Ever get the feeling you’re being propagandised to?

Apparently that sugar tax was very good, very good indeed. So say all the newspapers:

A repeat:

The amount of sugar consumed by children from soft drinks in the UK halved within a year of the sugar tax being introduced, a study has found.

The tax, which came into force in April 2018, has been so successful in improving people’s diets that experts have said an expansion to cover other high sugar food and drink products is now a “no-brainer”.

The research, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, looked at responses from 7,999 adults and 7,656 children between 2008 and 2019 to the annual nationally representative UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey.

It showed that the daily sugar intake for children fell by about 4.8g, and for adults 10.9g, in the year after the levy’s introduction.

Except pretty much none of that was true. Or even is true with the exception that there really was a sugar tax imposed on soft drinks.

As Chris Snowdon points out here. For example:

Firstly, the study doesn't claim sugar consumption halved, as the headline says, nor that "sugar consumed by children from soft drinks in the UK halved within a year of the sugar tax being introduced" as the article says. It found that sugar consumption by children from soft drinks halved between 2008 and 2019, with nearly all that decline occurring before the sugar tax was introduced in 2018.

That, of course, is a less than ringing endorsement of the success of the tax in reducing sugar consumption - and therefore obviously of the case for any extension. As Snowdown goes on to point out it’s also not had the slightest effect upon child obesity which is the background justification for the whole idea.

We’re being fed unsugared pap as propaganda here.

Which does make us think more kindly of that Welsh idea. It should be a criminal offence to lie in politics. As we’ve noted that is going to curb politics rather a lot. But it is going to be interesting.

This is clearly politics - it’s advocacy of a tax, that is politics. Somewhere between fact and what we’re being told there’s a certain error. So, who do we bring the private prosecution against for lying in politics? The authors of the original paper? The journal that published? The Press Association (we assume the reason everyone is running it is because that’s the intermediate source)? The individual newspapers? Or perhaps just all of them?

It really is going to be fun, isn’t it? Now, how does that crowdfunding lark work - if Jololyon can get piles of cash to pay lawyers then….

Tim Worstall