Column: Has the left hand of the government ever met the right?
There are two things we seem to be good at. One is telling people they should exercise more. The other is finding a way of making exercise more complicated, says comedian and writer Steve N Allen.
We have now reached the stage where doing yoga in a park can apparently require paperwork, insurance, first-aid certificates and, depending on where you live, several hundred pounds.
There’s fascinated reading in a report published by the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life called “Banned from the Beach: the Crackdown on Outdoor Community Sport.”
Angela Brier-Stephenson used to get up at 6am and run a small yoga class on the beach.
6am is an early start, but she was flexible. There were about ten people who would attend her 45 =-minute yoga class. Participants paid what they could. The local council told her she would need to pay £1,200 a year for a licence. She hasn’t run the class for two summers.
A licence to do yoga. Finally, we’re clamping down on the blight of the unlicensed yogis.
We should send them to prison. It seems fitting they’d get a long stretch. The council has since reduced its fee to £300 for fitness activities. So it now only costs £300 a year to stop people doing yoga on a beach instead of £1,200. It seems they’re flexible too.
One woman ran donation-based qigong classes with sometimes just seven people attending. She has stopped too. And now I may never get to find out what a qigong is and if I can eat it or not.
Why can’t people meet up in a public space and bend around a bit? They’re not doing it in the street where people have to walk round them, like an advertising sign put outside a vape shop. Oh, it’s OK for the pavement to suddenly get half as wide because they need to plug their air-freshener-scented smokes, but some middle-aged woman can’t bend with friends in a park.
This is particularly impressive when you consider that governments and councils spend an enormous amount of time telling us that Britain needs to get healthier. We are told to exercise. We are told to spend less time sitting down. We are told that obesity is a national crisis. We are told that getting outside is good for our mental health.
And as soon as we actually get out of the house they say, “That’ll be £1,000 please.”
It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether the left hand of government has ever met the right hand. They should try cow face pose to fix that.