According to today’s Express & Star, Wolverhampton City Primary Care Trust will be recruiting 25 lifestyle coaches at a cost of £700,000 in an effort to get smokers, drinkers and the overweight to kick their bad habits.
These “lifestyle trainers” will be lurking around Wolverhampton in gyms, leisure centres, GP surgeries and community centres, attempting to coerce the unwilling and unassuming to change their behaviours.
But why can’t people be left to make their own decisions and resolutions without being targeted by such Government health-salesmen? Are we incapable of making are own choices and employing our own will-power without the state on hand to molly-coddle us through? And why should ordinary taxpayers’ pay for the one-on-one “training” for those who have shown little regard for their own well-being up until now?
The "wayward" get special treatment while everyone else gets penalised…
But are they necessarily wayward? The only people these ‘lifestyle trainers’ are likely to meet the gyms and leisure centres they’ll be frequenting aren’t the exercise-shy coach potatoes they’re after, but rather those who’ve already taken the initiative and determined to live a healthier lifestyle without a penny from the Wolverhampton City Council coffers.
Schemes like these make you think we’ve evolved too far. Why are ordinary people paying for this sort of intrusive, coercive, questionably effective and wildly expensive government intervention for those who should be encouraged to take responsibility for their own health? If the recipients of this sort of nannying are motivated and in need of it, then they should buy their own help rather than leaning upon those who’ve contributed much and cost little.