"Food industry is killing us" says Action on Sugar
As long ago as 2004 I gave a speech entitled 'Food is the new tobacco'.
At the invitation of the Adam Smith Institute I was speaking to sixth formers attending a one-day conference so no-one could be less surprised at recent events. (See It's official: food really is the new tobacco.)
What has shocked me is the speed with which the war on sugary products has escalated.
There it was, bubbling away in the background. Then, as Chris Snowdon reminded listeners to Five Live last night, Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH) reinvented itself as Action on Sugar and, well, you know the rest.
They're not alone, of course. Jamie Oliver has been banging this drum too and the result is what we see today – what Chris rightly calls a "moral panic" has been manufactured (brilliantly it has to be said) with the collaboration of journalists who should know better but probably don't because they haven't bothered to read the actual evidence.
David Cameron is resisting calls for a tax on sugar but for how long? He did the same initially with smoking in cars with children and plain packaging of tobacco and look what happened. The odds on fizzy drinks being sold in standardised cans within a decade must be falling rapidly.
Anyway my colleague Rob Lyons (Action on Consumer Choice) was also on Five Live yesterday and his opponent was Professor Graham MacGregor.
MacGregor is not only chairman of Action on Sugar, he founded CASH in 1996 and World Action on Salt and Health in 2005.
Yesterday he told listeners "the food industry is killing people". Concepts such as choice and personal responsibility are anathema to him.
As Rob later pointed out on Twitter, MacGregor also had this to say:
Our view is that we very much welcome a [sugar] tax. It's additive to all the other measures. We know it reduces consumption, you only have to look at tobacco and alcohol. My view is that it should be an escalating tax that is like alcohol and tobacco, it goes up with time.
So you have that tax in position we can then say to the food industry and the soft drink industry, "Look, you've got to reformulate", that is, slowly reduce the enormous amounts of sugar they're putting in all these foods.
We need a regulated plan for that. If you don't reformulate properly we'll escalate the tax, but if you do reformulate we'll keep the tax at 10-20 per cent. In other words, you've got a mechanism to force the food industry to cooperate on a voluntary basis.
Rob also noted, 'The good folks from Action on Sugar clearly use a different definition of 'voluntary' from the rest of us.'
Anyway, to listen to the discussion click here.
Further reading – 10 reasons why sugar taxes suck (Action on Consumer Choice).
I'd also recommend this article, not least for it's splendid headline – Jamie Oliver is a patronising bully and he can stick his sugar tax (Telegraph).
The author is Alex Deane who spoke at Forest's Freedom Dinner in 2014.
PS. Curiously the URL actiononsugar.org takes visitors to the Queen Mary University of London website, which is odd because I can't see any mention of the campaign on the home page.