This sugar tax is yet another case study in government inconsistency
The Government’s new sugary drinks levy has come into force, and it’s sharply dividing opinion. An important measure to tackle the obesity crisis, or an outrageous assault on personal choice? The dividing lines draw themselves. I happen to think it a fool’s errand. A similar tax in Mexico reduced consumption by just 16 calories a day, and it is unclear whether the change in price will really stop people from imbibing sugary drinks or they will just end up paying more for the same purchases.
But what we can all agree on is that this new tax is shot through with flaws. In fact, it’s a case study in the inconsistencies inherent in so much government policymaking.
Take the aim: to reduce sugar consumption. So why is this not really a tax on sugar at all, merely a tax on sugary drinks? Cakes, biscuits, chocolates, smoothies and even milkshakes are all excluded, without rhyme nor reason. But the inconsistencies don’t end there.
The Government is seeking to vastly reduce sugar consumption in Britain at the same time as it looks to expand the country’s sugar industry for export. The Department for International Trade is keen to talk up free trade, and the Government has been touting the UK’S success in getting the European Union to scrap Soviet-style production quotas and minimum prices for beet sugar, an industry that currently provides 10,000 jobs in Britain.
When this deregulation happened last year, the industry expected it to result in a massive increase in UK production, as well as falling prices for consumers. So what is it that the Government wants? Higher or lower sugar prices for consumers? I couldn’t tell you.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not just on sugar that the Government’s policy is not as sweetly logical as it ought to be. Mixed messages are to be found right across government.
The Prime Minister has extolled the virtues of the private sector, for example, once calling it the “greatest agent of collective human progress ever created”, but she is seeking to intervene to cap energy prices, undermining the attacks the Tories made against Labour’s Seventies-style campaign on the same issue. Mrs May finds herself inadvertently making Corbyn’s case for nationalisation for him.
Rightly worried about rising house prices, meanwhile, successive governments have perversely responded by propping them up through measures such as Help to Buy.
Under Margaret Thatcher, the Tories understood the importance of simple and sellable ideas. The free market; government not doing what the private market can provide; increasing choice for citizens; law and order. There is a reason that Thatcherism is a word. It stood for something consistent. Perhaps that’s something to return to.