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Jos Haynes's avatar

I think you give a misleading impression of this Bethel character by referring to him as a former nightclub entrepreneur. He is much more dubious than this. According to Wikipedia, he is a failed politician who owed his presence as a govt minister entirely to the fact that an ancestor four generations back was made a Lord as a result of his banking and political connections. So he inherits a title and then that clown, Boris Johnson, puts him into the Department of Health just in time for Covid. And what does he do? He negotiates lots of dodgy deals for his friends involving multi-millions of pounds, and then conveniently loses all his Whatsapp messages setting up the deals. He gives three different explanations for not having the messages, but confronted with the evidence admits he deleted them all "because he thought they were backed up". He also, inter alia, sponsored a Parliamentary Pass for the lover of the then Minister of Health, Hancock.

His is a record of malpractice, deception, corruption and failure. Why waste time reading what this pathetic crook writes? It says something about the times that this individual can achieve some prominence despite achieving nothing worthwhile in his lifetime. His great great grandfather has a lot to answer for in accepting an hereditary peerage which has allowed this good-for-nothing descendant to live off the public purse.

As for Van Schalkwyck and Gilmore, yet more academics (I nearly put pseudo in front there, but these days they are all pseudo) who reel off all the right (ie left) phrases that the grant giving woke institutions adore. At least you have given me a few more names to avoid in the future. My list grows longer by the day.

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Dan Malleck's avatar

Great post. Along with just ignoring that people have agency and can make decisions based upon what they like, the biggest problem on my view with the Commercial Determinants of Health BS is that it distracts from the other very well documented problems of social determinants of health, things over which people often have no control but that seriously affect their health. If you just blame big junk food, big alcohol, etc you give the social structural inequities a pass that they do not deserve. Ironically (and you and I may argue about this) both point to problems of capitalism but one is an illusion and one is very real. (It's the aspirational lefty paradise thing that also irritates me although I am a lefty)

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