It was Hayek who pointed out that a tax funded and politically run health service was going to lead to serfdom. Not, as he himself pointed out, because free at the point of use health care made you or us a slave but because that political involvement would lead to, well, political involvement.

Which it has and is:

This apparent conversion is welcome, but only if it results in a radical shift in the government’s approach, away from reliance on an ill-conceived notion of personal responsibility and towards recognition that much tougher regulation is required....

Obesity means that we must stop doing as we wish and must be forced into doing as they insist. Serfdom that is.

We need to see the compulsory reformulation of processed and convenience foods to reduce sugar and fat as well as salt levels, and, as the King’s Fund argues in today’s Observer, we need a comprehensive ban on junk food advertising, regulation to eliminate unhealthy food being sold as a loss leader by supermarkets and beefed-up powers to enable local authorities to maintain the area around schools as fast food-free zones.

The recipes of our food must be determined - enforced - by the illuminati, freedom of commercial speech be damned and given the way that schools are spread around urban areas - for the obvious reason that so are people and thus children - fast food banned from the cities.

There being various problems with all of this even after we ponder what right do these people have to rule our lives in this manner?

One in three leaves primary school overweight or obese,

That’s not true in the slightest.

it brings a huge cost of around £6bn a year for the NHS as obesity-related hospital admissions continue to rise.

Nor is that. To the extent that obesity does cause health problems it shortens lives and thus reduces the bill to the NHS of lifetime health care.

There is, also, the rather obvious point that the last few decades of government dietary advice seem to have been totally wrong and no one is all that confident that they’re right this time around.

But back to Hayek’s point. They are currently insisting that the NHS requires them to determine the price a supermarket may charge you for a pizza. No BOGOFs on junk food, recall? How far you must travel to buy a bag of chips - nothing near schools. They’re even insisting that the existence and needs of the health care system mean that they, the bureaucrats, should control the recipe books of the nation.

True, it’s not quite what Chekhov, Gogol or Tolstoy would have called serfdom but Hayek’s point is becoming more and more apparent, isn’t it?