Yesterday saw the 10,000th illegal immigrant reach Britain on a dinghy this year and an announcement from the government that it is going to start taxing milkshakes. The latter was not a response to the former but the juxtaposition of news stories was nevertheless telling. Governments that are unable to carry out their basic functions are always eager to immerse themselves in trivia. Labour, like the Tories, cannot resist the displacement activity of petty prohibition.
The sugar tax, announced by George Osborne in 2016 to deflect attention from the fiscal targets he has missed and the cuts to disability benefits he was making, has been a failure. Obesity rates rose among both children and adults after it was introduced in 2018 and consumers resented having their favourite brands “reformulated” with artificial sweeteners. If “evidence-based policy” was a serious objective rather than a buzzword, it would be repealed, and the people responsible would be publicly shamed. A modelling study that was often cited by campaigners for the sugar tax claimed that it would lead to 180,000 fewer cases of obesity and generate £276 million in tax revenue. The revenue estimate was roughly correct. The obesity estimate was out by 180,000.
In healthcare, where evidence has to be taken more seriously, you cannot get away with mistakes of this order. Few medicines and surgical procedures have a 100 per cent success rate, but if they fail utterly to help anyone while causing unpleasant side effects, there are lawsuits, inquiries and sackings.
Things work differently in “public health” where modelling is used as evidence that a policy will work and then, when the prevalence of the problem increases, modelling is used to show that things would have been even worse if the policy had not been introduced. This is quite obviously the business model of the snake oil salesman. If the patient getting worse after treatment is not evidence that the treatment has failed, then nothing can be shown to fail and the cycle of useless “public health” interventions can continue forever.
The other approach used by nanny state campaigners to save face is ignoring the primary outcome — in this case, obesity — and focusing on proxy measures. Minimum pricing for alcohol, which dramatically failed to reduce alcohol-related deaths in Scotland and Wales — has been portrayed as a success because retailers complied with it and because there was a small decline in per capita alcohol consumption. Neither measure has any direct link to health, but it is something to cling on to. The sugar tax has been portrayed as a success because it led to less sugar being consumed in soft drinks. Consumers were shifting towards low and no-sugar soft drinks long before the tax was introduced, but there was nevertheless a small step change in 2018. This, of course, is only a “success” if it leads to fewer people being obese. The fact is that it was instead associated with more people being obese suggests that obesity never had much to do with soft drinks in the first place.
The whole thing is a bait and switch
The whole thing is a bait and switch. The sugar tax was not sold to us as a way of having more artificially sweetened drinks or a slightly low rate of obesity than we would otherwise have. We were told that it would lead to a significant reduction in obesity that would be worth the cost. As some researchers noted when they assessed the failure of various anti-obesity policies in Chile, including a sugar tax, last year: “It is possible, therefore, that, although overweight and obesity did not show a sustained decline after Chile’s 2016 regulations, they might have increased, or increased more, if no regulations had been enacted. However … the purpose of the regulations was to reduce overweight and obesity prevalence absolutely, not just relative to what would have happened otherwise.”
The idea that a tax that has failed to produce the promised results when applied to fizzy drinks will suddenly start to work if applied to milkshakes and lattes is risible and the government’s Impact Assessment verges on the hilarious. It projects that extending the sugar tax and increasing the tax rate will lead to young children consuming 0.9 fewer calories a day and adults consuming 1.2 fewer calories a day. This, supposedly, will result in the NHS saving £100 million over 25 years. This amounts to £4 million a year and is the equivalent to around eight minutes of NHS funding. Somewhere there is a room full of people tasked with making such futile projections from unproven assumptions. They are forced to debase themselves like this because Impact Assessments are part of the veneer of “evidence-based policy”, a well-meaning concept that has inevitably been corrupted because politicians do not make evidence-based decisions. They make political decisions.
