Guest’s notes: Claire Fox on sugar taxes, gender ratios, comedy clubs and free speech
Hope you had a happy sugar tax day.
If you’re a joyless public health campaigner, you’ll be cheering. But if you’re a drinks company, there’s less reason to be cheerful: you’ll now be forced to pay between 18p and 24p for every litre of sugary drink containing more than 5g of sugar you produce or import.
And if you’re a sweet-toothed freedom lover, you should be angry. Either your favourite tipple will cost more (50p extra for a large bottle of Coke, for example) or it won’t taste as good: to avoid the levy, many manufacturers have reformulated their drinks.
It’s not much-maligned EU regulators but home-grown nanny-staters hitting everyone’s pockets by imposing this sin tax. Small businesses have been granted a reprieve, but will have to register for the tax if they’re successful and increase sales to more than one million litres a year. Hardly an incentive for sales growth.
Politicians claim the tax is about protecting consumers from ruthless big business. But what about choice?
In fact, customers are rebelling. Lucozade saw an annual 8.4 per cent decline in sales after replacing some of the sugar with artificial sweeteners.
In Scotland, thousands have signed a “Hands off our Irn-Bru” petition, demanding manufacturer AG Barr drop plans to halve the sugar content. There’s tales of stockpiling the original, boycotts of the new version and two-litre, full-sugar bottles are on sale on Ebay for £10.
Last Sunday, I assumed a tabloid headline about a “Coke black market” was an April Fool.
However, warnings that “drink smuggling could quadruple” are based on the British Soft Drinks Association’s worries about “an increase in illicit trade”.
Indeed, when Norway increased its sugar tax earlier this year, hordes of Norwegians crossed over the border to sugar-tax-free Sweden to get their fix.
Should this alter our attitude to the Irish border question?
Sadly not – Ireland has implemented its own sugar tax today, too!
Gender ratio for contributors is paternalistic tokenism
I groaned on Monday when the BBC announced an enforced 50/50 gender split of expert contributors on its news and current affairs programmes.
Some of us are furious at the damage such paternalistic tokenism might do for real equality.
Imagine grafting long and hard to establish yourself as a top economist/engineer/statistician, only to have your credibility and credentials undermined by the suspicion: you’ve only been asked to comment because of your biology not your brainpower.
This week of course there’s been no shortage of female experts on the airwaves, the majority welcoming the release of gender pay gap data.
Thankfully a minority challenged the overblown inference that women employees are victims of corporate sexism.
City A.M.’s very own Kate Andrews effectively debunked a simplistic misuse of stats when debating Labour’s Stella Creasy on TV.
The disgruntled MP continued the spat online, dismissing Andrews’ meticulous research by tweeting “I guess it gets her on the telly”.
So, more women experts on TV, but only if they parrot received feminist orthodoxy? Yuk!
Free speech allowed
Talking of media gigs, London has a new Radio Station, Love Sport Radio, broadcast on 558 AM and London DAB.
Despite not particularly loving sport, or indeed knowing much about it, there’s no gender or sportsphobic discrimination here and I’ve been given my own weekly show, every Friday, 10am-1pm. On Fox News Friday, I can guarantee that guests will never be invited to tick identity boxes.
The only criterion: contributors – male or female – must be interesting about the news behind the headlines. The show’s motto is Free Speech Allowed. Listen in.
Antidote to orthodoxy
Heard the one about YouTube humourist ‘Count Dankula’, convicted in a Scottish court for filming himself training his girlfriend’s pug to do a Nazi salute?
Now that jokes can land you in jail, it’s great that London has a new free-speech stand-up club, Comedy Unleashed, set up as as antidote to orthodoxy and groupthink.
The next gig, on Tuesday at the Backyard Comedy Club E2 0EL, will show the infamous video.
A chance for City A.M. readers to have a laugh and prove some of us can distinguish between humour and Nazism, even if the judiciary can’t.