In her maiden speech to parliament in 2017, Kemi Badenoch said: “As Woody Allen said about sex: ‘If it’s not messy, you’re not doing it right.’ The same is true of democracy.”
In the five years I spent as the lead non-executive director at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I was intrigued and occasionally entertained by the dissonance between how government is imagined to work – a seamless path from ideas to policies to results – and the reality: a maelstrom of external pressures, internal disputes, and unforeseeable events by which ministers are daily buffeted.
I came to believe the National Food Strategy needed a companion volume – a manual for politicians to help them tackle these adverse currents and wrestle their policies over the line. On Monday, public health expert Dr Dolly Van Tulleken and I published Nourishing Britain, which aims to do just that.
The insights in the report, supported by Nesta and Impact on Urban Health, are gleaned from our interviews with 20 senior politicians from all parties who have tried to turn the tide on obesity over the last 30 years. They include three former prime ministers, three former Chancellors of the Exchequer and 10 former health secretaries.
Their reflections range from the insightful to the humorous, and occasionally surreal. You might have caught Boris Johnson’s suggested solution to obesity in the papers this week: “Instead of the Archbishop of Canterbury balling on about slavery reparations, he should ask himself why people in this country are so bloody fat… religious leaders should try to fill what is obviously an aching spiritual void in people’s lives, that drives them to gorge themselves.” Religion as the Ozempic of the people.
But what took us by surprise was the extraordinary unanimity of the interviewees when asked directly whether efforts by government to date have been sufficient. Every one of them, of every political persuasion, gave the same answer: absolutely not.
Attempts to address obesity, they admitted, have mostly been derailed, diluted, or delayed into irrelevance. And as a result, we risk becoming an increasingly sick and impoverished nation.
One of the key bits of advice they gave to their successors was to go hard and early with policy interventions. Food policy sucks up political airtime. You want to be talking about other things come an election. But it isn’t a vote loser. As former health secretary Sajid Javid told us: “No one is going to say: ‘Oh my god, I went into a Marks & Spencer in Birmingham, and it was bloody awful because I couldn’t reach my chocolate as soon as I got to the till’.”
Getting obesity policy in place early appears to be exactly what this government has in mind. Just this month they were due to announce a National Food Strategy, linking departments across government, but decided to delay the launch in the face of the farmer protests, as covered in this magazine.
I imagine – we should all hope – it will be back soon. Without it, they will not succeed in either their growth or their NHS mission. The food sector should view this as an opportunity too. Yes, companies will need to ensure they don’t get caught out as the regulatory floor rises, but the creation of a level playing field will provide greater opportunities to capture value at the ceiling.
More importantly, it offers a genuine chance to build the food system we all aspire to – one that promotes health rather than undermines it. And in doing so, Britain could set an example for the world, demonstrating how to truly nourish a nation.
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