Rachel Reeves is preparing to bring in a milkshake tax in an attempt to reduce obesity levels despite the complete failure of the 2018 sugar tax that has seen obesity levels accelerate rather than fall. The Telegraph has more.
The Chancellor has drawn up plans to impose a sugar tax on milk and yoghurt-based beverages for the first time, after concluding that they are damaging public health.
The levy will drive prices up by as much as 24p a litre, with officials expecting 93% of drinks on the market to be affected unless they change their recipes.
Ms Reeves also intends to make an existing tax on fizzy drinks more onerous. This would force the makers of drinks such as Irn-Bru and Ribena to cut sugar content or face having to pay the tax.
The Treasury, which disclosed the plans in a consultation published on Monday, insisted that the anti-obesity move was needed because its current levy had not reduced the nation’s sugar intake, which is still twice the recommended levels.
However, experts accused Sir Keir Starmer of another breach of his election pledge not to raise taxes on working people.
Dr Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: “The sugar tax has been such a dramatic failure that it should be repealed, not expanded.
“It has been costing consumers £300 million a year while childhood obesity rates have continued to rise.
“To claim it has been a success on the basis of a hypothetical reduction of one calorie a day is absurd. Sugar taxes have never worked anywhere. What happened to Starmer’s promise to not raise taxes on working people?”
The sugar tax – officially the “soft drinks industry levy (SDIL)” – is set at 18p per litre, or 24p for higher-sugar drinks.
It was introduced in 2018 and Ms Reeves announced in October that she planned to extend it. However, she did not give details.
At present, only fizzy drinks with more than 5g of sugar per 100ml qualify for the tax, but the document said the Government is proposing to reduce this to 4g: a more “ambitious target”.
The change will capture drinks such as Sanpellegrino lemonade, which has 4.5g of sugar per 100ml, as well as the likes of Lucozade, Old Jamaica Ginger Beer and Fanta, all of which have reduced their sugar content to slightly below the existing 5g threshold.
Worth reading in full.
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Yes. To be fair, the garden thermometer reading during the recent hot spell (“40C”) was 94 degrees, compared to, as I remember, a previous highest of around 90 degrees over the past few decades. All irrelevant anyway, what is needed is a proper accurate cost-benefit analysis for governments trying to change the climate (and for that matter how likely they actually are in the real world to essentially leave wealth in the ground when hard times come and people are feeling the pinch).
By the way, does anyone know how much influence (if any) the solar flare at the time of the “40C” reading had (and what value readings from next to busy airfields have for that matter)?
The vast majority of models show enhanced warming over the Arctic, but closer to twice the global average. This is true regardless of whether the forcings fed into the models are natural or the supposed effect of carbon dioxide. I assume that the opposite is also true and if we are entering a period of global cooling the Arctic will cool faster than the rest of the globe meaning that any cooling trend will become obvious in Arctic temperatures before it shows up in global data sets.
Just enjoyed a very pleasant evening on our patio (ak agin palace) after a hottish day. Nothing unique as far as I can recall (born 1949).
A major work Arctic Ice was published in 1940, by the Russian oceanographer N. N. Zhubov. It reads in places like an abstract of the modern Arctic-ice alarm. Arctic temperatures in the 1920s and 1930s rose at unprecedented rates. Vast areas that once were ice-bound had become navigable. Fish species never before seen so far north were now commonly brought up in the nets of arctic fishermen. The general winter temperatures were several degrees higher than the maxima of previous decades.
Not too bad for Greenland ice sheet either despite the doom-mongering http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/