An idiot’s guide to promoting “public health” policies

The Health and Care Committee has published a report calling for yet another slew of anti-obesity policies. After taking “evidence” from such experts as the orthorexic children’s entertainer Chris van Tulleken and some “youth activists” from Jamie Oliver’s front group BiteBack, it has called for a ban on fast food outlets opening near schools, a ban on all outdoor advertising of high fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) food, a ban on companies associated with such foods advertising themselves even if they are not advertising an HFSS product, and a ban on companies which “derive more than a certain proportion of sales from less healthy products from any discussions on the formation of policy on food, diet and obesity prevention.” 

Most of this is old news. The insatiable neo-puritans who masquerade as “public health” professionals have been trying to stop fast food outlets opening for years and didn’t even wait for the “junk food” advertising ban to be implemented before they demanded it be extended beyond television, radio and the internet. The only interesting development is the explicit recommendation to bar the food industry from discussing policy with policy-makers. The tobacco industry has been similarly ostracised for the last 20 years under Article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Whether this explicit signal that the slippery slope is real will wake the food industry from its complacent slumber remains to be seen. 

Announcements like this are a dime a dozen. A constant barrage of press releases from a network of NGOs, state-funded charities, journals, All-Party Parliamentary Groups and Select Committees creates a “swarm effect” that keeps the pressure on until the government finally buckles. The policies are then introduced, they fail to work and the whole process begins again as if nothing happened. Freedom is diminished by another increment and the economy suffers another small blow, but it keeps lots of academics and lobbyists busy. 

As I have argued before, the anti-smoking lobby created a playbook which has become the Bible of the anti-obesity, anti-alcohol and anti-gambling lobbies. Yesterday’s announcement follows that playbook to the letter. If you have something you would like to ban, here are some of the boxes to tick.

1. Flatter politicians 

Most parliamentarians are powerless pygmies with delusions of grandeur. Having no answers to the big problems facing the country, they indulge themselves in the displacement politics of petty prohibition. They want to be seen as heroic, so be sure to flatter them by portraying the policy you are proposing as “bold” and “brave”. When the Health Committee proposed a sugar tax in 2015, it subtitled its report “Brave and Bold Action”. Jamie Oliver urged ministers to be “big and bold”. This week’s report from the Health and Social Care Committee uses the words “bold” or “bolder” six times. The first line of the press release calls for “a new, bold approach”. The committee’s chair, Layla Moran, said: “We ask this government to be bold, not to fudge and delay food restrictions.”

In truth, there is nothing courageous about taking on food companies that have shown no interest in standing up for themselves, let alone individual kebab shop owners who are just trying to make a living, but that is the beauty of it. MPs want to feel brave but don’t want to take risks. You have just the policies for them.

2. Portray industry, not the public, as the problem

All nanny state policies are aimed at changing the behaviour of the plebs by restricting what they can do, but you can’t say that out loud. Therefore never talk about the desire of individuals to buy things cheaply and easily. Instead focus on businesses’ desire to sell things at a profit. This kind of thing goes down well with politicians who think that profit-making companies have no place in modern Britain but also with the public because it absolves them from blame. Don’t blame individuals for stuffing their face with pizza and doing no exercise. Blame pizza companies for putting a shop in an area with high football and telling people about their pizzas. And don’t call people “obese”. Instead, say that they are “living with obesity”, as if a squatter has moved into their house. The more powerless they feel, the more powerful you are.

That is why Layla Moran said yesterday that: “Attitudes of obesity being purely down to the individual failings are outdated and deny the reality of those living with obesity and excess weight in this country needs robust challenge.” There is a reason why the word “industry” is used more than 60 times in the report while the word “freedom” is only used twice, both times in the context of businesses being “given the freedom” to meet the state’s targets for healthy food sales in whichever way “works best for them”. 

3. Cite spurious economic costs

If someone gets fat, it is really no one else’s business, so you need to get out there and make it their business. The best way to do this is to concoct a pseudo-economic study showing that fat people (or whichever outgroup you are going after) are a huge burden on public services. The trick is to make it look like a cost-benefit analysis, but only include costs. For example, add up all the costs of treating obesity-related diseases, but don’t look at what the healthcare costs would have been if the person hadn’t been “living with obesity”. Never compare the lifetime healthcare costs of an obese person to those of someone who has a “healthy weight” because it will totally undermine your argument. And if your number still isn’t big enough, include the intangible costs of lost years of life. That will give you tens of billions of pounds extra to play with and no one will notice either financial or external costs.

If you can’t be bothered doing this yourself, go through the literature and find whichever study produced the biggest number, even if it’s only an eight page Powerpoint presentation that updates a study funded by a company that makes weight loss drugs. That’s what the Health and Care Committee did and that’s why the first paragraph of their report says that “obesity costs the UK at least £74.3 billion per year”.

4. Ignore all previous policies

“Public health” isn’t a results-driven business and you can avoid awkward conversations about the total failure of every anti-obesity policy to date

In the last 20 years, the British government has introduced a ban on adverts for HFSS food during children’s TV programmes, a traffic light labelling system on food products, a tax on sugary drinks, a food reformulation scheme, mandatory calorie labelling in restaurants, a ban on volume price discounts for HFSS food, a ban on supermarkets putting HFSS products at the entrance, exit or end-of-aisle, and a total ban on HFSS food advertising online and on television before 9pm. No country in the world has more interventions in the food supply in the name of fighting obesity.

None of it has worked. Fortunately, “public health” isn’t a results-driven business and you can avoid awkward conversations about the total failure of every anti-obesity policy to date by simply pretending they never happened. The Health and Care Committee offers a masterclass in this. Its press release is headlined: ‘“Stand up to food industry” after decades of failure to tackle obesity epidemic, MPs tell government’, brilliantly combining Tip 4 with Tip 1 and Tip 3. Despite Keir Starmer implementing the advertising ban, the volume price discount ban and the supermarket promotion ban, as well as extending the sugar tax and setting a plan in motion that will lead to supermarkets being fined if they don’t sell customers enough healthy food, The Guardian says that the report “criticises Keir Starmer’s Labour government, saying it has not followed through on pledges to introduce policies to tackle bad diets.”

With a little gaslighting, you can convince the public — or at least The Guardian — that obesity has only been on rise because real anti-obesity policies have never been tried. Forward, comrades!