Sugar caned. Salt licked

Sucking the fun out of food

As the grey reign of Keir Starmer’s miserable Labour government metastasises from gloomy weeks into dismal months, the more I’m reminded of the Pixar movie Monsters, Inc.

A movie I’d recommend to warm hearted viewers of any age.

If you’ve not seen it, here’s a quick recap.

The movie tells of two lovable monsters who live in their home town of Monsrtopolis, a city much less like Milton’s burning lake than you might expect, and more like a jolly analogue of modern Manhattan. But seemingly without all the fentanyl and crime. So in many ways, actually less monstrous.

Apparently securing a reliable energy supply is as much a problem for monsters, as it is for us humans. But with no Net Zero nonsense to worry about, the monsters have managed to come up with an ingenious and workable solution.

They power their city by sneaking into human children’s bedrooms, lurking under their beds, then leaping out at night to scare the kiddies. They then harvest the energy created by the terrified toddlers’ screams.

Essentially they are extracting fear from our world, and using it to power theirs.

I can’t help feeling that our Labour government has embarked on a similar operation, though it’s not our screams which Starmer and his ghost train of gormless ghouls are desperate to vacuum up. It’s our joy.

This wretched government and the entire progressive class it represents, is like a dismal parasite, a busy, buzzy mosquito, a leech, a tick, on a mission to suck every last little pleasure from our lives.

Not a day goes by without the Labour Party, or its attendant coterie of pinch faced familiars, demanding a new ‘sin’ tax, regulation, ban, tariff or toll, all in service of their own insidious goal, to purge the very joie from our vivre.

Air Passenger Duty, Climate Change Levy, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Gambling Taxes, the list never ends. There’s even, I discovered this week, a special tax applicable whenever two fat ladies get together, called Bingo Duty.

Of course this mirthless crusade did not start under Starmer. The Tories were almost as bad, but the noxious public health lobby and assorted soul crushing scolds have clearly been emboldened by the recent electoral victory of the authoritarian left.

I’ll talk about the plan to eradicate the pleasures of smoking and driving, and the supposed burden our self indulgence imposes on the sainted NHS, in another post, but for today, let’s concentrate on their efforts to take the fun out of food.

Most recently these busy body creeps have been harumping around like the pompous whinge buckets that they are, demanding new taxes on sugar and salt.

You know. The two ingredients that are responsible for making the vast majority of the foods we eat, taste nice.

The Daily Telegraph explained how in

recent weeks the Obesity Health Alliance – a coalition of 60 health charities and royal colleges – met the Treasury’s health team to discuss a levy on salt and sugar in foods.

60 health charities!

If anything in this creaking croaking country of ours has grown morbidly obese, bloated, greedy and beyond its natural and healthy size, then surely it’s the ‘charity sector’. Or as it should be known, the ‘charity industry’.

I haven’t got the time, money or inclination to do proper research into these tin rattling parasites but I’d bet my pancreas that if the the vast majority of the 60 alleged ‘charities’ which make up this particularly pernicious corner of the public health lobby, lost their direct, or indirect, government funding, they would immediately wither away into nothingness.

I’d bet that not a one of these ‘charities’  is funded exclusively by fun runs, bring and buy sales or sponsored swims. Pub crawls, raffles or bake sales. No. They are largely paid for by you and me. From our taxes.

In reality they are unlikely to be any more a genuine ‘charity ‘ than say, OFCOM, the OBR, The Health and Safety Executive or any one of the other thousands of nominally ‘independent’ quangos, NGOs, and government bodies which stomp about, squandering our money as they search for ever more inventive ways to lecture the rest of us about how we must live our increasingly glum lives.

Also.  Please stop talking about a ‘levy’ on sugar and salt as if it were some scientifically interrogated fee, which reflected a carefully considered, empirical and calibrated, cost benefit analysis.

It’s not. It’s just another pernicious, spiteful and unnecessary tax. Plucked out of the air, and imposed as usual on you and me by sanctimonious do gooders who consider themselves our intellectual, moral and social superiors.

These po faced puritans are nothing if not efficient in their joy hunting. They’ve recently discovered that their dreary sugar taxes don’t currently cover milkshakes and frappuccinos.

This cannot stand.

God forbid someone somewhere is enjoying a sugary drink, free from the reproachful gaze of the ever disapproving public health lobby. Heaven forfend that some corner of the nation’s menu has passed them by unmolested. Or that some dietary delinquent is quaffing down a Five Guys Oreo and peanut butter milkshake unpunished.

The article continues,

Under the Government’s new system of cross-departmental missions, the Treasury has been asked to consider fiscal changes which could improve the health of the nation.

This highfalutin’ language conceals the true nature of these mean spirited demands.

Because the supposed solution to our mythical ill health apocalypse is always the same.

Make poor people poorer.

As ever with these tiresome nags, there’s a massive class angle to this.

Are these pinch faced scolds demanding the closure of sodium soaked restaurants in upmarket Mayfair? I doubt it. Will the fun police be raiding middle class food outlets like Leon, or targeting the sandwich rack in M&S? Unlikely. Will these enlightened busy bodies be calling for a ban on lard laden cookery books by Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Heston Blumenthal and the rest?

Fat chance.

The object of their ire will be the same as ever. Low class food that the hoi poloi, with their uneducated palates, lowlife tastes and terrible table manners, enjoy.

Because if the general public, slow witted dolts that we are, cannot be trusted with uncensored social media, unpoliced speech, or complex national referendums, then how on earth can we expect to be granted the freedom to choose what to have for our own dinner?

And so the food police will inevitably focus on the staple foods of what they consider the lower orders, ‘ultra processed foods’, ready meals, fast food, and of course that perennial pleb favourite, Maccy D’s.

Here’s a genuine question. How do you ‘ultra’ process food? What’s the actual mechanism?

Do you put it through the evil, nutrient-sapping, processing machine twice? Of course not. Because such a machine is like the left’s other bogeymen, the impending ‘climate apocalypse’, and an organised ‘far right threat’, a fearmongered fantasy.

‘Ultra’ processed food is a nonsense, infantilising term, without any real definition. No wonder it’s been popularised by Christopher van Tulleken. A literal children’s TV presenter.

Don’t get me wrong. Of course it’s good to eat decent food. I try to enjoy a balanced diet, even as I work around my obsessive love of fried chicken. And my friend Dominic Frisby is convincingly evangelical about the benefits of avoiding seed oils. But our government’s obsession with our diets is becoming unhealthy.

As the brilliant Christopher Snowden never fails to point out in forensic but entertaining detail, none of these bans, initiatives and taxes will have any effect.

They simply don’t work.

But who cares about facts?

Look at the nonsense they told us about covid.

The same sanctimonious do gooders who defied common sense by claiming a paper mask could stop a virus, and that ‘social distancing’ would outwit a lab built pathogen, are now insisting that making food more expensive for poor people will improve their lives.

It won’t.

None of us will become healthier. We’ll just be worse off. And meal times will be more miserable.

The truth is that we, as the kids say, are being gaslit.

They pretend these measures are about improving our health, when in reality they are about taking away our freedoms, and increasing the state’s power and control over our everyday lives.

The governing elites insist that they care about public health. But of course they don’t.

How do we know?

Well because if our political masters genuinely sought to improve the health of the nation. There are no end of practical, effective steps they could take.

They could keep little kids healthy by not letting them get stabbed at Taylor Swift dance classes.

Or they may want to reflect on the health benefits of not removing the Winter Fuel Allowance from pensioners. Because, though I don’t claim to be an expect, I do understand that freezing to death is detrimental to most elderly people’s wellbeing.

They could stop allowing children to be chemically castrated on the say so of a cadre of blue haired sex offenders. (Yep. I know it’s been banned in the NHS, at least for now. But there are private clinics springing up which will still allow the most determined and loving parents to castrate their kids for a reasonable fee.)

They might consider the health implications of charging hard up families vastly more for their heating bills than absolutely necessary, just so muppet faced moron Ed Miliband, can delude himself that he’s saving the planet.

They might also consider ways to enhance both the physical and mental wellbeing of our young people by stopping thousands of teenage girls from being systematically raped by grooming gangs.

They could enhance the general health of the community by keeping violent criminals in prison, rather than releasing them onto our streets to cause havoc, mayhem and murder.

In fact I could, and I bet you could too, easily think of a hundred government policies that would help improve ‘the health of the nation’ more than adding a pernicious and pointless ‘fiscal change’ to the price of a milkshake.

How about letting sick people see a doctor?

There’s one. Let’s start with that.

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As regular readers will know, I’m super busy at the moment so forgive me if it’s a couple of weeks until my next post.

I know sugar taxes and the ‘obesity crisis’ are emotive subjects, and as I say in the article, I’ll look at the increasing moralisation of the health service is a separate post.

But for now, I’ll see you in the comments. Just forgive me if I take a little longer than usual to respond.

All the very best to you and yours

LSO