|
Rishi Sunak’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill, banning sales to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009, is passing through Parliament. Cake Tsarina Prue Leith proved herself again, on BBC’s Today programme last week, as a popular champion of government intervention to protect – young - consumers from forming bad habits. ‘Government intervention’, though, is a weak substitute for that highly charged slogan ‘the Nanny State’. Words lose or gather power in politics. The Nanny State has become shorthand for Big Government, thus the enemy for all true libertarians.
Libertarians are good at inventing slogans used to ridicule policy or practice especially of active government. Remember ‘Health & Safety gone mad’: ha, ha, ha. That one worked well until the Grenfell Tower tragedy. But combatting morbidity due to unhealthy food has yet to have its seat-belt moment. The Nanny State taunt is now working against the creation of an effective national food strategy. Former Cabinet Minister, IaIn Macleod, coined the term writing in The Spectator, 3 December 1965. “In my occasional appearances as a poor man's Peter Simple I fire salvos in the direction of what I call the Nanny State. Mr. Fraser is, although you wouldn't think it, the Minister of Transport [in Harold Wilson’s first government]. He has come forward with the perishing nonsense of a plan for a 70 mph speed limit even on motorways [sic]”. This controversy over motorway limits is forgotten but Nanny State is now wheeled out for food regulation. But why does it resonate so well? The old-fashioned nanny, traditionally a disciplinarian, supervised children’s meals. The understood message is that the Big State treats us as children. Maybe also a covert swipe at the hated ‘metropolitan elites’, with their modern nannies and leanings towards vegetarianism. But given the libertarian ideology of choice, how much is healthy eating a matter of genuine choice? The individual is battling against the influence of the food companies who control the food business, led by the Swiss-based Nestle SA - whose 2022 revenue was $99 billion. Health messages are understood but consumers contend with clever advertising and packaging of food containing too much fat, sugar and salt, all designed by experts to tempt our taste buds. Parents sheep-doggedly try to manoeuvre their offspring past enticing arrays of sweeties and chocolates to reach the supermarket check-out. And responding partly to the changed role of women, the big food companies offer a fast and relatively cheap substitute for home cooking after an exhausting day’s work. How free does that make free choice? A 2023 study by Cancer Research UK produced some frightening figures. Body Mass Index (BMI) is calculated by weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared. Using this measure, by 2040, 71% of British people are predicted to be overweight (compared to 64% today). And of these 36% - 21 million people – will suffer from the complex, chronic disease of obesity defined as a BMI over 30. The consequences of this for future prevalence of cancers and diabetes are disturbing. Currently the NHS spends £10 billion, 10% of its budget, on treating diabetes. There is no chance that the National Health Service will be able to cope with millions moe diabetics. And in the words of the respected social welfare expert, Baroness Louise Casey, “the less well-off you are the more likely you are to be prey to unhealthy food”. Healthy politics – healthy in all senses - is about working for the common good. Catholic social teaching has a definition: “the totality of social conditions allowing persons to achieve their communal and individual fulfilment”. The concept of subsidiarity entered Catholic social thinking in the 19th century as a feature of the common good. As the former EU Commission President Jacques Delors, a devout Catholic, pointed out in a 2009 interview, the term subsidiarity came originally from a Calvinist principle of Church order in the 17th century: the lower Church unit of association took precedence over the higher. Subsidiarity took on new relevance supporting resistance from civil society against the all-controlling totalitarian and military dictatorships of the 20th. century. The Nanny State slogan might garner some support from a crude understanding of ‘subsidiarity’ championed by the UK in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty which established the EU. During the internal debates of the EU, the principle of subsidiarity became used to define the - contested - roles of member states in relation to the EU ‘central government’, the European Commission. Today it best expresses support for the life of local communities, particularly ‘in case of need’, implying approval of ‘enabling government’. The higher units of subsidiarity now include not just governments but multi-national corporations and supermarket chains. The creation of a strategy prioritising health and the environment must consider the interacting dynamics of all. In a situation of intense competition, lest their competitors undercut them, none of the food giants can risk unilaterally eliminating or radically reducing unhealthy ingredients. Government taxation of the content of unhealthy foods and drinks provides an - enforced - level playing field open to change. A sugar tax on soft drinks introduced in 2018, called the Soft Drinks Industrial Levy (SDIL), has reduced children’s sugar intake but not enough. Commissioned by the Department of Education, in 2013, restauranteurs Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent produced a pioneering School Food Plan. Initially its vision of ‘flavourful, fresh food served by friendly fulfilled cooks in financially sound school kitchens’ caused widespread excitement. The vision faded under government austerity. Dimbleby’s 2021 National Food Strategy: The Plan, also commissioned by government, sets out a reasoned and well-researched way forward for food and farming. He proposes, for example, a ‘Sugar and Salt Reformulation Tax’, £3 per kilogram of sugar and £6 per kilogram of salt ‘for use in processed foods or in restaurants and businesses’. But taxation remains a toxic word even within the context of preventative action acceptable to food companies. Sir Keir Starmer has promised not to introduce further sugar or salt taxes while saying he would ban junk food advertising before the watershed. Government promised to respond to The Plan with a White Paper. Instead, they produced a 13 June 2022 policy paper widely criticised not least by Dimbleby himself. The paper gives the impression of providing a comprehensive national strategy while largely avoiding significant interventions - such as taxing offending ingredients. An advertising watershed for children will only be implemented after 1 October 2025 and non-removal of sweetie chicanes in supermarkets is disregarded without penalty. Often when confronting contemporary problems, the defensive political response to criticism is what’s the alternative? But there is an alternative. Implement more of Dimbleby’s strategy. In the words of Prue Leith in 2022: "There is so much to celebrate about our food, but we do need to act urgently to protect our health and that of the environment. The Plan is compelling and overdue. If the Government adopts it, we will, at last, be putting our food system on the right path to health and prosperity” - and saving our NHS. We are still waiting. Can today’s right-wing back benchers really imagine that government interventions to help people stop harming themselves and their children lead us towards Xi Jinping’s dystopian State? From their entrenched opposition to banning advertising unhealthy food and drinks directed at children, you might think so. The libertarian Right using their clever slogans and ideology are endangering our health and environment. They should be seen for what they are: dangerous ideologues. See TheArticle 25/04/2024
0 Comments
Joan Girling grew up near the Suffolk coast with its little terns, barn owls, harebells, ladies bedstraw, sedums, blue butterflies and acid grassland. There was no nuclear power station. “It was perfect, a nature lover’s paradise”, she told me.
In 1959, Joan’s father faced with compulsory purchase was forced to sell off a corner of their front garden with its large pond full of water lilies and wildlife. It was to make way for workers’ traffic to the site of Sizewell A, a nuclear power station, today a great, ugly, Stalinist-looking excrescence looming above the sea-shore. Her grandmother who lived next door watched as they filled in the pond. “The worst part was to hear my grandma crying. I remember it as if it was yesterday”. In the late 1980s it all happened again: Sizewell B. This time Joan moved house with her family to escape construction traffic. From 1993-2005 she served on Suffolk County Council. Fifteen years ago, Joan Girling became a founding and deeply dedicated member of Community against Nuclear Expansion later renamed Together Against Sizewell C (TASC). The human and environmental costs ought not be underestimated. The disruption and destruction accompanying years of building accounts for the level and persistence of local protest. Stop Sizewell C, originally a parish of Theberton and Eastbridge action group, alongside the local Friends of the Earth, joined TASC in a long-running legal campaign. Crowd financing helped fund three rounds of court action seeking judicial review of the Sizewell C project. The last challenged the Business Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng’s, 2022 Development Consent Order giving the green light to start construction. Kwateng rejected the Planning Inspectorate’s conclusion (part of the process required by the 2008 Planning Act) that in the absence of an assessed, permanent, potable water supply for the project, “the case for the grant of development consent is not yet made”. Sizewell C will be forced to use a desalination plant during construction. The Court of Appeal found for the government in December 2023. The construction of Sizewell C means heavy truck traffic. New roads, a large park and ride facility, as well as a railway branch line, will have a major impact over a large area much of it designated by Natural England - sponsored incidentally by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) - as a Suffolk Coast and Heaths National Landscape (formerly Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). A small bite comes out of reed beds and marsh land declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The new reactors will lie right next to Minsmere, a popular RSPB reserve where the drain-pipe boom of the bittern can be heard. Building Sizewell B will blight tourism for two decades but boost other aspects of the local economy. But before dismissing protest as Nimby-ism (Not in My Back Yard) it is as well to evaluate what lies in the backyard. Sizewell C planning first saw the light of day under Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 2007-2010, when coastal Suffolk was selected alongside other sites with existing nuclear reactors The initial choice of investors, EDF (Electricité de France) and a Chinese Company CGN, was almost as contentious as the choice of site. In 2009 EDF, 85% French government owned, bought British Energy, the UK’s largest electricity energy-generating company. By 2019 EDF was over 50 billion Euros in debt and its share price had dropped from 42 to 10 Euros. The company was re-nationalised in 2023. EDF’s track-record building two reactors at Hinkley Point, Somerset, does not inspire confidence that all manner of things will be well at Sizewell C. Building of the EDF’s first Hinkley Point reactor began in March 2017 but is unlikely to be completed before 2030 at a cost of possibly £47 billion (the initial estimate in 2016 was £18 billion). Actual construction of a reactor starts usually after three years of preparatory work once a Final Investment Decision (FID) is issued indicating that financing for the entire project looks assured. FID for Sizewell C remains ‘expected’ by the end of this year. Professor Stephen Thomas of Greenwich University Business School estimates the length of time from inception to first commercial power production of nuclear power stations worldwide at between 15-20 years. Given the pace of climate change, that is too long to wait. Geopolitics put paid to Chinese part ownership in Sizewell C; CGN’s stake was bought out by the UK government in 2022. Nuclear power is costly. Government, now the majority shareholder in the project, turned to what is called the Regulated Asset-based (RAB) model, an array of investors, in a bid to attract pension funds. But this has not been successful. It is now wooing investors such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the UK electricity company Centrica. Professor Thomas’ optimistic estimate of cost for 13 years of Sizewell C construction is £26.3 billion and his pessimistic, some would say realistic, estimate for 17 years, £43.8 billion. Just too costly. No-one knows what international energy prices will be when the reactors start up - thus creating a very wide margin of risk. RAB offers possibilities for the government to reward potential investors. In Thomas’ words: “First, because the risks will fall on consumers and taxpayers, the project would be seen by financiers as low risk to them and would attract a low interest rate. Second, the finance charges [and these would be significant] would effectively be paid by consumers as a surcharge on their bills payable from the date of FID to completion of the plant”. There are alternative sources of energy. In the past fifty years, the cost of renewables has gone down, real nuclear costs have only ever gone up. But Shell expects to make 15% profit on investment in oil and gas against 5-8% returns from renewables. This is one reason for the continuing investment in new fossil fuel extraction and faltering financing of the realistic option for meeting carbon emission reduction targets; solar panels and wind turbines. Government colludes with energy companies and investors seeking to be as risk-free as possible, with their decisions and actions critical for mitigating climate change, based on profit taking at the expense of the citizen/consumer. Windfarms, for example off Lowestoft with one hundred turbines serving 630,000 homes, take after a preparatory phase, 2-3 years for construction offshore, longer for a larger windfarm under more difficult conditions. Their coastal infrastructure needs to be kept to a minimum, ideally with an offshore grid and subsea cables. With the kind of money made available for nuclear reactors, the energy-storage problem – caused by variable wind - is soluble. Renewables do not take 15 years to become operational, nor have an unmanageable afterlife: the disposal of highly radioactive material. Meanwhile access roads are being cut through nearby countryside, and the government has found £2.5 billion for the Sizewell C preparatory pot. Five years ago, it was estimated 37.5% of the world’s carbon emissions came from electricity generation. There is now urgent need for low carbon electricity-generating infrastructure. Government is obsessed with nuclear power stations as a solution. But they are too late. As Professor Thomas put it to me in conversation: “In an emergency you don’t choose the slowest and riskiest option”. See TheArticle 13/04/2024 Conservative politicians attribute our parlous economic situation to the cost of COVID and the inflated price of oil and gas due to the war in Ukraine. The barmy budgeting of Liz Truss and her malfortuné Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, sometimes get a mention, a cautionary tale of self-destruction. As for the third of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the word BREXIT shall never pass the lips of a government minister.
How should we describe this omission? Google to the rescue: an English version of the South Italian word Omerta, a “code of silence and code of honour and conduct that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders” - usually associated with the Mafia. Ministers and MPs know a great deal about the impact of BREXIT - hence Omerta. The UK Department of Trade and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy like the European Commission are all clients of Cambridge Econometrics. In a report commissioned by the Mayor of London and published in January 2024, Cambridge Econometrics estimates that we lost 2 million jobs due to BREXIT, and that in 2023 the average person was nearly £2,000 worse off (Londoners by £3,400) than had the Referendum gone the other way. Goldman Sachs’ 2024 report “The Structure and Cyclical Costs of Brexit”, puts the economic loss caused by BREXIT at between 4-8% of GDP and concludes that since the Referendum Britain “significantly underperformed other advanced economies”. Both reports, complex calculations, emphasise the impact on trade and investment. The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), an independent public body funded by the Treasury, analyses our public finances and produces bi-annual economic forecasts intended to guide Government’s economic policy - so heeded by Prime Ministers, except of course Liz Truss. It broadly supports the conclusions of Cambridge Econometrics and Goldman Sachs. Rishi Sunak is well aware of the extent of BREXIT damage. In 2016, David Cameron, believing he would win the Referendum, turned a complex issue into a binary choice. No rules were established to govern the conduct of the ensuing campaigns, nor the information provided the electorate. Voters need accurate, relevant information to make informed political choices. Voters making a huge decision by direct democracy were lied to and disinformed in a campaign led by charismatic but unscrupulous men. The public did not necessarily believe their lies or the battle-bus promise of “£350 million sent per week to the EU” being returned to the NHS, but such disinformation served to dramatically and divisively raise awareness of the Leave campaign. Thanks to the nurturing of division and hostility, any empathy for the thinking and feelings of people on the other side of the argument could not get a look-in. ‘A shared framework for containing conflicting aims’ created by ‘good faith compromise’, ‘positive sum’ agreements and brokered bargains, appear in Brook Manville and Josiah Ober’s The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, Princeton & Oxford University Press 2023, as important ingredients in any functioning democracy. They offer a simple definition: the pithy “No boss – except one another”, but there is no discussion of how this is best achieved by direct or representative democracy. It is a stretch to describe the BREXIT referendum, conducted in a climate of disinformation and lies, the subsequent negotiations and the unlawful proroguing of Parliament, in these terms. Their consequences were the reverse of what Aristotle called ‘civic friendship’, seen by the two authors as sustaining democracy. OMERTA about Brexit is part of a wider government Omerta about the damage done to our political culture with its unwritten but well understood values and codes of conduct. It is important, though counter-intuitive, to recognise the erosion of democracy added to by the 2016 Referendum with its compelling slogan ‘Take Back Control’. The quantifiable economic consequences of BREXIT are not the only ones to contend with; there is also the absolutist mindset encouraged by the binary referendum choice, in versus out, pervading public attitudes. The gradual nibbling away of the mainstays of a democratic culture has done nothing to improve voter turn-out. Youth are giving up on their fundamental civil right to vote, to sack the government and install another, to put into practice – Manville and Ober’s - “no boss except one another”. In addition, many people are responding to continuous grim reports on radio and TV with ‘news avoidance’ that further encourages a “they’re all the same” rejection of political participation. The 2022 Electoral Reform Act directly affects turn-out and not only in general elections. The Bill abolished the supplementary (second choice) vote and made mayoral elections first past the post, favouring the Conservative Party. Voters not showing photographic voter ID are turned away, an imported form of voter suppression, part of the US Republican electoral playbook known to disadvantage youth, ethnic minorities and poorer voters. In the 2019 general election - before this requirement - 33 alleged impersonations with 9 convictions came to light - amongst 32 million people who voted. A 2023 You-Gov poll found one in four voters were unaware of the new requirement. In last year’s local elections, according to the Electoral Commission, some 4% of eligible voters said they didn’t vote because of the new regulations. Voters in a democracy need obstacles to voting removed not inserted on spurious grounds. Electoral campaigning can, and is, used as an opportunity for the destruction of ‘civic friendship’ by gas-lighting and the flagrant untruths of attack ads. In support of the Conservative mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, a video purporting to reveal panic on the London Underground appeared on X (Twitter). It turned out to be filmed in Penn station, New York. “Gripped by the tendrils of rising crime” Londoners were staying at home said the voiceover. Picture of empty street. The fake ‘evidence’ from the USA was taken down but the fake assertions about citizens’ safety in London stayed in. The Greater London area with 9.75 million people will have more crimes (for example than greater Glasgow, 1.7 million, to which London is sometimes compared), more bins to empty, more air pollution to be cut. As Ministers know, meaningful crime statistics are based on size of population. In the real world, the crime rate in London is below the national average. There is danger that such American-style attack ads have infected the Labour Party. Their on-line ad a year ago asked: “Do you think adults convicted of assaulting children should go to prison”, and answered, “Rishi Sunak Doesn’t”. Shocked Shadow Ministers and Party members protested. Sir Keir Starmer had a torrid time on Sky News trying to limit the fall-out. The truth is such ads are widely shared and read by millions creating serious temptation for politicians who find that honesty and truth-telling disadvantage them. We’ve got several more months campaigning to endure. Omerta, disinformation and voter suppression are poisoning our political culture. Together they preclude acknowledging and learning from experience. This is not how democracy survives. This is not how to heal domestic divisions nor counter the rise of threatening authoritarian regimes opposed to democratic values. You don’t have to read The Civic Bargain to figure that out. See TheArticle 02/04/2024 |
Archives
August 2024
Categories |
RSS Feed