Delingpole: Leave the Cornish Pasty Alone, NHS Bureaucrats!

Some ghastly National Health Service bureaucrat wants to change the recipe of Cornish pasties so that they are less Cornish, less pasty-like, and more ‘healthy’.

Well of course she does. It’s what public health officials do.

The bureaucrat, called Jill Venables, was speaking at a conference of Public Health England, the ghastly, finger-wagging quango established by David Cameron’s pretend-Conservative government in one of its many fits of pettifogging Nanny Statism.

According to the Telegraph:

Ms Venables told the Public Health England conference that some hospital visitors eat three Cornish pasties a day.

While acknowledging there is “nothing evil” about a traditional pasty, which can comprise up to 800 calories, she said she wanted to “save patients’ lives, which is why we are focusing on therapeutic diets”.

“Cornish people will probably throw me out of Cornwall but I’m working on a few recipes, using a few alternative things to shortcrust pastry, such as filo or pasta.

“There has to be a way to do this.”

No there doesn’t have to be a way to do this. There’s an equally viable — and considerably more attractive — way of dealing with this non-problem called “leaving the Cornish pasty the **** alone.”

That, you can be sure, is what most patients would want, given the choice.

But they’re not being given the choice, are they?

This one of the problems with the modern world: the gulf between what we, the people, actually want and the one which the bureaucrats of the finger-wagging liberal elite insist on imposing on us.

I discuss precisely this problem at some length with Christopher Snowden on this week’s podcast. It’s well worth a listen for its insights into the mindset of these people — the flawed logic which they use to justify imposing these authoritarian measures for our “own good.”

Snowden is fond of quoting Kingsley Amis:

“No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare.”

Exactly. It was to rid ourselves of these ghastly, meddling loons that we voted Brexit.

Yet still they are there.

Why?