British people want to be treated like adults, not ordered around by the nanny state
In July 2023, Transport for London barred a West End poster from appearing on the walls of the Underground because it showed a wedding cake. The image, TfL said, breached its rules against promoting unhealthy foods. A few months later, comedian Ed Gamble was forced to swap the hot dog in his Hot Diggity Dog tour poster for a cucumber to avoid the ban.
Neither advert was selling food. One was for a play, the other for a comedy show. It didn’t matter. TfL says even “incidental images” of unhealthy foods are verboten. Apparently Londoners can’t be trusted to glance at a picture of a wedding cake without losing all self-control.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who has a casual relationship with the truth, defended the wedding cake and hot dog censorship. He claimed that, particularly with regard to reducing childhood obesity in London, “all the evidence shows that the TfL policy works”.
So let’s look at the evidence. The celebrated headline, based on a study from the University of Sheffield and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, claims that the bans have “prevented almost 100,000 obesity cases”. But that study proves no such thing.
First of all, the study doesn’t measure childhood obesity, in fact it explicitly excludes under-16s. Secondly, the study is merely a projection of potential future reductions in adult obesity, based on findings from another study which found that TfL bans may be associated with fewer household purchases of certain types of (but not all) unhealthy foods. In other words, it measures shopping habits, not children’s weight. Crucially, neither study measures BMI.
So there is not yet any evidence that censoring comedy show posters — especially under the “incidental images” rule — is reducing obesity in London, let alone childhood obesity. That gap between outcomes and overreach is the point: we’ve normalised rules that don’t protect, they infantilise.
Long gone are the days A.J.P. Taylor pined for in English History 1914-1945, the days where “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.” Today, the state even polices which foods you may be reminded exist.
One might assume that decades of such brazen micromanagement have conditioned the British public to accept it. But our polling indicates the opposite. At Adam Smith Insights, we surveyed 2,065 adults across Britain. On safety, lifestyle and money, Brits back themselves, not Whitehall.
On safety, 77 per cent say they, not the government, are best placed to judge what’s safe. Even among 2024 Labour voters, it’s 69 per cent. Strong majorities hold across every age group, and three-quarters of both men and women say they can decide which activities are safe. We did find an ethnic difference, with White Brits more than twice as likely as Asian Brits to “strongly agree” that they are better placed than the government to judge what’s safe.
And on personal autonomy, the public is equally clear: they want freedom, not overreach. Reform 2024 voters are particularly firm, 56 per cent want the government entirely out of their personal lives. The ethnic split persists here too; White Brits are twice as likely as Asian Brits and 2.5 times more likely than Black Brits to want autonomy. Age also matters; older Britons, perhaps remembering life before constant interference, are more libertarian than younger people.
On finances the verdict is overwhelming, 92 per cent of the public believe they should be trusted to manage their own money responsibly. Even 89 per cent of Labour 2024 voters agree. Yet Britain’s regulatory state does not extend that trust. In fact, the Financial Conduct Authority claims that more than half of Brits could be classed as “financially vulnerable”.
As it turns out, Brits want to be treated like adults
And when we tested those two now-infamous posters — the wedding cake and the hot dog — the reaction was near-unanimous. 82 per cent told us that they should never have been banned.
As it turns out, Brits want to be treated like adults. So if the aim is better health outcomes, target real drivers. But if the aim is theatre, carry on censoring cakes.
