Nanny Emma

It's a shame that the government's latest bit of insanity was smothered by Thursday's Pledge Riot. The Nanny Emma scheme is a plan to create 'Working Families' by inflicting a regiment of badgering Gillian McKeiths upon unfortunate people who have not lived up to the ConDem standards, and will be the most invasive and least effective and most humiliating piece of social interference since the ravages of the Means Test. 
Its brainchild, the training entrepreneur Emma Harrison, is typically vague about her plans. The 'primary focus' will be:
'to start by helping 500 ‘never worked’ families into families that are working, paying their own ways and living great lives. This will be achieved by giving every troubled family the support they rightly deserve.'
How this will create any more jobs and help society is a total mystery. How much healthier and empowering was Jamie Oliver's pyramid cooking project, which  attracted mass sneers from the tories and their media backers.
Only when kids are treated like human beings, and provided with places to learn how to value life can poor diet ever really be a thing of the past. If an effective National Youth Service is ever founded, and kids learn to value interaction for its own sake, and value themselves as a result, then we can expect that generation to use food, and alcohol and drugs, responsibly. But at present, young people are demonised, and their only source of respect comes from their peers, and the only comfort many get is to eat and drink to excess. The result is the weekly binge and the problems that go with it. 
Our consumer culture is instilling mass self-loathing in every young person it can get its claws into. When (or if ) they grow up, we will have created a race of monsters.
This gimmick stinks.