Coco Pops are the new tobacco - Tom Watson

'Elementary, my dear Watson'

The Advertising Association invited Tom Watson to harass them give the keynote speech at their conference yesterday and the great man shared his insights on Twitter afterwards. Watson lost a lot of weight last year after going on the kind of low calorie, high exercise diet that anyone can do.

At the time he explained that he 'basically stopped taking sugar, refined sugar, and then I started walking 10,000 steps a day and walking up staircases and when a bit more weight came off I started to jog and cycle.' He has retrospectively dropped the bit about vigorous exercise and, under the spell of Aseem Malhotra (picture above), has decided that sugar consumption is the sole cause of obesity and that other people are not clever enough to lose weight without government coercion.

His talk to the Advertising Association was straight out of the anti-tobacco playbook... 

There is no 'dental crisis' and you will be hard-pressed to find a scientist who agrees that sugar is 'every bit as deadly as tobacco', but facts are optional in the growing war on food.

Nor is packaging a form of advertising, for that matter, but Watson uses anti-smoking rhetoric to get around that...

This is uncannily similar to the claim that cigarette packs are 'mobile billboards' and 'mini-billboards', but don't worry because when the campaign for plain packaging was underway, ASH's Deborah Arnott assured us that 'the “domino theory” i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false'.

I'm not sure if the allusion to heroin is deliberate or not, but it's worth remembering that Kellogg's cut the sugar content in Coco Pops by 40 per cent last year in an attempt to appease the fanatics. This is twice as much as the 20 per cent reduction demanded by Public Health England but it is clearly not enough to satisfy Tom Watson.

As the food industry will learn over the next few years, fanatics can never be appeased.

PS. In a busy week for the slippery slope, Lewisham's Director of Public Health is earning his £139,923 salary...

Once upon a time this would have been a Silk Cut cigarette ad - soon unhealthy food and drink ads will go the same way pic.twitter.com/71yB5F5miW

— DPH-Lewisham (@DphDanny) January 29, 2019

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Last Orders with the Angry Chef

Three wise men

There has been some crazy talk about food and obesity this month. Things are moving in a dangerous direction - and quickly. Here's the lead author of Monday's Lancet report tweeting earlier today...

As a counterweight to all these madness, Tom Slater and I got the ever-reasonable Angry Chef, Anthony Warner, onto the Last Orders podcast. As always you can listen on iTunes or online here.

Please remember that the Last Orders is now on its own channel so if you were listening via the Spiked channel before, be sure to subscribe.

Anthony Warner's new book, The Truth About Fat, came out a couple of weeks ago. I'll be reading it soon and will probably post a review.

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Soda and cigarettes

New York City taxpayers' money at work...



You can watch the whole thing by clicking the tweet below.

By comparing cigarettes to soda, we want to be clear that BOTH are major health hazards. Skip soda; choose water.

— nycHealthy (@nycHealthy) January 28, 2019

If only someone had warned us about this slippery slope...

1994 advert from JTI

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The slippery slope becomes a runaway train

Less than two weeks after setting out its bizarre near-vegan diet, the Lancet has published a lengthy report detailing how it expects the government to force us to eat it. In short, it wants to bypass democracy by getting a global treaty based on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control passed by UN agencies. To that end, it wants a billion dollar slush fund for activists to lobby the government (courtesy of the taxpayer, natch).

This is the anti-smoking blueprint copied to the letter - complete with state-funded sockpuppet campaigners and the equivalent of Article 5.3 to keep industry experts out of the conversation - and they make no bones about it.

I put out a comment for the IEA:

“This is the final vindication for those us who have warned about the slippery slope of regulation. Nanny state zealots are no longer hiding their intention to use the anti-tobacco blueprint to control other areas of our lives. They are openly contemptuous of freedom of choice and make no secret of their desire to bypass democracy and use unaccountable global institutions to further their agenda.

“If such authoritarian regulations come to pass, a thriving and competitive food market which responds to consumer demand will be replaced by a “state anchored approach” in which bureaucrats and activists decide what the public is allowed to eat. The idea of taxpayers being forced to contribute to a $1 billion slush fund for them to lobby for such a future is nauseating.”

The Lancet has well and truly jumped the shark. It's almost painful to watch. If only editor Richard Horton had done the honorable thing and resigned after the Andrew Wakefield scandal, things could have been so different

The report itself is a 56 page diatribe against 'Big Food'. You can read it here or read all about it in my Spectator Health article.

The increasingly loony Lancet is on a roll this month. After causing global mirth two weeks ago by publishing the EAT-Lancet diet (no more than a quarter of an egg, a tenth of sausage a day, etc) the once great medical journal has now laid out how it expects the government to make us eat it.

Published today, a lengthy report from the Lancet Commission on Obesity gives a detailed overview of what it sees as the problem (capitalism), the solution (higher taxes, more state control) and the means by which the great transformation will take place (more money for activist groups to lobby the UN). It is explicitly modelled on the anti-tobacco blueprint and is the final vindication for those of us who have warned that the slippery slope of nanny state regulation is becoming a runaway train.

The lead author of the report is Boyd Swinburn, a New Zealand doctor and food campaigner who declared last week on Twitter that the EAT-Lancet report shows where diets need to get to while his report shows how to get there. They are two sides of the same coin and whilst there is no shortage of policy suggestions in the EAT-Lancet document, including rationing and the outright prohibition of certain food products, the Lancet Commission takes it a stage further by calling for a global treaty.

Do read the rest. 

You can also see my colleague Kate Andrews giving it with both barrels on Sky News last night...

“They want us to essentially move to vegan lifestyles in which we don’t eat meat, we don’t have Coca Cola, in which people who can’t afford it are taxed out of being able to do this, whilst they fly around on their jets in Davos!” says @KateAndrs on the Lancet's diet prescription pic.twitter.com/BPmkfFgqZW

— IEA (@iealondon) January 28, 2019

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Clutching at straws

More words of wisdom from Colin Shevills of the 100% state-funded temperance group Balance...

Community pubs are 'stronger than ever', according to new research. No excuse there for cutting alcohol duty then @hmtreasury https://t.co/d7klGDodsT

— Colin Shevills (@cshevills) January 25, 2019

Great news! But what are community pubs? They are, as the Morning Advertiser explains, 'pubs owned as community businesses'.

Cool. And how many are there in the UK?

During the period, 14 new pubs opened, bringing the number of community pubs in Britain to 15.

Wow, fifteen pubs are 'thriving'! Let's put alcohol taxes up!

Meanwhile...

With pubs already closing at a shocking rate of 18 a week, according to the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) figures, the future of the great British pub is very much in question

On second thoughts, let's cut business rates, cut alcohol duty and repeal the smoking ban.

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The ugly face of the nanny state

The slippery slope heuristic says that anything that is tried in tobacco control will be copied in food control, alcohol control and gambling control sooner or later. Anti-smoking advertisements have used repulsive imagery for years and so it is no surprise to see it being used by the anti-sugar wowsers in Australia. As with the graphic imagery of the anti-tobacco lobby, the purpose is not to educate but to repel.


It's funny to think that the so-called public health lobby accuses every industry it doesn't like of 'aggressive advertising' and using the 'tobacco playbook'. The reality is that commercial advertising is extremely tame compared to the vile, manipulative and frequently dishonest output of the nanny state, and the only 'playbook' being used is the neo-prohibitionist blueprint written by the anti-smoking lobby. 

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Shrinking food

According to the Guardian on Tuesday, Brexit has caused food to get smaller. It's not true, as the Office for National Statistics explicitly says. Neither the ONS nor the Guardian mentioned one of the real reasons for shrinkflation: the government.

I've written about this for Cap-X.

Limiting calories in everyday food items, backed up with the threat of legal coercion, has been government policy for several years. So too is shrinkflation. They are features, not bugs, of Britain’s ‘health by stealth’ strategy.

Do have a read.

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