Britain’s system for producing and distributing the food we eat is not working. Last week, we learned that UK food prices rose an astonishing 19.1% in the year to March. Yes, they are rising everywhere, but faster in Britain – over 2022, 40% higher than in the EU. There are frequent shortages of key products. Two million people used food banks last year. British consumers eat more cheaper, fatty food than other Europeans. As a result, nearly one in three is now classified as obese, the highest in Europe besides Malta and Turkey. Five million people are estimated to be at risk of contracting type 2 diabetes, with all the risks that entails.
Every malfunction of British capitalism and the British state has combined in a perfect storm, fuelled by the way the laissez-faire consensus – inflamed by the rightwing media – frames our understanding of society. We are unhealthier, at greater risk of dying early and facing a deeper cost of living crisis than our peers in the EU. People should be as angry as hell. This, rather than the small boats influx, should be at the heart of our national conversation.
Food inflation will start to fall in the months ahead – world food price inflation peaked in October – but the structural weaknesses will remain. The fall will be slower than elsewhere, not least because Brexit has imposed a layer of additional costs on household food bills – an average of £210 per household over the two years to 2021, estimate LSE researchers. Imports from the EU constitute around a third of our food supply: it is now more time-consuming and expensive to navigate newly imposed border controls when importing EU foodstuffs than it used to be; some smaller European suppliers have simply abandoned supplying the UK market. Key seasonal EU workers on whom we used to rely to harvest quickly perishable food are no longer available. All the Brexit promises about cheaper food and warnings about the costs of the common agricultural policy are now revealed as fantastical ravings.
But the anti-EU critique had its roots in the right’s ideological belief in minimal government, the perfect power of free markets and the moral and economic imperative of running an economy and society around individual choice and responsibility. There should be no “nannying” by government, especially unaccountable EU bureaucrats from whom Brexit freed us. Business should be allowed its head; markets will do what they will do; individuals should take their chances. It is this mindset that is at the root of the food supply crisis and accompanying public health disaster.
Last week, the Institute for Government set out the roots of Britain’s obesity crisis – and the failures of our leaders since 1992 to come up with a sustained, effective response. The threat and cost of obesity has certainly been recognised. “There have been 14 strategies, 689 policies and 10 targets,” it writes, “and at least 14 key institutions and agencies variously created and abolished.” Powerful lobbying, from a food and drinks industry that employs 3.5 million people, to abstain from effective action has been one important influence, but the key problem, says the institute, is political. Despite the evidence from the success of banning smoking in public places, governments have been terrified of “nannying” accusations. Thus the retreat to ask for only voluntary action by industry, with consumers left to take responsibility guided by food labelling or educational campaigns. Theresa May’s successful sugary drinks tax is almost the only example of effective state action. But this voluntarism ignores almost everything we know about human behaviour. Human biology welcomes sugary, fatty food; our bodies, once accustomed, crave for at least the same amount of bad food to maintain our body weight. Urging individual responsibility in an environment that supplies ever more of what makes us ill is bound to be a failure. Instead, the report proposes a long-term obesity strategy, with a new food and health policy unit strengthening the Food Standards Agency and local government’s powers – and to stress the urgency to the public.
All good recommendations, but hard to make work in a Westminster in which turf wars and ever changing policies are hardwired. In any case, the proposals are predicated on ministers having a Damascene conversion to effective collective action. For example, there is zero comprehension of the role of well-designed autonomous public institutions in delivering economic and social outcomes: they are quangos and busybodies to be avoided and, if possible, abolished – even if, like Public Health England, it’s your own government’s initiative.
Nor can much progress be made until the culture of the food industry is addressed. Here a well-researched paper by the Unite trade union on the scale of profiteering in the economy, the food industry included, is illuminating. It echoes similar research by the European Central Bank showing that since the start of 2022 unit profits have grown much faster across the EU than unit labour costs. Both bodies agree that profiteering is driving inflation rather than wages. And the EU economy has more competitive pressures than in cartelised, monopolised Britain, whose investment institutions continue to invest in EU companies. Of course margins have swollen in our supermarkets and among food manufacturers, as Unite details: the concentrated industrial structure, less protected, less unionised workforces and non-functioning investment system make it inevitable. Add that to Brexit and Britain’s excess food inflation rate is largely explained.
The high priests of laissez-faire held the line against concern over the “condition of the people” into the early 20th century. It became a byword for want, squalor and disease. Keynes pronounced it dead in a famous essay published 97 years ago, and between the end of the Second World War and the election of Margaret Thatcher it was submerged. Today’s conservatism has revived it, and it is failing now as signally as it failed in the past. Slums and hunger fired up Dickens, Ruskin, Morris, Carlyle, a Tory such as Harold Macmillan, the new Liberals and triggered the rise of the Labour party. The same phenomena in a 21st-century guise – hunger alongside obesity – will surely recreate the same cultural and political responses. This time, let’s bury this philosophy for good.
• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
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