SUGAR TAX - SOCIAL ENGINEERING BY TAXATION.

Today sees the introduction of a so-called 'sugar tax' which is being imposed on drinks of which the government disapproves. It is said that the proceeds of the tax are to be directed at activities intended to benefit the health of children. Ha-ha.

Taxing anything in order to try to 'encourage' people to behave differently is a form of social engineering that is abhorrent to me. We already have punitive taxes levied on tobacco and alcohol and now we have the same approach to sugar. No doubt the health fanatics will, in due course, convince a future government to introduce taxes on salt, fat, carbohydrates other than sugar and lord knows what else in an effort to make the population bend to their will. On every occasion, the tax will be dressed up as being directed at health related issues but will, in fact, simply vanish into the vast black hole that is the government coffer.

If tobacco, alcohol and sugar are really so bad for us, why are they not simply banned ? The answer, of course, is that banning things a) doesn't increase government income and b) usually results in a black market that has to be policed and so costs more. Hence, we have social engineering by taxation. There is an alternative which is a proper programme of education but this also has a cost and, again, taxation  is the preferred option because it raises rather than costs money and satisfies the fanatics more quickly.

When I was a teenager, I was an ardent chemistry student, so much so that I built up a significant home laboratory. One of the experiments I had a go at was to see what happened when a cigarette was incinerated; I heated a crushed cigarette and collected the resulting products by distillation. Brown fumes condensed into a thick dark brown liquid and a black tarry mass was left in the original vessel - needless to say, I never even considered smoking as a lifestyle choice. Something as simple as this experiment, performed in a classroom of 12 year olds would surely put off most of them, and something similar could surely be devised to demonstrate the perils of other products.

Taxation is a blunt instrument and its use as a means of changing people's habits is fundamentally wrong. Nonetheless, governments find it an easy way to raise money and to silence pressure groups; how long will it be before we have a tax on toothpaste that doesn't contain fluoride or some packaged item that doesn't contain enough of a then favoured vitamin or mineral ? We already have mass medication through the addition of fluoride to our drinking water and there are regular calls for the addition of other chemicals to various foodstuffs, notably folic acid as a preventative agent for spina bifida, but can such actions truly be justified when education about diet and lifestyle is available as a simple alternative ? My view is that they can't be.

Once this type of bandwagon starts to roll, stopping it is well nigh impossible and we will all pay the cost.