The surprising truth about ‘Nanny State’ Britain

This week, a Conservative Prime Minister announced he was banning something – disposable vapes. The reaction to that ban – or rather, the lack of reaction – is a signpost to future UK health policy, which will lean towards interventionism in the years ahead. Companies making and selling food and drink should pay close attention.

Over the last quarter-century around Westminster, I’ve watched many political debates about intervening to make it harder or more expensive for people to buy and consume things that are, in general, bad for them. There was Labour’s ban on smoking indoors, then Gordon Brown’s attempt to deter buy-one get-one free food deals. There was the coalition’s dalliance with Minimum Unit Pricing for alcohol, and then David Cameron’s soft drinks industry levy (SDIL), or ‘sugar tax’.

Some of those policies happened. Some didn’t. What united them is the significant resistance they met, usually taking the same form: how dare these interfering political busybodies stop freeborn Britons enjoying the consumption of something they have freely chosen for themselves? Inevitably, the term ‘nanny state’ is used.

Nanny state arguments almost always have a social class element. This was best illustrated by John Reid, the Labour health secretary who resisted the indoor smoking ban as a middle-class infringement on ‘working-class pleasures’. More modern variants invoke the cost-of-living: intervention will make life more expensive for low-income households.

Rishi Sunak’s ban on disposable vapes follows his plan for a total ban on tobacco for people born after a certain date. Both pledges have faced a degree of criticism from elements of the Conservative Right and some commentators from the libertarian end of what used to be Fleet Street. But that criticism lacks real force and even some of its exponents look like they’re just going through the motions for old times’ sake.

The reason is that they know the public isn’t behind them. (This is the dark secret of Britain’s libertarians, by the way: most know that their views are supported by only a tiny minority of the electorate, but they can generally use media platforms and political office to amplify their voices to make their movement sound much bigger than it really is.)

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

No, the collective response of Britain to banning fags and vapes has been: yeah, fair enough.

We have been here before, of course. That ban on smoking indoors was intensely ‘controversial’. Before it was passed by Parliament in 2006, it was subject to the full barrage of ‘nanny state’ objections. Yet after it was implemented, Britain shrugged and no serious politician has ever proposed reversing it.

Sunak’s smoking and vaping policies will likewise become permanently embedded features of British public policy. Why? Because they follow, not lead, public opinion and public habit. The public have been shifting away from harmful tobacco consumption for decades, part of a wider move towards healthier living. Intervening to ban things most people don’t want to consume – or wish they didn’t consume – is not really ‘controversial’.

And those bans are a sign of things to come. The real action here is on food and drink, because of the obesity rates that cause sleepless nights for both public health officials and Treasury officials. More than a quarter of UK adults are obese. More than a fifth of 10- and 11-year olds are too. Obesity is linked to diabetes, cancer, arthritis and several other comorbidities. That makes it expensive. Direct costs to the NHS are probably around £7 billion and on track for £10 billion. The wider economic cost of an obese and therefore sicker population are in the region of £100 billion.

Pretty much anyone involved in health policy agrees that unless and until the UK’s public health problems are better addressed, the NHS will remain on an unsustainable path of rising costs. Addressing obesity won’t, alone, ‘fix’ the NHS’s long-term challenges, which also derive the demographic shift to an older population and the chronic failure to reform social care. But a leaner, fitter population would go a long way to ‘saving’ the NHS, to use a term popular with politicians.

So there is a strong fiscal and political impetus towards greater intervention over obesity. Alcoholic drinks are likely to be swept along in this movement towards intervention, since alcohol is generally negative for individual and public health.

What about the public? Expect more shrugging, since policies that push them away from fat and sugar and booze go with the grain of their behaviour – or what they wish their behaviour was.

I’m 47, which is old enough to have come of age into a world of heavy drinking (often during working hours), routine smoking in public places (including public transport) limited physical exercise and a workplace expectation of long hours with no complaints.

Forty-seven is also old enough to realise that I and my generation no longer determine social norms and habits. The future of consumption and policy belongs to younger people, who by and large don’t go in for the booze-and-fags lifestyle. The under-25 group are now more likely than any other age group to be teetotal. The prevailing cultural aesthetic (‘vibes’, I think the young folk call it) of today is gym-honed good health and wellbeing. Compare that to the stumbling drunks celebrated by Loaded and the other ‘lads’ mags’ that set the tone for British culture and politics in the 2000s when John Reid made his argument against the smoking ban.

Polling backs up this sense of mood. According to surveys such as ASH’s annual megapoll on public health, young Brits are about as likely as the overall population to support policies like higher taxes on fat and sugar. There may be some small-state libertarians in their 20s out there, but they’re few and far between.

This is part of the wider pattern that Aveek Bhattacharya of the Social Market Foundation observed in a paper last year. Most surveys suggest that most people are relaxed about policies that make it harder or more expensive to buy and consume stuff they think is bad for them.

Although we won’t get any clarity on this before the general election, this is something that is getting a lot of thought inside the Labour party. Some Labour advisers think the party should embrace intervention, for reasons of social justice and/or fiscal prudence. Others are wary of that ‘nanny state’ label and being accused of taxing households’ choices.

Keir Starmer’s recent hint at embracing the nanny state wasn’t quite as definitive a position as some reporting made it look: he was only calling for the brushing of children’s teeth in schools and nurseries, something the Conservatives say they’re already supporting in government. But it remains notable that a Labour leader whose operation is pathologically wary of headlines that frame him as an old-school left-wing interventionist took a deliberate step towards the ‘nanny state’ agenda.

All of this should shape the thinking of the food and drink sector. The tide of public opinion and the winds of fiscal need will push any future government towards greater intervention over obesity and problem drinking. Anyone trying to resist that movement by invoking ‘the nanny state’ is making a losing bet. Far better to learn from smart companies such as Danone – which has actively supported higher taxes on fat, sugar and salt – or Diageo, which is embracing no- and low-alcohol drinks.

When it comes to food, drink and public health in Britain, the nanny state is coming. Look busy.