Sugar tax: Johnson’s plan to keep us sweet
“What excellent timing,” said Jenni Russell in The Times. On the very day that Cancer Research UK launched a campaign highlighting the dangers of obesity, Boris Johnson unveiled his latest “populist policy” – one that would “encourage us all to consume more sugar, not less”. In a press release, our likely next PM promised last week to review the effectiveness of so-called sin taxes (financial disincentives to buy products that are bad for your health) and, in particular, to look again at the government levy, introduced last year, of between 18p and 24p per litre on some sugary drinks. The time has come, he later explained, to start basing our tax policy on “clear evidence” – and to take a “proper look at the continuing creep of the nanny state and the impact it has on hard-working families across Britain”.
The political appeal of such a move for Johnson is clear, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Calling for a freeze, and hinting at an eventual scrapping of what The Sun calls the “hated sugar tax”, will have looked like an “obvious vote-winner” among grass-roots Tories. Johnson argues that these taxes are regressive, hitting the poorest hardest, and insists that people should instead be encouraged to walk, cycle and generally do more exercise. But that’s to ignore the “horrific” scale of Britain’s obesity problem, said Camilla Cavendish in the Daily Mail – with sugary drinks identified as a leading cause. One in five of our children are classified as obese when they leave primary school (poor children are three times more likely to be obese than richer ones), while the number of adults who are similarly overweight has soared from 15% to 29% since the early 1990s. As a result, obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of bowel, liver, ovarian and kidney cancers, and the number of Brits with type-2 diabetes has doubled in only 20 years. Many doctors despair that today’s children could be “the first generation to die earlier than their parents”.
But such alarmist talk misunderstands what is going on here, said Matthew Parris in The Times. Although there are indeed arguments to be had over the role of “state nannying” and the “right to self-harm”, Johnson knows that any review he orders into the operation of the sugar tax will conclude the measure is working well – and that drinks companies are sharply reducing the sugar content of their products as a result. To that extent, he is really only “tickling Tory activists’ tummies” by suggesting otherwise. Move along please, there’s “no story here”.