CITY A.M. : We have slipped into a new age of state intervention. Even after a year of unprecedented interference in our everyday lives, attacks on personal freedoms are emerging from every quarter. Take gambling, for example. The government’s review of the Gambling Act looks set to introduce new spend limits to dictate what people can and can’t do with their money, with some calling for it to be illegal to spend more than £100 per month.
Elsewhere in gratuitous growth of the state in the name of public health, the government has finally signed off on its plan to ban advertising for what it deems “junk food” in an effort to curb obesity, albeit a slightly watered-down version which promises not to criminalise family-run bakeries posting pictures of cakes on Instagram.
There is no disagreement whatsoever in the science on this. All the evidence demonstrates that it will do much more harm than good. The government’s own in-house analysis of the policy concluded that it will remove a grand total of 1.7 calories from children’s diets per day – roughly half a Smartie. » | Jason Reed * | Thursday, July 1, 2021
* Jason Reed is the UK lead at Young Voices and a policy fellow with the Consumer Choice Centre.
