Delivering subject content through nine life themes
The UK government introduced a bill in parliament this week which, if it becomes law, will make England the first country in the world to ban smoking. The prime minister says he wants to “protect future generations across the UK from the harmful impacts of smoking and build a better future for our children”. The measure has – potentially – cross-party support, but it is as yet unclear how much opposition there will be from libertarians on the Conservatives’ own backbenches. Expert to hear renewed talk of ‘nanny statism’, ‘governmental over-reach’ and ‘individual liberty’ as the bill undertakes its parliamentary journey. But what is the public mood on public health policy and the role of government? New polling from the King’s Fund health and care think tank suggests that most people are in favour of government action to address the harms caused by tobacco, alcohol and obesity, and to support people to live healthier lifestyles.
Writing in a blog on the King’s Fund website, the think tank’s senior policy lead Toby Brown says that, in recent months, there has been “a sea change” in politicians’ willingness to be bold with public health policy, citing as evidence this Conservative proposal to ban smoking for those born after 2008 and Labour’s promise to introduce supervised kids’ toothbrushing. He links this shift directly to the approaching election.
Ipsos Mori polled 1,115 respondents in February 2024 for the King’s Fund. Their polling indicated that:
In recent years, the government has repeatedly promised action on public health and repeatedly pulled back. As Brown points out, there are plenty of policies “sitting on the shelf – legislated for by this government – ready to go”.
In the interests of balance, I will quote in its entirety the last part of the blog, which sounds a cautionary note:
I’ll end on a word of caution for political leaders looking to introduce public health policies: the public’s view is nuanced. There is an important difference between the general concept of government’s intervention in people’s lives and support for specific policies. Mistrust of the concept of the ‘nanny state’ is real, but so is the public’s eagerness for policies that will improve the health of the nation.
In our blog A prevention-first approach to health we pointed out that education has a massive role to play in helping people to live healthier lifestyles before their health declines. Unless we do more to ensure that individuals – including children and young people – adopt healthy lifestyle choices, we will continue to sleepwalk towards disaster.
LBL priorities children’s physical and mental wellbeing. This includes opportunities for regular sport and physical activity – including the Daily Mile or something similar – and an emphasis on food education and healthy eating.
from A prevention-first approach to health
We need to junk our junk-food culture. Food education and healthy eating – knowledge, knowhow and practice – must be at the heart of any long-term strategy for improving health outcomes. It needs to be proactive and not reactive.
We also wrote the following in our blog Unimaginative nanny-state rhetoric:
Two overlapping issues – the political/ideological and the economic: it is not the proper role of government to meddle in people’s lives because it is a denial of our basic freedoms and because it leads to higher taxes. Those sympathetic to this view often refer to the ‘nanny state’ in this context. For them, individual choice must be at the heart of any obesity strategy. The government should not be ‘instructing’ people on things like what they should and should not eat.
from Unimaginative nanny-state rhetoric
We first mentioned a smoking ban in our blog Collective action on obesity in 2023. It was in relation to New Zealand. The then Labour government passed a law in December 2022 to phase in a near-total tobacco ban. It is essentially the same policy that the Conservatives have announced for England. However, the New Zealand scheme was scrapped after a general election resulted in a change of government.
One of the reasons given for the scheme’s abandonment was that the new government needed money to fund tax cuts. In other words, the short-term drop in government revenue from smoking-related taxes would take priority over the long-term savings to the health system from a smoking ban.
LBL has always maintained that, though we are not overtly political – and certainly not party-political – any discussion of principles, values and aims cannot be entirely divorced from the realm of politics.
We argue that it cannot be left solely – or even primarily – to individual choice and tinkering around the edges of existing policies and approaches. Something more radical is required – a collective approach to public health, led by and including an active, interventionist role for government – if we are going to prevent a public health disaster in the decades to come. The three blogs below explore issues relating to a collective approach to tackling obesity.
Education is important so that people have the knowledge and skills to make informed individual choices around healthy lifestyles – what to eat, whether to exercise and so on. But it also needs a collective effort, with government driving forward significant changes in how we educate our children and young people. We need to rethink, changing our common frame of reference so that healthy lifestyles become an urgent priority.
Image at the head of this article by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
