After 15 years as Diageo’s corporate affairs director, Ian Wright knows a thing or two about political lobbying, and if some of the heat has come off booze he’s taking some of the credit. “I went to a meeting in the summer,” he told me, “where a government minister said to the deputy chief medical officer: ‘What’s the hierarchy of evil?’ and she said: ‘Well I’d go tobacco, sugar, alcohol.’”
The trouble for Wright is that sugar is now part of his remit as director general of the Food & Drink Federation (FDF), where, among other things, he has to defend those wicked fizzy drinks, of which the average Scottish teenager necks 287 cans a year. He dismisses the notion of a ‘hierarchy of evil’ as “absurd,” saying: “One cigarette is clearly bad for you, but the body needs sugar.”
But does it need quite so much Coke and Irn-Bru? Wright switches tack. “It’s about free choice. It’s about personal responsibility, and the idea this is in some way a sinful sector is just ludicrous!” he says. “We know sugar’s not addictive – that’s the view of the government and the government’s medical advisor.”
Well, let’s just say not everyone agrees, but whatever the truth, there’s a growing anti-sugar lobby out there demanding a sugary drinks tax of 20p a litre, led by the great school dinners’ crusader, Saint Jamie of Oliver.
Wright is unimpressed. “I think it’s a metropolitan thing,” he says. “I think it’s middle class people telling working class people what to do, and what’s good for them.”
He may have a point. There is something righteous about Jamie’s proposed sugar tax, and as with booze and fags, it recalls CS Lewis who believed a tyranny of do-gooders was the worst tyranny of all. As he put it: “Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
The FDF is confident it will win, not least because the Tories are committed to no new taxes and any U-turn would not look good on the chancellor’s CV in his bid to become the next prime minister. If Wright really does succeed in removing sugar from the naughty step altogether, who knows what his next job will be. Come the New Year and perhaps Big Tobacco will be calling him up.
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