How the sausage gets made

Today sees the publication of my new book Inside the Sausage Factory. It is not about my secret life in the Brighton club scene. It is a more family friendly story about policy-making in the UK. 

For those who are still reading, I looked at four nanny state policies introduced during those notorious 14 years of Conservative-led government: plain packaging for tobacco, minimum pricing for alcohol, the sugary drinks tax and the de facto ban on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). My aim was to see what kind of evidence was most influential in each of these campaigns by looking at what research was most mentioned in the media and in the House of Commons. A few patterns emerged — politicians are impressed by computer modelling and like to hear about policies working in other countries – but it soon became clear that the decision to go ahead with the policy — or, in the case of minimum pricing in England, to abandon it — had very little to do with evidence. 

The government of the day didn’t seem to have strong feelings about any of the policies and although there were a number of U-turns, none of them came about as a response to new evidence. What mattered was political pressure. Aptly enough, most of the pressure came from pressure groups. Anti-smoking groups intimidated David Cameron by claiming that his advisor Lynton Crosby, who had links to a tobacco company, had been lobbying him against plain packaging. Anti-gambling groups demonised the bookmaking industry and accused Theresa May’s government of capitulating to it. 

Similar tactics were used by campaigners for the sugar tax and minimum pricing, but talk about “Big Alcohol” never caught the imagination of the public — 80 per cent of whom were drinkers — and it seems to have been a different form of pressure that pushed the government into announcing the sugar tax. By 2016, George Osborne was supposed to have eliminated the structural current budget deficit. Not only had he failed to do this, but he was going into a Budget knowing that he would have to announce worse economic growth forecasts and higher debt forecasts than expected. In the absence of a high-profile policy such as the sugar tax, it would have been the revised forecasts, along with new cuts to disability benefits, that would have led the news. While it cannot be proven that this was Osborne’s motivation for suddenly embracing sin taxes on soft drinks, the sugar tax dominated the news cycle on Budget day and featured heavily on the front pages of the Independent (“A spoonful of sugar tax”), the Mirror (“Sugar and spite”), the Telegraph (“Osborne sugars the pill”) and the i (“Sugar tax sweetens the pill”).

Without campaign groups and Jamie Oliver to roll the pitch, few people would have considered a new tax to be good news, so Osborne had them to thank for that, but it is difficult to argue that the policy announcement was driven by evidence. The evidence had not changed since January 2016 when the Department of Health had said that the “government position has not changed and we have no plans for a sugar tax.”

This is not to say that evidence played no part in these political campaigns. Evidence from other countries showed politicians that the policies could be implemented legally, cheaply and without unleashing a significant public backlash. Modelling studies served a useful purpose by showing how a policy could work in theory and validated the opinions of those who felt intuitively that the policy would work. Evidence was also important because, quite simply, some evidence is better than no evidence. As one Scottish civil servant explained after the minimum pricing campaign in Scotland: “Minimum unit pricing would never have flown if we hadn’t had something, you know, to kind of back it up.”

When it comes to the kind of low salience, virtue-signalling policies that the nanny state specialises in, four criteria must be met:

• some evidence of efficacy must be presented
• opposition must be limited to no more than a third of the public
• the policy must be revenue-raising or close to revenue-neutral
• policymakers must be assured that it will not cause major social or economic problems

If those conditions are in place, all it takes is a good political reason to do it. Sometimes that involves pressure groups piling on the pressure. At other times, it involves politicians needing to find a distraction or create a legacy.

The last of the campaigns I write about in the book ended in 2019 when the stake on FOBTs was reduced to £2. At the time, campaigners claimed that this would cut the rate of problem gambling and halve the number of gambling-related suicides. As with the other policies I discuss, there is no evidence that the promised benefits materialised. Instead, punters went online and played on different machines, as those who understand the gambling makes predicted. 

What happened next? There was more of the same from the same pressure groups, but with even less evidence. Action on Smoking and Health moved on to lobbying for a generational tobacco sales ban. Alcohol Focus Scotland shifted its attention to an alcohol advertising ban. Action on Sugar called for the sugar tax to be extended to food and milkshakes. The anti-smoking, anti-alcohol, anti-obesity and anti-gambling groups all called for a levy on the industries they saw themselves as being at war with.

The Obesity Health Alliance campaigned for a ban on “unhealthy food” advertising and was the first to chalk up a win. In July 2020, a slew of anti-obesity laws was suddenly announced, including an online and pre-watershed television advertising ban, a ban on volume price discounts and restrictions on where HFSS (high in fat, sugar and salt) food can be placed in supermarkets. A familiar coalition of activists had been lobbying for these policies for years but since most of the policies had never been introduced in any other country, there was no “real world” evidence to cite, and there were few relevant experimental studies in the academic literature. 

When the supposed libertarian Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, it was assumed that these proposals would be kicked into the long grass and yet they became part of a new obesity strategy a year after he took office. Evidence played no part in this. Two related events provide a better explanation. Firstly, Johnson was hospitalised with COVID-19 three months earlier and explicitly blamed this on him being “too fat”. Johnson’s hospitalisation provided a focusing event which made the issue more salient for the nation and for the Prime Minister personally. Secondly, the UK had one of the world’s highest cumulative death rates from COVID-19 in July 2020 and obesity was a known risk factor for COVID-19 mortality. New anti-obesity policies were unlikely to have an impact before the pandemic subsided, but the new strategy signalled that the government was taking action and it helped shift attention away from its own policy failures in controlling the virus.

In October 2023, Rishi Sunak announced a permanent ban on the sale of tobacco products to anyone born after 2008, thereby introducing incremental prohibition. There was no “real world” evidence to support this as it was untested, but it polled well, particularly with those who had voted Conservative in 2019. A survey conducted days before the announcement found that it was supported by over 70 per cent of the public, with fewer than a quarter opposed.

The obvious risk of prohibition was that it would create a large and violent black market, but the government dismissed this as an industry scare story. As the legislation crawled through Parliament over the next two years, convenience stores in Australia started going up in flames and tobacco duty revenue fell by 75 per cent as the country entered a “tobacco turf war” driven by extremely high cigarette taxes and the prohibition of vapes. The British government paid no attention to this. The policy still polled well. 

In December 2025, the Australian government tried to ban children aged under 16 from accessing social media. It didn’t work. Months later, 70 per cent of kids still accessed at least one banned website and several children’s charities warned that a similar ban in the UK would lead to “serious unintended consequences that could put children at greater risk”. On Monday, Keir Starmer announced that he would be banning children aged under 16 from social media. Polls showed that over 70 per cent of the public were in favour.

Only the most ardent advocates of these policy decisions were driven by evidence. In 2020, Boris Johnson was in a tight spot politically and, like George Osborne in 2016, found obesity to be a useful distraction. In 2023, Rishi Sunak was staring down the barrel of crushing general election defeat and wanted a policy to be remembered by. Keir Starmer announced the social media ban in the week of the Makerfield by-election which could be the beginning of the end for his time in Downing Street. He, too, is looking for a legacy.

Call it government by opinion poll if you like, but let’s not pretend it is evidence-based

In the campaigns I write about in Inside the Sausage Factory, several studies were referenced again and again by politicians, journalists and activists. The policies didn’t work and the evidence wasn’t very good, but at least evidence was cited from time to time. The evidence for banning “junk food” adverts and social media for the under-16s is negligible and the evidence from the generational tobacco ban is non-existent. Scientific evidence was not a decisive factor in any of the campaigns I studied from the 2010s. Today, it seems to be entirely optional.

From a liberal perspective, it is a great shame that freedom is the first thing to be sacrificed when governments are under pressure and Prime Ministers want attention, but the lack of organised opposition from the public combined with endless calls for more regulation from “civil society” (much of which is state funded) make it the path of least resistance for unprincipled politicians. Call it government by opinion poll if you like, but let’s not pretend it is evidence-based. 

And in case you’re wondering, the reference to sausages relates to a comment reputedly made by Otto Von Bismarck who said that laws are like sausages insofar as you don’t want to see how they are made. After spending years reading parliamentary speeches from grandstanding politicians and media reports about legislation that turned out to be a waste of time, I can only concur.