Edmund Burke proven right once again

The latest claim is that we’re all very ill because we do not do that only connect thing Forster was so keen on.

Social health is the aspect of overall health and wellbeing that comes from connection – and it is vastly underappreciated. Whereas physical health is about your body and mental health is about your mind, social health is about your relationships. Being socially healthy requires cultivating bonds with family, friends and the people around you, belonging to communities, and feeling supported, valued, and loved, in the amounts and ways that feel nourishing to you.

Decades of research have proven that connection is as essential as food and water, but this knowledge hasn’t yet made its way into the mainstream understanding of health – and without it, we’re suffering.

Possibly the idea is picked up from, umm, Bowling Alone was it?

But OK, so, we lack social connection. We do too few things communally and too many alone. Well, if true there’s an answer to that.

Burke said that the bedrock of a society, the layer that made it work, was the little platoons. Folk simply getting together, themselves, and doin’ what needed to be done. Rather than some distant ruler or bureaucracy tellin’ them what must be done, or how it must be done. Burke might have gone on to say that it was a more moral society and all that, but the clinching point to pragmatists like us is that it was a more efficient, effective society.

Now we’re being told that these sorts of personal connections are a major determinant of health. Which sounds like an interesting string to the bow of the argument. We have far too much done for us - by those rulers, that bureaucracy - for us to be making those little platoon connections any more. To our detriment and, as Burke and we would also point out, to the detriment of the society itself, not just our health.

Which seems an easy enough problem to solve. Cut government, slash it in fact, because it will make us healthier. For we’ll have to return to those more personal, locally communal, methods of gettin’ things done.

Who knows, cut enough government and we might all become healthy enough that we’ll save the NHS.