Did the UK torpedo peace talks on Ukraine?

Did the UK torpedo peace talks on Ukraine?
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
12 November 2022

Since 1976 the award-winning US media watchdog Project Censored has printed an annual list of the most under-reported news stories in the US media – the “news that didn’t make the news”.

Should someone start publishing a similar book about the UK media, the top under-reported story of 2022 will almost certainly be the news the UK government worked to prevent a negotiated settlement to the Ukraine war in March-April 2022.

Here’s what we know.

Following Russia’s aggressive and illegal invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, in March Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Istanbul for talks. On 17 March a Sky News headline summarised: “‘15-point’ peace deal being ‘seriously discussed’ as Putin says he’s ‘ready to talk’”.

The deal included “a ceasefire and a Russian withdrawal, with Kyiv having to accept neutrality and curbs on its armed forces,” the report noted. “Citing three sources involved in the negotiations, the FT [Financial Times] said Ukraine would have to give up its bid to join NATO – something Mr Zelenskyy has already hinted at.”

“It would also have to promise not to allow foreign military bases or weaponry into the country in exchange for protection from allies such as the US, UK and Turkey.”

Quoted in a 20 March Al-Jazeera report, Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu stated “We see that the parties are close to an agreement”.

This is also the conclusion of Fiona Hill, a Russia specialist in the Bush and Obama Administrations, and Angela Stent, an ex-Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the US National Intelligence Council. Writing in the September/October issue of the establishment Foreign Affairs magazine after having spoken to “multiple former senior US officials”, they note “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement” in April 2022. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, where it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”

However, in May the Ukrainian online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, citing “sources close to [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy,” reported UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson “appeared in the capital [Kyiv] almost without warning” on 9 April, bringing “two simple messages.”

“The first is that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”

According to the Ukrainska Pravda – described by Encyclopædia Britannica as “one of Ukraine’s most-respected news sites” – “Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to ‘press him.’”

Three days after Johnson returned to the UK Putin said the talks “had turned into a dead end”. In September Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov asserted that “the Americans and the British… forbade Ukraine to conduct further dialogue with Russia” and “since then, the Ukrainian authorities have been shying away from negotiation process.”

Of course, hopefully it goes without saying we should be highly sceptical of public statement from Putin and Lavrov, especially about their willingness to seriously pursue a negotiated settlement. And it should also be noted that the Ukrainska Pravda also reported that Russian atrocities in Bucha and other locations in Ukraine affected the course of the peace talks.

But as the Morning Star is a British newspaper, and as I am a British citizen, let’s get back to the actions of the UK and the US. Johnson publicly confirmed his opposition to talks during a trip to India later in April, telling reporters that negotiating with Putin was like dealing with “a crocodile when it’s got your leg in its jaws,” according to Reuters.

Why did the UK government try to torpedo the peace talks? The answer likely lies in the references above to the “collective West” and the opportunity to “press” Putin. As Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA under President Barack Obama, explained in March: the conflict is “a proxy war with Russia whether we say so or not.”

This fits with comments made by US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at a press conference in Poland in late April. Asked whether the US aims had shifted since February, he replied the US supported Ukraine in retaining its sovereignty and defending its territory, before adding a second, previously unstated, goal: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, concurs with this “proxy war” framing, writing in May that “For NATO, the payoff has been damaging some of the most important parts of the Russian military – its ground and mechanized forces, its airborne units, its special operations forces – so badly that it may take them years to recover.”

However, while the West has continued to ramp up their military support for Ukraine, there are increasing calls for the US – and UK – to change their position and make a serious diplomatic push for peace negotiations.

Commenting on Russia’s repeated threats to use nuclear weapons, in October Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told ABC News “We’re about at the top of the language scale, if you will. And I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing… the sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

Speaking to Newsweek magazine about President Biden’s comment that he was “trying to figure out what is Putin’s offramp”, a “senior intelligence officer” said “We have the power to influence how that offramp might work. I’m not comfortable criticizing a president, as if I’m some partisan animal, but we are just not doing enough.”

A “senior military source” quoted by Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman last month made the same point: “Military action is ineffective on its own. It’s only truly effective when it’s combined with economic and diplomatic efforts. And we’re not seeing enough diplomacy.”

Tellingly, I didn’t find out about Johnson attempting to block peace negotiations from the UK’s famously stroppy and disputatious Fourth Estate but from small, progressive publications and writers – namely Milan Rai at Peace News and Branko Marcetic from Jacobin magazine.

With the war dangerously escalating and President Biden warning the world is the closest it’s been to nuclear “Armageddon” since the Cuban missile crisis, concerned citizens simply cannot afford to rely on the mainstream media to gain an accurate understanding of the world.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

“This civilization as we know it is finished”: Rupert Read interview

“This civilization as we know it is finished”: Rupert Read interview
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
8 November 2022

Professor Rupert Read has devoted a huge amount of his life to green politics – as a Green Party member, councillor, parliamentary candidate and spokesperson, as an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and in 2019 as a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, appearing on BBC Question Time.

With his new book Why Climate Breakdown Matters just out, Ian Sinclair asked Read about why he thinks this civilization is finished, the importance of telling the truth about the climate crisis and where the green movement goes from here.

Ian Sinclair: One of your central messages in the book is “This civilization as we know it is finished”. What, exactly, do you mean by this? And does the climate science support this statement? 

Rupert Read: It’s not just about climate science. It’s about a whole systems-analysis and understanding. That is what, as a philosopher, I seek to offer. Though of course the task is actually way too big for any one person. But we have to try. We can’t take refuge behind academic specialism, if the cost of doing so is that no-one asks the really big questions, like I ask in this book, such as is this civilisation finished?

But yes, indirectly I think the climate science does support this claim. If we are to get through what is coming without collapse, then the curve for change is getting ever steeper. The time when a smooth transition might have been possible is past. The only transition possible now is transformational. Everything is going to change, either way. This civilisation will be transformed, by us or by Earth, by collapse. These are the two possible outcomes insofar as I can see; our civilisation either collapses due to ecological breakdown, or it consciously transforms to combat the climate crisis in such a fundamental way as to no longer be this society. Either way, this civilisation’s days are numbered.

IS: The 2015 Paris Agreement, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, and to keep them “well below” 2.0C above pre-industrial times. You describe the agreement as a failure. Why? 

RR: Look, the first thing to point out is that the Paris Agreement was of course an unprecedented diplomatic triumph. It rocketed the climate to the forefront of international relations, and the success of having all 196 countries agree to limit their emissions was unheard of. Nevertheless, Paris still did not establish an international regime of the kind created by the much more successful Montréal agreement (on stopping ozone-depletion) a generation before: this time, countries were left to create their own carbon budgets, and there was no enforcing power behind the accord, no requirement for trade sanctions against laggards. Moreover, the budgets that were created to limit carbon emissions were based on overly optimistic models of climate change, and this is insufficient when dealing with the inherent uncertainties of climate modelling; even if all countries were to abide by a climate budget that was agreed upon at Paris (which obviously they are not), there is no guarantee that this would be enough. Moreover, Paris in effect relied on totally uncertain gambles on carbon-reduction technology for its optimistic projections. All in all, Paris should have been at best the starting point, inspiring a wave of more intense and stringent climate policies. Instead, Paris remains the mediocre highpoint of climate conferences, seven years later. 

IS: Responding to Liz Truss labelling opponents of her government as “the anti-growth coalition”, Fatima Ibrahim from Green New Deal Rising said “this couldn’t be further from the truth. Activists such as myself are committed to clean, equitable growth for all.” What’s your take on ‘green growth’?  

RR: Firstly, my position on economic growth is that we really must abandon it as the be-all and end-all aim of economic policy. The obsession with economic growth, GDP, has gripped the world for far too long without considering vital questions like what is all this growth for, who is benefiting from economic growth, is endless economic growth possible, why are we growing the bad things that are wrapped up inside the definition of GDP, etc. My view is that we talk about economic growth to avoid having to talk about redistribution; there is enough to go around, and making sure everyone has what they need should be our focus and I’m entirely unconvinced economic growth is any kind of path to that. The economy should, for the sake of the environment and the people in it, be geared towards providing what we need, whereas it currently serves to sell us what we don’t for the sake of growth. I would be sceptical of Fatima Ibrahim’s idea of “clean, equitable growth.” Certainly, there are green sectors of the economy that do require substantial growth, such as the renewable energy sector, but being committed to societal-wide economic growth, green or otherwise, as an indispensable component of policy, means we are still prioritising a statistical figure over the needs of the people. Instead of pursuing growth, let’s pursue equality: that’s the way to be equitable! And let’s aim to grow the clean and to shrink/eliminate the rest.

IS: Reading your book about the radical transformations in society that need to be implemented as soon as possible, it strikes me that even the Green Party of England and Wales is not speaking honestly about the severity and enormity of the climate crisis. Do you agree? 

RR: Yes, on balance I would agree. Although, as should be expected, they are doing way better than any other major party on this issue (full disclosure: I’m a life member, and have previously been a national spokesperson, an elected local Councillor, etc.). Nevertheless, the Green Party are still not being honest about the fact that contemporary society as we know it will not survive the ecological breakdown we are already embroiled in, as set out in my answer above. To continue to tell the public “just vote for us, we’ll sort it out if only we are in power” is dishonest for two reasons; the first is that the current first-past-the-post political organisation of this country makes the Greens winning a General Election as close to impossible as you can get, and the second is that it’s too late for anyone to simply ‘sort it out’. There isn’t going to be a smooth green transition, not even if we had a benevolent environmentalist Government in this country fairly soon. Especially given that it is a pipe dream – and nothing more – to expect that to happen fairly soon worldwide. When we consider the impact of things like the ‘tipping points’ that appear to be being triggered – in our weather systems, in the Amazon, in the oceans, and so forth – and the obvious fact that this is a global issue that requires a global response, the ability of the UK Government to ‘sort this out’ should in any case not be over-claimed. What the UK government does matters – we are a wealthy country, even now; we need to show leadership, especially given our historical responsibility for huge climate-dangerous emissions and for imperial damage to others; and the City of London exercises an enormous, disproportionate, global influence on climate-related finance, an influence that remains mostly for ill, not good – but we are one part of a much larger picture. 

The way in which the Green Party could make the most difference is by telling these difficult truths, now. The Green Party’s USP is as the political party that is a trusted messenger on all things green. If we were to speak authentically about the direness of the crisis, about how hard we’ve tried to shift things, about how we have achieved small incremental improvements but the country and the world remain miles behind the clock and off the pace, about how it’s too late to ‘fix’ this and how we in the Greens certainly can’t significantly ameliorate it alone… if we were to be brave enough to do this, it would be game-changing. Ironically, such a confession of comparative impotence could propel many more voters to us; for voters are hungrier than ever for authenticity, for truth, for humility; for politicians who break the stereotype of their trade. That in any case is the essence of the strategy that I am pursuing for the Green Party, along with my colleagues in The Greens’ Climate Activists Network, GreensCAN: http://www.greens-can.Earth. I’d urge interested readers to weigh it up.

IS: In the book you argue for a new “moderate flank” to be built up within the green movement. What is this, and after playing a key role in Extinction Rebellion’s 2019 actions, why do you think this is the best way forward? 

RR: The emerging Moderate Flank is designed to mobilise everyone who is concerned about the environmental crisis; it is a movement that puts climate and life (aka biodiversity) first and foremost. Extinction Rebellion really did achieve remarkable things, and has put climate concern into the public consciousness in a way that was never been seen before. However, in recent years some of their actions have become more radical, such as the smashing of bank windows. And this process started with the own-goal, that in retrospect proved basically fatal to XR’s prospects of being the prime vehicle for change, of some rebels targeting tube trains, in October 2019. The desperation and frustration behind any of these actions is certainly something I completely relate to, but it’s also no secret that Extinction Rebellion has for years now lacked support from the general public. The climate crisis is the biggest issue our planet has ever faced, and we need a vehicle to mobilise people on it that, while deepening the truth-telling that XR helped initiated, will be unpolarising, welcoming, with low barriers to entry. That is why the new Moderate Flank is being created; to allow every single person who is concerned about climate breakdown, but who may not agree with the more radical tactics of Extinction Rebellion, or at least recognises that it is vital we provide ways (for many more to get involved) that are truth-based and yet don’t require sign-up as an ‘activist’, to participate in trying to prevent/mitigate it, and to seek to adapt transformatively to it. If you want to know more, and I hope you will, then go to @moderateflank on Twitter.

Why Climate Breakdown Matters is published by Bloomsbury, priced £17.99.

Economic Growth vs. A Liveable Planet: Which Side Are You On?

Economic Growth vs. A Liveable Planet: Which Side Are You On? 
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
29 October 2022

“There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle to be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.”  

My main takeaway from Tony Benn’s wise words is that each new generation of activists and progressives need to fight and win the important arguments again and again and again. 

Take, for example, former Prime Minister Liz Truss telling the recent Tory Party conference that those who oppose her government were the “anti-growth coalition.” 

Writing in the Financial Times weekend magazine under the heading ‘Intellect’, Tim Harford, the presenter on the fact-checking BBC radio programme More Or Less, told readers “The UK’s new prime minister is absolutely right to believe that economic growth should be her top priority.” 

Over at The Guardian there was a roundtable collecting responses to Truss’s speech. The contribution from Mick Lynch from the RMT union was titled ‘It’s pure nonsense that unions are “anti-growth”’. On the same page, Fatima Ibrahim, Co-Director of activist group Green New Deal Rising, noted “Green groups have been labelled as part of an ‘anti-growth coalition’, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Activists such as myself are committed to clean, equitable growth for all.” 

Responding to Truss resigning as Prime Minister, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party tweeted “For our economy. For growth. For working people. General Election, now.” Meanwhile the Labour Party’s popular 2017 manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership included fifteen mentions of “growth”, such as “Labour will invest in our future, to ensure faster growth” and “our industrial strategy is one for growth across all sectors.” 

Analysing 1,133 news items – from the Guardian, Telegraph, Sun, Mirror and BBC – about the Financial Crisis for her 2018 book Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis, Laura Basu found only one that challenged the growth paradigm. 

There is, then, with a few rare exceptions, a broad consensus across the political and media spectrum today that economic growth – as measured by a nation’s Gross Domestic Product or GDP per person – is good.  

However, we have not always been so sure about economic growth, or blind to the climate and ecological ramifications of making it a central aim of society and government. 

50 years ago this year a report was published by researchers at the Massachusetts of Technology, which had been commissioned by The Club of Rome, a group of business leaders and intellectuals. Titled The Limits To Growth, the study warned “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next one hundred years.” 

The report continued: “It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future.”  

“If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.” 

The Limits To Growth’s legacy in terms of sales and generating debate has been huge, including influencing Tim Jackson’s report Prosperity Without Growth: Economics For A Finite Planet, published in 2009 by the Sustainable Development Commission. 

Noting “GDP growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world for most of the last century”, he argued the climate crisis now requires reconciling our aspirations for the good life with the constraints of a finite planet. This means “we have no alternative but to question growth” and transition to a sustainable economy. 

Also published in 2009, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better took time out from analysing inequality to highlight the problem. “We have to recognize the problems of global warming and the environmental limits to growth,” co-authors Professor Richard Wilkinson and Professor Kate Pickett noted.  

Australian public intellectual Clive Hamilton was more forthright in his 2010 book Requiem For Species: Why We Resist The Truth About Climate Change. Building on his 2003 treatise Growth Fetish, he explained “From the outset, the fetish with economic growth has provided the principal obstacle to coming to grips with the threat of global warming.”  

Naomi Klein took up the baton in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. Published in 2014, she noted “the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming…. are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die.” She quotes climate scientists Professors Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows from 2010: to meet our emissions targets “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations are needed.” 

Our rulers cannot say they haven’t been warned. Since 1972 The Limits To Growth has sold over 10 million copies and been translated into over 30 languages. Prosperity Without Growth was endorsed by King Charles and the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and appeared on then Labour leader Ed Miliband’s summer reading list. This Changes Everything was on the New York Times bestseller list, and reviewed across the mainstream media. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, one of the most famous people on the planet, has repeatedly denounced the “fairy tale” of ceaseless economic growth. And speaking in 2013, national treasure Sir David Attenborough explained “We have a finite environment – the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” 

But what about the ‘green growth’ championed by Fatima Ibrahim from Green New Deal Rising? Reviewing the academic literature on the subject in a 2019 peer reviewed journal article, Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis conclude the “empirical evidence on resource use and carbon emissions does not support green growth theory” and therefore “green growth is likely to be a misguided objective, and that policymakers need to look toward alternative strategies.” Hickel explained why in a 2020 blog: “The question is not whether GDP can be decoupled from emissions (we know that it can be), the question is whether this can be done fast enough to stay within safe carbon budgets while growing GDP at the same time. And the answer to this is no.” Only a degrowth strategy will succeed in reducing emissions fast enough to keep the global temperature increase below 1.5oC or 2oC, he argues.  

Indeed Hickel sees a deliberate policy of degrowth as an opportunity to improve people’s lives. “We can ensure that people are able to access the things that they need to live a good life… without feeding the never-ending growth machine.” He calls this Radical Abundance, where private riches would likely shrink, but public wealth would significantly increase. 

All of which makes the current consensus incredibly depressing – and deeply worrying. If we are to have any chance, as a nation or humanity, in averting catastrophic climate change then the mainstream debate and government policies on economic growth need to be in a radically different place than it is today.  

As the academic and activist Rupert Read noted in his 2019 co-authored primer This Civilisation Is Finished, “unless you ‘angelise’ economic activity, eliminating its environmental impact altogether… then increasing economic activity is prima facie now a dangerous thing to encourage.” 

In short, growth fetishists who ignore the reality of the climate crisis need to be treated accordingly – as a danger to young people and future generations. 

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair 

Book review: Why Climate Breakdown Matters by Rupert Read

Book review: Why Climate Breakdown Matters by Rupert Read
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
24 October 2022

“There are no non-radical futures,” top climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson has repeatedly explained. “The future is radically different from the present either because we make huge, rapid shifts in reducing our emissions with profound shifts in our society, or we hang onto the status quo for a few more years whilst we lock in huge shifts from the impacts of climate change.”

After reading Why Climate Breakdown Matters, I’m confident Rupert Read, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and former Green Party councillor, wholeheartedly agrees with this.

A summation of his recent writings, talks and activism, it’s a deeply challenging and necessary book.

“The stakes could not be higher,” he argues. “Our economic, political and social systems are in the process of making our planet uninhabitable.” And with government action in the UK and elsewhere woefully inadequate, he contends “we are likely to face widespread social and ecological collapse within the next few decades.”

Echoing Anderson and the title of his 2019 primer co-authored with Samuel Alexander, he believes “This civilization as we know it is finished”. Those who downplay the seriousness of the climate emergency are participating in “soft denialism”, which he argues “is now the real enemy.”

A comforting bedtime read this is not.

The book’s second half is more hopeful, with Read leaning on the work of Rebecca Solnit and Charles Fritz to highlight how resilient communities often grow in response to terrible disasters. He urges readers to get active and “do what is necessary now, regardless of its legality or otherwise.” Having played a key role in Extinction Rebellion’s policy-shifting April 2019 uprising, he is now pushing for a “moderate flank” to be built within the climate movement, one that will have the numbers and broad appeal to force radical change.

For Read, if you care about the future of your children and the generations that will come after them, then logically you should also do everything you can to pass on a liveable and sustainable planet to them.

As part of Bloomsbury’s Why Philosophy Matters series, unsurprisingly there is certain amount of philosophy running through the book. However, Read keeps his language and arguments relatively straightforward, making the book accessible to the lay reader. Unlike a lot of academic writing, his references are genuinely an interesting read – I repeatedly found myself underling sentences and citations for later consideration and investigation.

With Read one of the most interesting thinkers currently engaging with the most pressing issue of our time, Why Climate Breakdown Matters is essential reading.

Why Climate Breakdown Matters is published by Bloomsbury, priced £17.99.

The food industry vs. the nation’s health: interview with anti-obesity campaigner Tam Fry

The food industry vs. the nation’s health: interview with anti-obesity campaigner Tam Fry
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
11 October 2022

The UK has one of the highest rates of obesity in Europe, according to a May report from the World Health Organisation. As the research noted, obesity is associated with many diseases, including musculoskeletal complications, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and at least 13 types of cancer.

In 2017 Public Health England estimate the overall cost of obesity to wider society at £27 billion per year.

Tam Fry, the Chairman of the National Obesity Forum and an Expert Advisory Team Member at Action On Sugar, tells Ian Sinclair what he thinks about the Truss government’s plans on obesity, and what policies might actually work to address the deep-rooted problem.

Ian Sinclair: According to the UK Health Security Agency, in 1980 6 per cent of men in England were obese (those with a Body Mass Index over 30). By 1993 it had more than doubled to 13 per cent, and by 2019 it had doubled again to 27 per cent. Why have obesity rates increased so quickly in England and the rest of the UK?

Tam Fry: Obesity rates in the UK have risen so quickly because no government in the last thirty years has succeeded in formulating a strategy that has any chance of stemming the epidemic. A review paper from Cambridge University published in January last year (‘Is Obesity Policy in England fit for Purpose?’, The Millbank Quarterly) concluded that every attempt to come up with a workable set of measures was doomed to fail. And there is nothing coming out of new Health Secretary Thérèse Coffey that gives any hope for success in the future. Ironically her mantra “ABCD” is the US obesity specialists’ description of the condition – Adipose-Based Chronic Disease! No government, of whatever hue, has addressed the principal cause for the nation’s overweight: without serious curbs being slapped on a food industry that persists in lacing its products with excessive levels of fat, salt and sugar – three of the principal drivers of obesity – and continues to market the worst products at attractively low prices, levels will not fall significantly.

IS: How do you respond to the common argument obesity is a failure of individual willpower?

TF: The common argument that obesity is a failure of individual willpower was all the rage in the early years of this century and it was a very easy way for government to escape taking any blame. But all that went out of the window in 2007 when the Foresight Report was published. The report was the result of two years intensive work into obesity commissioned by the Labour government and it clearly established that the obesogenic environment in which we all live was the main cause of the problem. It recognised that few individuals would be able to withstand the incessant advertising and marketing of food and, the lower down the social scale they were, the more difficult it would be to resist the onslaught.

The incoming 2010 Conservative government then turned to a new strategy: promoting behaviour change. This was the great white hope for a few years. That ran out of steam quite quickly, however, when it became obvious that waiting for the population to change ingrained habits was akin to watching paint dry. A special office was even set up in Downing Street to oversee the process but it had little effect. The office will probably be best remembered as the ‘Nudge Unit’ but nudging was never likely to be the answer.

Running parallel with nudging, the Conservatives also mistakenly decided that it would appeal to the better nature of the food barons and came up with a “responsibility deal”. The premise was that with their promise not to legislate food production, the barons would pledge voluntarily to reformulate their products into being “healthy” items. In the expectation that industry would keep to its pledges, the government even invited senior industrialists to co-chair the committees which would implement the ‘deal’. It would be a vain hope. Pledges fell by the wayside and the deal was dead.

IS: Last month the Guardian reported the new Truss government is considering scrapping a range of anti-obesity policies, including bans on “buy one get one free” offers, displays of sweet treats at supermarket checkouts, TV adverts for junk food before the 9pm watershed, and possibly the sugar tax. You commented “Once again the interests of big business have dangerously overridden the interests of the man in the street.” How does big business influence government policy?

TF: Essentially business influences government policy by pleading dire consequences for the country if Downing Street takes any measures that might affect its profits. In a 2010  Guardian article entitled ‘Andrew Lansley’s Department of Big Macs’, Philip James, one of the UK’s top nutritionists involved in setting up the Foods Standards Agency at the turn of the century, gave two examples of the food industry at work. In the first he described how it became clear to him that ministers were under intense pressure from industry to see that the agency excluded nutrition from its portfolio and should focus solely on food safety. His second example illustrated how a report authored by him, outlining a strategy that had the potential of nipping childhood obesity in the bud, was never published at the express request of industry leaders because it suggested that advertising and marketing might influence children’s behaviour. They seemed to have ‘persuaded’ the then Minister for Public Health, Tessa Jowell, that the report was “extraordinarily radical” and that they would like to speak to James. Within days he was invited to a private chat over dinner with the industry chiefs “who considered it entirely reasonable to market products directly to children”. The report was quickly buried in some Whitehall graveyard – and there has never been anything similarly ‘radical’ since.

IS: Depressingly, many experts describe the current UK anti-obesity strategy – which the Tory government is looking at ditching – as inadequate. What policies would work?

TF: The greatest hope that something radical might be done to stem obesity came when Prime Minister Boris Johnson exited St Thomas’ Hospital having been treated for COVID-19. Realising that his own weight was identified as a contributing factor to catching the virus, he declared that he would launch a war on obesity. In July 2020 he published the measures that he was sure would start to see it off. Public health specialists were jubilant that finally some of the draconian proposals that they had been advocating for years might be about to be implemented.

It was a false dawn. The majority of the proposals that Johnson hoped would empower adults and children to live healthier lives have now been kicked into touch by Liz Truss and Coffey, and the single proposal that remains, and which has just come into force, has served only to confuse – the idea that supermarket layouts be reconfigured so that sugary items in particular be furthest from the check-out/entrance has essentially infuriated customers who are baffled as to the aisles in which they will find their desired purchases!

The only initiative to combat obesity that might, over time, have some effect in significantly reducing it is the Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL). It came into effect in 2018, after Chancellor George Osborne fought lengthy battles for it within Downing Street. The SDIL knocked everyone out with its success and its continuing benefit has sparked clamours that it be extended to food items. Its success lies in the fact that it is not a tax on the drinks’ purchaser but a levy on the company bottling it. Indeed, it allowed companies to escape the levy altogether if they radically reduced the sugar content in their sodas and they embraced the idea. There are now many zero sugar or low sugar versions of drinks on sale and, would you believe, companies are profiting from it. Indeed, so immediate was the levy’s success that in 2019 Dame Sally Davies, who was England’s Chief Medical Officer at the time, made an extension of the levy her first proposal to tackle child obesity. She singled out milk based drinks (presumably milkshakes and high street coffee shop drinks etc.) as prime targets but, inevitably, any food product unreasonably high in sugar content could follow. Stripping sugar out of breakfast cereals, cakes and biscuits is also on the cards but more time is needed for reformulation to be achieved.