Scotland’s health tyrants should get on their bikes | Kevin McKenna
Perhaps we’ll never know which Holyrood star chamber decided in the twilight years of the 20th century to model Scotland on ancient Sparta. Indeed, we only know of its existence at all because of the implacable slew of ordinances and diktats handed down over the last 15 years with the apparent aim of making Scotland the hardest wee nation on Earth.
Sparta had good reason to ensure that all its citizens were constantly maintained on a battle-ready footing. For several hundred years, it was in a state of constant war with Athens, Thebes and Persia and thus it evolved into the world’s first real military state. And when big Gerard Butler and his 300 overcame the odds in 480BC to give the Persians their tea at Thermopylae, few of the world’s geo-political commentators were really that surprised. By the time it passed into history, Sparta was unbeaten home and away.
But what will fourth-millennium historians make of Scotland’s bizarre efforts at being the world’s house of pain? At a time when every other modern state in the world has been putting its feet up and deploying new technology to make life easier for its citizens, Scotland has been forcing its people to do 50 laps of the track before serving us all cabbage and beetroot for dinner. The latest decree announced by our health politburo is that, by 2020, at least 10% of all journeys in Scotland must be taken on a bicycle.
This daft and unattainable quest has come about through years of constant whingeing and hand-wringing by an increasingly strident bicycle lobby. Quite how the government intends to bring this about was not really addressed. Perhaps every household in Scotland will be handed a government-issue bike fitted with a mileometer connected to a government mainframe. In that way, it will be possible to identify the stragglers and issue penalties accordingly.
When will all those junts in the cycling junta realise that if God had wanted Scotland to be a nation of cyclists He would have given all our hills and mountains to someone else?
When cyclists start insuring themselves and observing the highway code like the rest of us I’ll start listening to them. And it’s impossible to tell how many road traffic accidents have been caused by their pantomime helmets and electric blue and yellow vests distracting innocent and unsuspecting road-users.
Our political elite have been implacable in their quest to make Scotland a realm of rectitude and solid ethical housekeeping. The edicts have continued ceaselessly since the dawn of devolution in 1999. There shall be no smoking in public; there shall be no consumption of cheap booze; there must be no more happy hours.
Thou shalt not attempt to pass your children pies, chips or other naughty comestibles through the school fence that are not included on the Jamie Oliver middle-class healthy food concordat.
Thou shalt consume five vegetables a day else ye may become one yourself. Ye shall climb Munros, walk 500 miles and undertake fun runs until your feet be blister’d and your arse be chafed and the streets be submerged in rivers of sweat. Your carbon footprint must be reduced to a size three by 2020.
Being Scots, of course, we consent to all this civic finger-wagging because we’ve always done as we’re told and been taught to obey our betters. And because of this we will be kettled ever more aggressively into living a test-tube lifestyle of some academic and political philosopher’s dream. Already, those who can’t – or won’t – get with the project are being held up to ridicule. “You are poor and sick because you shop in Iceland and watch too much satellite telly. We can’t help you if you can’t help yourselves. Stop sitting about all day and wearing white tracksuits.”
We will all be forced to embrace state spartanism for the greater good of a healthy Scotland. Only the fittest will survive because nothing is more important, it seems, in the new Scotland than that we are healthy and sturdy. Like the Spartans, all infants will be forced to lie out all night under a Partick sky to toughen them up.
From the age of 15, all fit and able-bodied citizens will be given a quota of Munros to climb and hills to cycle up, which they must have completed by the time they are 25. The right to marry and have children will rest on successful completion of same.
All roads will have been converted to cycle routes with special pay-as-you-go car lanes that only the new Scottish mafia and party apparatchiks will be able to access.
Scottish codgerdom will be forced into local parks at 6am, there to participate daily in a mass state Falun Gong malarkey while chanting the new state mantra:
Onward brave Caledonia
Where asparagus, carrots and onions thrive
Land of the running vest and bicycle clip
Death to the smoked sausage supper
Middle-class Latin-American teenage girls will be getting detained regularly at Glasgow airport trying to smuggle out consignments of haggis and Buckfast tonic wine, the old Wreck the Hoose Juice itself. They will claim that armed gangs made them act as mules to carry the forbidden fare.
Anyone who objects to the madness will be deemed an enemy of the state and sent to correctional facilities.
They will be told that something had to be done about Scotland’s bad diet and our lack of exercise and that this was killing our people. And, as such, the nation had to become a health-and-fitness boot camp. To deny this narrative will be to risk forfeiting job, home and alcohol token.
An outlawed resistance movement will be forced to go underground for claiming that the state movement for health and fitness is nothing other than a lucrative confidence trick to disguise the real reasons for Scotland’s bad health: low wages; fuel poverty and lack of investment in poor communities.
No amount of running or cycling or climbing will absolve successive Scottish governments of their abject failures in curbing multi-deprivation in an affluent country.
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