Fat heads, the Fat Society, and the Fat Controller

2012 is opening as 2011 ended, with a national panic on the subject of breast implants. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a bit fed up of the French: a stream of insults before Christmas, and now it transpires they’ve been sending us a veritable torrent of badly-made falsies over the last decade. Yes, it’s all gone tits up.

Getting in on the act this morning is the irrepressibly dull Andy Burnham, who says he wants new guidelines on implants. Bless. He’s still a Blairite to his twinkly little toes, is our Andy. But then, when Mr Burnham was in charge of the NHS, we had very strict, zero-tolerance guidelines about hospital performance. So strictly did Andy adhere to these, he signed off the performance of Stafford Hospital….just before a host of media (including The Slog) pointed out that a WWII bomber pilot had more chance of survival than a patient going into Stafford General.

Anyway, Andy Burnham wants better guidelines on implants, and he does have a point: he’s been on the list for a brain implant for over six years now, and it isn’t fair to make him wait any longer.

Camerlot is giving the Big Society another dose of wellie by declaring that ‘A big society needs big citizens’. Well, no problem there, Dave: judging by the size of the average Brit in the passports queue at Heathrow yesterday, we’ve got millions of them. Unfortunately, they won’t be able to get out there into the community and do their bit because most of them will have to be winched back into their homes this week….and the service doesn’t run to making the doors bigger so they can get out again. Issa cuts, roit? The f**kin’ Tory cuts.

The statistics say obesity is still on the increase here, and for once they are borne out by the terrifying sight of megablobs at every public gathering in Britain. Almost a quarter of all UK citizens are now classed as obese. We have the worst obesity rates in the EU: experts who looked at the health of 31 European countries in late 2010 also found that the number of obese Britons has more than doubled in the last 20 years. Worst hit are senior workers in the banking sector, where cranial obesity is ten times the rate in any other demographic, including politicians.

The massive opportunity these numbers represent will of course be lost on the snailbrains in government. If we make every chubby-chops redundant without benefits, and fill their posts with the poor – who must be thin, otherwise they couldn’t be classed as poor, right? – I calculate that the obesity level would drop below 10% by the start of 2013. This would be the inevitable result of (1) having nothing to eat and (2) running round trying to find a job. Such people always expect government to do things for them, and I think here we have a one-off opportunity to demonstrate the caring side of Camerlot. But of course, they won’t take it: with Eric Pickles at Communities & Local Government, they daren’t.

Rail Unions chief Bob Crow has turned up in The Guardian this morning, flailing train bosses for ‘daylight robbery’ in putting up rail fares by an average of 11% as a way to ring in the New Year. He’s right of course – a great deal of private rail commercial thinking involves an inverse correlation between bonus size and investment budgets. But I have a sneaking feeling I know where Mr Crow is going with this one.

It is a longstanding TUC gambit in all the transport and care sectors to say that redundancies and poor salaries are bad for the public, in that they reduce safety. Having been nearly killed by Great Western thirteen years ago, I can see the logic in that. But all Bob and his mates care about is more jobs for his mates and bigger wage increases to knock the wicked Coalition off course. And that kaiboshes Crow’s strategy really, because the deal he strong-armed Network rail into last May has put employee overheads up…..er, by around 11%.

RMT general secretary Bob Crow triumphantly opined at the time,  “This is a groundbreaking offer that gives Network Rail staff more than 10% on the basic between now and next year and which also puts a further £500 in their pockets for working shifts during the Olympics.The package recognises the important role that transport workers will be expected to play during the Games and rewards them financially while protecting their union rights at the same time. At this time of austerity, we think that the £500 extra payments and 10% on the basic represents a good deal and proves that strong union organisation can deliver for the members.”

All of which goes to show that Bob (right) tends to talk out of both sides of his ample mouth; but trying to attract members and public support is a very complex web to weave, even for him. Today he pronounces: “This is the scandal of rail privatisation writ large: fat profits for the train companies while the public pay through the nose to travel on creaking and overcrowded cattle trucks.” But one of the reasons they pay through the nose, Bob, is that “strong union organisation can deliver for the members.”

PS  Londoners already know Jolly Bob Crow, the patron saint of commuters, as the chap who drove the New Year Tube strike.