Oh, Grrreat! The nanny state has Tony in its sights

YOU MIGHT have thought that with Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro making all the headlines, Tony the Tiger wouldn’t rank high on the list of public enemies who must be overthrown. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. Last week, Labour launched a character assassination on Tony – an amazing feat when you consider that Tony is a cartoon.

His crime? Appearing on the side of a box of cereal which, according to deputy leader Tom Watson, is an “obesity-inducing” product.

Tony’s time is up, according to Tom. Either Kellogg’s bans him and his other cartoon friends from their packaging, or Labour – if or when it gets the chance – will force them to do so.

Force is a tactic politicians across the spectrum are becoming increasingly comfortable with when it comes to controlling our lifestyles and personal decision-making.

Under the guise of “public health strategy”, we’re being made to pay more, consume less and struggle to access the products we want to eat and drink, because nosy politicians and faceless bureaucrats can’t help but intrude on our daily lives.

In reality, most lifestyle areas – including alcohol, obesity and gambling – aren’t public health issues at all. They’re private health issues and while we may want to consider what can be done to help people tackle lifestyles they no longer wish to lead, they do not justify a full intrusion of public officials into our private lives, to regulate our pints and pizzas out of existence.

Yet intrude they do. The introduction of a tax on sugary drinks – despite no evidence that such a policy has ever reduced obesity anywhere in the world – has led to higher prices and inferior products on supermarket shelves.

The price hikes deplete the disposable income of the poorest in Britain, while Irn-Bru and Ribena lovers have been forced to adapt to reformulated drinks or abandon them altogether (surprise, surprise, they don’t taste as good).

It’s a modern miracle, thanks to trade and innovation, that people who once struggled to access basic goods such as poultry are now able to get a wide range of dietary options – from organic vegetables, to fizzy drinks, to vegan sausage rolls.

What backwards philosophy tries to take choice away, or remove the bettertasting options from the market?

As the saying goes, 1984 was meant to be a warning, not an instruction manual. The more soft-power wins that the nanny state gets under its belt, the harder and further it pushes for control.

Rightly dubbed “killjoys” by my Institute of Economic Affairs colleague Christopher Snowdon, domestic and international busybodies are revealing their full ambitions for lifestyle takeover, and their vision for the future can be described no more kindly than as a dystopian nightmare.

One only needs to look at the past 40 days to see the direction this is heading... The end of 2018 revealed that Public Health England is considering calorie caps on restaurants and ready-meals. This goes far beyond publishing calorie guidelines on menus. The Government is threatening to tax food and punish industry if the food companies don’t bring their products within these arbitrary targets.

Wave goodbye to your Friday night pizza, date-night at the French bistro, or a flavourful ready-meal picked up on the way home.

And that’s on the moderate side of recent proposals. Last month saw a swarm of guidance from the medical journal Lancet, first calling for people to adopt a “planetary health diet” and then demanding the food industry be treated and regulated like “big tobacco”.

Sadly, the “slippery slope” argument has proven not to be a fallacy. It’s stone-cold reality for those who believe in the freedom to live life as you please, as long as you’re not harming anyone else.

The diet, which would require meat-eaters to cut their intake by 80 per cent, would allow you to eat one-tenth of a sausage per day or half a rasher of bacon per day – not both. You could consume just one-and-a-half eggs per week, ruling out the chance to make an omelette or frittata.

The Lancet-EAT report also calls for a hierarchy of intervention from governments, actively taking a stance against soft interventions in favour of the stricter ones, including to “ration”, “eliminate choice” or ban products from the market completely.

Flying in the face of genuine nutritional guidance or wellbeing for people who would have to live under this regime, the report goes so far as to describe wars and natural disasters as “opportunities from which the food system can be transformed”.

It is from this perspective that a select group of unelected academics is dictating the future of food and lifestyle to the world.

WHAT’S WHOLLY baffling about the modern puritan movement – besides the obvious – is that it has chosen to rear its ugly head at a time when our food and drink consumption is healthier than it has been for decades. Sugar intake has fallen by more than 20 per cent since the 1970s, while young people are reported to be engaging in far less risky behaviour – including smoking and drinking – than their parents did at their age.

What has also dropped, however, is physical exercise. We’re moving less, which is no doubt leading to more people being overweight.

From the calls to ban, reformulate, tax and regulate such a wide range of food products (as well as cartoon characters!) you’d be forgiven for thinking that a bowl of Frosties could kill you or launch an “obesity-inducing” process that can never be reversed. This picture isn’t just misleading, it counteracts the promotion of a healthy, balanced, moderate lifestyle, which is how to meaningfully tackle the rise in obesity and, yes, even allows for a few spoonfuls of sugar from time to time.

It’s not Tony who needs to go – it’s the nanny state preachers. Wouldn’t that be a “Grrreat” win for a free society.

Kate Andrews is associate director at the Institute of Economic Affairs.