NICE work if you can get it

Tuesday February 22, 2011

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is obsessed with its own importance, says Simon Hills. Essentially, this non-elected board of rather well remunerated do-gooders wants to nationalise our bodies.

When the government decided they were entitled to vilify smokers, they drew criticism from those libertarians who were of the view that what adults do to their bodies is their business.

At that time, in the Sixties and Seventies, our leaders actually had some qualms about telling people how they should live their lives, until self-righteous pressure groups started work on drumming up convenient (but highly dubious) evidence of secondary smoking to claim that they were causing harm to others.

No such qualms now.

NICE – the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence – last year called for a complete ban on alcohol advertising, the introduction of minimum prices and more rigorous screening for problem drinkers.

NICE advises the NHS on treatments and makes recommendations to the NHS and other organisations on how to improve people’s health and prevent illness and disease. Like most quangoes it is obsessed with its own importance. Although it concedes that it is not its business to make policy, here it is advising the government to, erm, do what it says and make it policy. Essentially this non-elected board of rather well remunerated do-gooders feels it’s time to nationalise our bodies.

It’s just had enough of binge-drinkers, people having the temerity to visit their GP with alcohol-related diseases and teenagers falling over after too many drinks on a night out.

It’s had enough. Do you hear?

Well, none of us likes a load of louts marauding through our town centres stoked up on enough lager to flood Bristol, but there is an easy way to stop their unruly behaviour. Arrest them for it.

That isn’t the national way, though. While NICE rails against society exercising its freedom to get out of its bonce on a Saturday night, so other quangoes are telling us that we ought to be more understanding to the poor dears who’ve been forced by circumstance into smashing up bus shelters and picking fights with the police. God forbid that we should make matters worse by punishing them.

Current thinking is that you need to control the innocent to bring the guilty to heel. (Stalinism, in other words.) So the government last year was presented with a report to lower the drink-driving limit to one that will ensnare sober drivers on the dubious evidence that it might “save lives”.

Sir Peter North, ex principal of Jesus College Oxford, who was commissioned by the Department of Transport to review the drink drive laws, told us “up to” 168 lives could be saved in England and Wales if the limit of 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood were lowered to 50mg (a figure so patently arbitrary he might have well as said “up to” 168,000, or six, for that matter).

We naughty citizens, as always, need to be more strictly governed. Needless to say that after 20 years of bullying and curtailing our freedoms, far from enjoying the possibility that we might soon not have to die of anything, all the government and its self-serving quangoes have achieved is to make society rather more obnoxious than it was. It has enforced a warped set of values where smokers and now drinkers are a drain on society, whereas it’s absolutely fine if people ruin their health and soak up our national resources being rescued from the Cairngorms.

And so it is. But there is an argument, too, that those of us who would rather sit around eating pizza, drinking strong lager and betting on the horses are perfectly entitled to do so. We’re all more than likely going to live a lot longer than the 189 people who’ve taken it upon themselves to climb Everest and died in the process. And there is no “up to” in that figure.

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine