Britain is being urged to follow the example of the Danes, and introduce a 'fat tax'. According to the National Obesity Forum, it's not a matter of whether we should do it, but when. Or follow the example of the Hungarians, the Swiss, the Austrians, the Romanians, the Finns, and introduce sugar, caffeine or salt (following the example of seventeenth-century France?) taxes. (The French had the right ideas. They not only taxed salt; they obliged every individual over the age of eight to purchase a minimum weekly amount at a fixed price.)
Is this the best we can do to rescue our doomed culture? Tinker with ill-adjusted financial penalties imposed on everyone's behaviour by right-thinking people of comfortable means and minds, who will themselves hardly notice the effects in their own lives - though they will minutely measure it in the lives of others? Slap 25 pence on the price of a food like butter that mankind has made for millenia. How about a Tesco tax instead?
