Nanny-state obesity solution would fatten government coffers, not make people slim
If you want to serve a sorbet but you just can't be faffed, Jamie -Oliver has the answer. "Chilled grappa, good-quality chocolate and delicious frozen grapes," he says, "are a great little combo that show you care." Conspicuous caring is important to Oliver. He showed he cared about climate change by buying offsets to make Jamie's American Road Trip the first carbon-neutral travel program on television.
Now he wants the British government to show it cares about obesity by slapping a tax on sugar. The symbolism is important, -Oliver told a House of Commons select committee. It would send a message that the government "is willing to fight tooth and nail for public health and most importantly for child health". 
The first thing that should trouble us about the sucrophobes is the simplicity of their proposal. The social, psychological and physical causes of obesity are complex. Unwanted kilos of body mass do not succumb to miracle cures, raising the price of sugar -included.
Equally revealing is the fact its advocates seldom talk about revenue. It suggests their proposal is not principally about collecting money but has a far more lofty purpose.
Rest assured, the Obesity Policy Coalition tells us in its submission to the government's tax review, a sugar-sweetened beverage tax would raise "considerable revenue" while increasing demand for water and low-fat milk. Yet neither proposition is backed by evidence; we are expected to take them on trust.
Fat tax proposals, like so many public policy blunders, are driven by the imperative to do something in the face of an imagined crisis. We have been struck by an "obesity pandemic", we are told. Health costs are not just rising, they are "spiralling out of control".
The sucrophobes back their arguments with scareynomics - the use of terrifyingly big numbers in an attempt to persuade us that their absurd proposal makes -perfect economic sense.
If we are to believe a recent report from Obesity Australia, for example, obesity costs Australia $58 billion, a figure equivalent to 40 per cent of the health budget.
Implicit in the proposal is the suggestion that sales of sugary soft drinks are rising. They are not.
Last year, for the first time, low-calorie cola outsold regular cola, according to data from Euro-monitor. Sales of full-flavour cola sold by volume has declined by 22 per cent in the past 15 years. The amount of sugar the average -Australian consumes from cola carbonates fell from 12.62g in 2011 to 11.83g last year and is expected to fall to 10.28g by the end of the decade.
When Euromonitor modelled the impact of a tax, the market researcher found it would accelerate the reduction in sales by a mere 0.5 per cent - hardly worth the bother when one considers the costs of implementation and compliance.
Overseas experience of fat taxes is hardly encouraging. In 2011 the Danish government began levying tax on food products containing 2.3 per cent or more of saturated fat. A sugar tax was to follow.
The tax was dropped after barely 15 months. The burden of compliance proved too heavy for business, while the tax was driving inflation. Changes in diet were marginal at best; four out of five Danes said the tax made no difference to their eating habits.
Danes driving over the border would return laden with bootleg chocolate. Anecdotal evidence suggested some had actually increased their sugar habit.
In any case, singling out one possible cause of obesity for special attention makes no sense. One European study found that Greek children, who drank relatively low volumes of sugar-sweetened drinks suffered most from obesity.
Children in The Netherlands, who were top of the soft-drink league table, had the lowest obesity rates. Why? Perhaps because Dutch kids ride bicycles, while Greek kids ride them less often.
The passion generated by the obesity debate invites comparison with the temperance movement of the late 19th and early 20th -centuries when the crusade to close saloon bars became a proxy for a range of popular anxieties from immigration and women's rights to the erosion of community -standards.
Sociologist Joseph Gusfield describes prohibition in the US as a symbolic rather than instrumental measure, best regarded as a morality play.
"Like drama, it represents an action which is make-believe but which moves its audience," he writes. "Such persons 'act out' the drama in which one status group is degraded and another is given -deference." By proposing a sugar tax, advocates recast a discussion about obesity into "an issue", something that people are for or against. Like coalmining or same-sex marriage, we are not allowed to sit on the fence. Our attitude to sugar is a test of virtue that defines one's status in a changing society.
A government foolish enough to adopt such a proposal would endorse the moral presumptions of its chattering-class supporters. It is a tax designed to save helpless sinners from moral decay that promotes the virtues of smugly slim. Its purpose is not the redistribution of wealth but the redistribution of prestige.
Boyd Swinburn, an anti-sugar campaigner, told a Canberra forum last month that it was only a matter of time before a sugar tax was introduced in Australia.
Swinburn may be right. Bad ideas in public health have a long shelf life, reinforced by the grant funding process that rewards those investigating fashionable problems.
Allegations of nanny-statism are received as a compliment. "Nannies are actually good for children," Swinburn told the forum. "Big corporations don't care about them, their job is to stay within the law and make money, period." Swinburn compares food -producers to tobacco companies to justify his demand for extensive government intervention. It is the line we have come to expect from pressure groups: regulate or -perish.
The anti-obesity brigade may not know how to make people slimmer but it sure knows how to make government fatter.Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.