – Marie-France van Heel:
“She’s the one who got me on to it. She’s always been very big on it. You buy some of the products that look as though they’re slightly healthier, they’ve got grain in or whatever, they don’t have “sugar” in their name on the box. But you look at them and go ‘oh my god it’s loaded!’ In the old days we had it from the bowl on the table, on your Weetabix. It’s built in now isn’t it? So I just don’t think people are able to monitor and control the amount of sugar that they’re taking.”
OMG sugar is now a matter of spirtuality and morals.
‘We’re saying, where is it right for the government to act and where is it right to let people make their own choices? We’re saying it’s absolutely right for the state to intervene, and probably do so even more decisively than we did when we were in government, to protect children.”
If in doubt evoke the poor kiddies. To protect children is the last cry of a dying idea. The Labour Party will now protect children from adults. It’s not even stranger danger. It’s mums and dads giving you food. Children are used to justify any opinion.
Anneke Meyer says “childhood” is being used as “a moral rhetoric. Children and childhood function to explain and legitimize any practice or opinion as right while removing the necessity to provide reasons: children are the reason.”
You mums and dads who make more than one trip to A&E do so in dread that you will be grilled on how, why and who hurt the child. Of course, bad things happen. But the presumption is of guilt. Parents are suspects. It’s not your child’s bruises being checked, it’s your morals and abilities as a parent. You’re on the database.
And where broken arms and clunked heads went, now go teeth and fat.
You parents are not role models. The State is. Or someone the State approves of is a role model, like the footballer adopted by the elite and used to convey good messages to the common people.
Burnham is diminishing the status of parental authority. He adds:
“Because children don’t control the situations they’re exposed to, the environment they’re exposed to or the food that’s put down to them. Therefore I do think the state has an absolutely clear moral and intellectual basis for saying ‘we will act to protect all children’.”
Yeah. We hear you. And we agree. Don’t vote Labour!
Posted: 15th, January 2015 | In: Politicians Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
