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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is director of the Social Market Foundation think-tank
Last month, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced plans to ban the sale of cigarettes to people born after 2008. The move was backed by the Labour party, whose leader Keir Starmer has promoted a Child Health Action Plan which would prevent junk food from being advertised after 9pm and introduce supervised toothbrushing in schools. Meanwhile, the Scottish government plans to increase its minimum price for alcohol from 50p to 65p per unit.
With Starmer declaring that he is up for the fight when it comes to accusations he is promoting a nanny state, political commentators have been left trying to figure out where this surge of public health interventionism has come from.
A natural assumption is that it stems from the pandemic, when people became accustomed to restrictions on their freedoms in the interests of saving lives. Yet analysis by the Social Market Foundation suggests that public opinion has long favoured restrictions on smoking, drinking, gambling and obesity. The vast majority of measures for which we have public polling since 2015 commanded at least plurality support — ie, more people were in favour than against.
The soft drinks industry levy, a tax on sugary drinks, illustrates the point. Announced in 2016, some accounts make it sound as though then chancellor George Osborne dropped the measure and then ducked for cover, waiting for an explosion that never came. In fact, public backlash was minimal — though the libertarian elements of his party never forgave him.
That experience reflects a general pattern, which helps explain why politicians have taken so long to catch up to public opinion on these issues. It is not, typically, voters they need to be scared of — it is their colleagues, the media and the industries they are regulating.
“Nanny state” issues cut awkwardly across party lines — there are those with paternalistic and libertarian instincts on both sides of the aisle. That can make it harder to form and sustain a coalition for change. Doubts are fostered and kindled by commercial interests with big lobbying budgets and profits to protect. Passing regulation becomes a grind. The Scottish government’s effort to introduce minimum alcohol pricing was delayed for six years because of legal challenges. Chile’s anti-obesity measures, including taxes on sugary drinks and marketing regulations, involved 14 years of bartering with industry.
Politicians who come round to the necessity of banning, taxing and regulating these harmful commodities invariably do so because those are the most cost-effective levers at their disposal. Reviewing the evidence, we found that educational interventions tend to have little impact; treatment, including the coming generation of weight loss drugs, tends to be expensive. By contrast, population-level restrictions are cheap or even revenue raising and tend to significantly improve outcomes.
For all Starmer’s tough talk, the key question is whether Britain’s politicians really are ready to tackle the country’s bad habits. The battles they have picked have so far been on relatively easy terrain. The smoke-free generation legislation is world-leading, but smoking crackdowns are so widely accepted that public health advocates in other areas complain of “tobacco exceptionalism”. Few people care to defend marketing, and anything aimed at protecting children is an easy sell.
But would a Labour government raise alcohol duty or introduce minimum pricing in England? Would it tax unhealthy food? Would it license tobacco retailers? Would it introduce strict affordability checks on gamblers? Each of these measures would provoke fierce resistance from backbenchers, the media and industry, and eat up vital political capital. It remains to be seen whether politicians believe firmly enough in the benefits of such measures to pay the cost. Ignore the rhetoric: the nanny state war has yet to be won.
