Who says Austrians don’t
love cricket too?
Giles Coren
Page 26
Obesity U-turn is weak, shallow and immoral
The threat of letters of no confidence has seen off a policy that might have turned around Britain’s ruinously bad diet
Comment
taxes in the future. None whatsoever.
The entire idea of a limited state is
going to depend on developing a
healthier society.
It is therefore a terrible error to
associate conservatism with a
reluctance to protect people from
their natural appetites being abused,
in an industrial age for which they
were not designed. If we could
liberate more people from that fate,
they could enjoy greater personalfreedom and have some chance of a
lighter tax burden. That sounds
pretty Conservative to me. We know
that tough interventions on this issue
do work: the soft drinks industry levy
on sugar has led to the reformulation
of drinks, with far fewer calories.
Manufacturers and consumers have
been helped to escape a cycle that
was creating poor health. It is
possible, as well as essential, to turn
round the alarming trends and costs
we see all around us.
MPs who have pressed, seemingly
successfully, for the dilution of the
obesity strategy are profoundly
mistaken. They are acquiescing in a
future of higher dependence, greater
costs, reduced lifestyle choice and
endless pain. For the government to
give in to them is intellectually
shallow, politically weak and morally
reprehensible.without physical distress and looking
down from the top with exhilaration
and wonder. These are the freedoms
being denied to vast numbers of
people who are the victims, not the
free agents, in a system that wants to
fill them up with salt, sugar and
saturated fat.
Conservatives also believe in self-
reliance, personal independence,
resilience and responsibility. A
country that cherishes these virtues
can have lower taxes and a smaller
state. We should be able to focus
resources on those who are
unavoidably ill and disabled. Yet
already, £18 billion a year is spent on
conditions related to high body mass
index. Covid hit us harder because of
widespread obesity. If we fail to
control diet-related diseases, on top
of paying for an ageing population,
there will be no possibility of lowerMany obese Britons are trapped in an
addiction to cheap processed foodpolicies and think it is “un-
Conservative” to pursue them. As a
former Tory leader, I emphatically
disagree with this interpretation of
conservatism. Conservatives support
freedom of choice but have always
seen that it is sometimes necessary
to prevent consumers being abused
or misled. That is why we have laws
on labelling, standards and
monopolies. People have not made a
voluntary choice to become obese.
They are trapped in what Dimbleby
rightly calls the “junk food cycle”.
Humans evolved, when food was
scarce, to indulge in calorie-dense
foods if the opportunity arose. Now,
the abundance of food and its
particularly highly processed nature,
which means we go on eating for a
long time before feeling full, leads us
to eat a lot of the wrong things. Food
companies have an overwhelming
incentive to design products that
lead us ever further down this
chemically induced addiction to
foods that make us overweight, more
prone to disease, and less able to
work and enjoy life to the full. This is
not freedom. People do not sit down
and say, “I know I should eat better
but on the whole I think it would be
fun to be grossly overweight”. They
are stuck in the cycle and so are the
producers feeding them.
If we believe in freedom, we have
to face up to this. Freedom is, most
crucially, being free from oppression,
violence or discrimination. But it is
also the freedom of a child to skip
and somersault; of an adult to enjoy
running down a country lane or in a
city park; of an old person to keep
their quality of life until their final
days. Freedom is being well enough
to work in your chosen career, to be
strong enough to protect and care
for your loved ones, to be fit enough
to take part in sports and games.
Freedom is climbing a mountainT
he spectacle of ministers
preparing unilateral steps
to depart from an
international agreement
they themselves negotiated
and which their approach to Brexit
necessitated is hardly edifying. There
is, nevertheless, fault on both sides,
for the EU has been unwilling to
agree changes to the Northern
Ireland protocol that might assuage
Unionist anger and make trade across
the Irish Sea run more smoothly. It is
at least possible to sympathise with
the motive of the government
changing its policy, if that is to obtain
fresh compromises from all sides.
No such generous view should be
awarded, however, to a quite different
change in government policy that
has become apparent in recent days:
the delay or abandonment of several
of the measures designed to tackle
the unrelenting rise of obesity in the
UK. Under pressure from some
Conservative MPs, some of whom
have been threatening to write letters
of no confidence in Boris Johnson
unless they get their way, ministers
have retreated from banning “Buy
One Get One Free” deals and from
imposing a watershed of 9pm on
junk food advertising. While some
measures, such as rules on the
positioning of unhealthy foods by
retailers, will still go ahead in
October, this U-turn adds to the long
history of failed obesity strategies. It
means the current government’s
anti-obesity drive will probably join
the 14 strategies and 689 different
policies over the past 30 years,
according to a Cambridge University
study, that have failed to deliver.
The national food strategy, led by
Henry Dimbleby and published last
year, offered an excellent plan to
help people escape “the junk food
cycle” while also reducing inequality
and making better use of land. It
explained that poor diet is leading to
tens of thousands of premature
deaths each year, that obesity is still
increasing and that by the mid-2030s
the NHS will spend far more treating
Type 2 diabetes than every form of
cancer. Britain is now the fattest
country in Europe, with over a
quarter of people classed as obese
and most of the rest overweight.
Tragically, one in five children are
obese by the age of 11, their chances of
living a long and healthy life already
impaired. It is a national disgrace.
The excuse for abandoning the
ban on “multi-buy” promotions is
the cost-of-living crisis. Yet when the
government launched its obesity
strategy in 2020 it quoted withapproval research showing that such
promotions “actually increase the
amount we spend by 20 per cent by
encouraging people to buy more
than they need or intended to buy in
the first place. These are not ‘good
deals’ for our wallet or our health.”
The whole point of them is to get
people used to buying more.
Delaying this plan, according to
Cancer Research UK, “would be
delaying progress in helping people
maintain a healthy weight and risks
exacerbating health inequalities”.
While the cost-of-living argument
is baseless, many Tories object to the
“nanny state” image of anti-obesityIt is conservative to
prevent consumers
being abused or misled
The levy on sugar
has led to far fewer
calories in soft drinks
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Haguethe times | Tuesday May 17 2022 25