TIM BELFORD

Get off our backs, eh?

George Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

The man who brought us "Nineteen Eighty-four" and the concept of "Big Brother" never lived to see the world he predicted.

And he probably wouldn't have believed that the communists would be gone by now and the so-called democrats would be the ones screwing with our lives.

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, came out with a whole series of proposals this week to make the average Brit a better person.

Like his North American counterparts, his vision of a better world came down hard on tobacco and alcohol.

Now, I'm not going to defend smoking because I think it's dumb.

I can say this because I smoked a pipe for thirty some years and I still puff on the occasional cigar.

(So did Winston Churchill and George Burns for that matter and they both lived past ninety.)

I don't think anyone should have to breath somebody else's second-hand smoke.

But I also don't believe Mother State should hound people who want to indulge, in the privacy of their own air space.

The same thing for booze.

You don't like it, don't do it. But Britain's PM seems to be heading back to the era of axe-wielding prohibitionists.

He actually said, "this will require us as individuals and as a nation to take our health and fitness more seriously."

This from a guy who's called in the medicos twice in the last month to check out his heart and stomach…

To top it off, Blair, unlike most of us, has the use of his wife's lifestyle guru to tell him to lay off the pint at lunch and go easy on the fish and chips.

To paraphrase Pierre Elliot Trudeau, "The state has no place in the lifestyles of the nation."

What we have here is someone elected to run a country who has decided to run everybody's living room.

When the State decides to tell you what you can do with your lungs and your liver, it won't be long before they start establishing maximum waist sizes, and minimum exercise periods.

To justify all this, Blair and his interfering minions say they want to "enhance social justice and develop social responsibility" so that people can "make their full contribution to society."

Of course, "social responsibility" and "full contribution" are apparently terms defined by Tony Blair and Cherie's life style guru.

What he doesn't understand is that freedom doesn't just mean you jog regularly, eat leafy green vegetables, and use the terms "firefighter" and "chair of the committee."

True freedom also means you can spend days on the couch with a pack of Rothmans and a bottle of Molson watching reruns of the "price is right" and eating jalapeno-flavoured ripple chips.

If you're so inclined.