Giving up meat won’t make us greener

There was a nifty about-turn last week when the so-called Nudge Unit, the government’s behavioural policy advisory body, abandoned its proposals to get us to shift towards a plant-based diet and away from eating meat. Among other exciting intiatives it suggested ‘building support for a bold policy’ such as a tax on producers of mutton and beef. It pointed out that the government could get people used to a vegetarian diet through its spending in hospitals, schools, prisons, courts and military facilities – you can just imagine how that would go down with soldiers, prisoners and patients – and declared that a ‘timely moment to intervene’ would be when people are at university. But it also acknowledged that an ‘unsophisticated meat tax would be highly regressive’.

It may ultimately have been that factor that caused the unit to back off from this bovine – hah – move. Because an undiscriminating meat tax would indeed be regressive, and not just socially.