UK Healthy Towns: A Step Too Far?

"Gordon Brown's UK government will now try to design urban areas that force us to exercise more – and that's official. To tackle obesity with what he called a ‘large-scale' approach ‘across the whole community', Brown's health secretary Alan Johnson has said that he wants to ‘make physical activity a normal part of everyday life'."

"Barely two weeks ago, Johnson insisted that Britain's potential obesity crisis is one that's on the same scale as the crisis of climate change. That comparison was ridiculous enough. Now, he has said that both Labour's eco-towns and other urban areas should be adapted to improve people's health. Through their layout, facilities and construction, eco-towns could also be ‘healthy towns'. If successful, such an approach ‘could also apply to areas undergoing housing growth and renewal'."

"This is a regime for national fitness worthy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Not for nothing has Johnson claimed a past allegiance to Stalinism. In an absolutely illiberal and inhumane manner, Johnson wants urban areas designed so that people's behaviour cannot at all consist of their own freely decided ‘choices'. Instead, behaviour will be relentlessly controlled by the state. What the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov did to salivating dogs, or the stimulus-response experiments conducted by US psychologist BF Skinner did to hungry rats, Johnson wants to do to us. Johnson's view of human freedom is degraded."