personal finance

Boris Johnson’s cynical ‘sin-tax’ freeze is a glimpse of what’s to come | Jonathan Freedland


Here’s a thing they teach in campaign school. If you’re about to make a political promise, first check the calendar. Just to avoid a clash that could make your policy proposal look utterly wrong-headed, inept and at odds with the available evidence.

Boris Johnson must have bunked off that day, because he clearly missed that lesson. Instead, he’s issued what he doubtless hoped would be a crowd-pleasing promise to halt any new “sin taxes” on sugary drinks on the very day obesity was named as causing more cases of four common cancers than smoking.

The Conservative leadership contender and near-certain next prime minister may be “the most talented person of his generation” – at least according to a former Oxford housemate who, in a slavering essay in Johnson house journal and one-time newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, praised his chum as an “extravagantly gifted” combination of Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – but sometimes the basics can elude him. You know the kind of thing: don’t recite imperialist verses in countries with bitter memories of the British empire; don’t appear to validate the false accusations of a hostile government that has jailed a British citizen; and don’t choose the day obesity is confirmed by Cancer Research UK as a bigger killer than cigarettes to speak up for sugar.

It’s not just that Johnson’s pledge is forced to share space on the front pages with the obesity-causes-cancer story. It also wholly contradicts one of his key supporters, the health secretary Matt Hancock, who is proud of the levy on sugary drinks and was poised to publish a green paper advocating that it be extended to include milkshakes. Hancock had already made himself look ridiculous by backing Johnson, whose entire approach to Brexit and much else he had opposed. But now he has been humiliated by the very campaign he is actively working for.

The appeal of the move for Johnson is not complicated. Calling for a freeze, and hinting at an eventual scrapping, of what the Sun calls the “hated sugar tax” will have looked like an obvious vote-winner – and that paper hailing it as a victory for its “Hands off our Grub” campaign will look like sweet vindication. Johnson has framed it as a gesture towards the poor, declaring that: “The recent proposal for a tax on milkshakes seems to me to clobber those who can least afford it.”

But that concern invites scepticism, and not just because Johnson used to be in favour of a sugar levy and even introduced one in London’s City Hall when he was mayor. If he was so worried about those on the lowest incomes, why would the first major pledge of his campaign for the Conservative leadership have been a tax cut for 3 million higher earners, raising the 40p threshold from £50,000 to £80,000 at a cost to the public coffers of £9.6bn? If his concern was truly for those at the bottom end, he’d have directed that £9.6bn towards them, rather than tossing them a few pennies off a can of Pepsi.

The more plausible beneficiary of any slowdown on the sugar tax is, of course, the food and drinks industry which strenuously opposed the levy. Note that one of Johnson’s advisers is Will Walden of the lobbying firm Edelman, among whose clients is Coca-Cola – a company which has made the case for rethinking the sugar tax. Team Johnson denies Walden was involved in the policy shift.

Instead, the case they’ll make is that this both helps hard-up people and fits the Johnson philosophy, expressed through his many years as a Telegraph columnist: a Merrie England libertarianism, railing both against political correctness and the nanny state as meddling busybodies seeking to deny freeborn Englishmen the fundamental pleasures of life. It’s a philosophy with populist appeal – think of Nigel Farage with his trademark fag and pint – and one that conveniently allows Johnson to fend off questions about his private life by arguing that he is hardly a moral scold and therefore no hypocrite.

In that sense, his sugar-tax promise is, if ill-timed, very much on-brand. But it also gives us a useful preview of the Johnson premiership to come. First, there will be cabinet splits aplenty, as Johnson cheerfully undermines or tramples on the detailed policy work of his ministers: Hancock will not be the last to suffer this fate.

Second, we are likely to see a very specific Johnsonian brand of populism, in which he purports to stand up for the little guy against the wagging finger of the nanny state and the PC-brigade. He will suggest that he’s on a mission to cheer us all up, against the po-faced directives of a varying cast of hand-picked enemies, whether at the BBC, Brussels or the Bank of England, who boringly urge prudence or caution.

And for all the talk of representing the poorest or “the people”, his proposed action will be of greatest benefit to the powerful. The fizzy drink levy might seem like a relatively light business, but through those bubbles you can get a glimpse of what’s to come.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist



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