Reform the NHS, not our shopping baskets

Telegraph

5 hours ago

This week, the NHS will publish its 10 Year Health Plan. The most we can expect from this exercise in Soviet-style planning is tinkering around the edges of an edifice that was erected when Joseph Stalin ruled in Moscow. By 2035, the end date of this 10-year plan, the country will almost certainly be unable to afford the NHS in its present form – if, indeed, it hasn't collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions by then.
Unable to address the fundamental problems of the NHS, the dirigistes of Whitehall have come up with a new plan to direct us how to lead our lives – telling us what we should or shouldn't be allowed to choose to put in our shopping baskets. Supermarkets will be expected to cut 100 calories from the average shopping basket by limiting sales of sugary and salty snacks or other 'junk food'.
Ever since Napoleon Bonaparte sneered at England as 'a nation of shopkeepers', we have worn his insult as a badge of honour. We are proud to be a people who earn our living by trade and we cherish the liberties that are the glory of a commercial society. Even those of us who are not shopkeepers are at least customers.
So little does this Labour Government know the British people that it is about to resort to distinctly Napoleonic measures to punish both retailers and consumers. Yet previous attempts to control consumption have never succeeded in changing enduring patterns of behaviour rooted in human nature. It is outrageous that officials feel empowered to tell us what we can, and cannot, eat. The public is being infantilised and robbed of agency.
Centuries have passed since Parliament abandoned sumptuary laws that prohibited the lower orders from imitating the luxurious dress of the aristocracy. But the bureaucratic mind is obdurate in its disdain for popular tastes in food and drink. Combined with Labour's instinct to meddle, along with its insatiable fiscal appetite, it is no surprise that, as we report today, a modern version of the sumptuary laws is about to land on an unsuspecting nation.
Obesity is a genuine and growing problem, but, hitherto, all attempts to address it by fiscal means have failed. The latest obesity tax – supermarkets will be fined if they don't reduce the nation's calorie intake, and this will inevitably be passed on to consumers – now emerging from the bowels of the Health Department and the Treasury, claims to be aimed directly at our waistlines. In reality, like all its predecessors, it will target our wallets.
There is a certain grim irony in the fact that this policy should have been adopted at the same time as the decision by the NHS to prescribe the weight-loss drug semaglutide (contained in Ozempic and Wegovy). It is fairly obvious that the underlying rationale of the new regulations is less about obesity than about the Government's failure to control spending. No doubt figures will be trotted out about how many lives will be saved by cutting consumption of ultra-processed foods or any other category of comestible that attracts the ire of the health bureaucrats.
But the truth is that new rules are being concocted because the Government is running scared of its own MPs, who have effectively imposed a veto on cuts in welfare spending.
What would genuinely make a difference to life expectancy and health outcomes would, of course, be a radical reform of the NHS, a more active population, and a reduction in the numbers wasting their lives on benefits. Rachel Reeves has just poured another £29 billion into the health service, without any clear cost-benefit calculation. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, is intelligent enough to know that he has inherited an obsolete behemoth that is crying out for root-and-branch reform.
But building a new consensus for a new NHS would require the Labour Party to rethink its assumptions about the social contract, as well as the role of insurance and individual responsibility. The original 1946 NHS Act created 'a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people of England and Wales'.
Today, the nation's health is not safe in the hands of a dysfunctional Labour Party that would rather do anything – even introducing an assisted-dying service – than take on the overdue task of making the NHS fit for purpose. These new directives are at best a displacement activity, at worst an act of fiscal condescension. A nation of shopkeepers deserves better than to be bossed around by its own government.