Realisation dawns

From the beginning of this month, new government regulations prevent restaurants and fast food outlets from providing unlimited refills of drinks deemed to be high in sugar. This includes not just fizzy soft drinks, but items such as hot chocolate in Wetherspoon’s. This has caused several commentators such as Andrew Lilico here to suddenly wake up and, as it were, smell the coffee.

Is this true? It's now illegal to sell bottomless portions of Coke? https://t.co/GdbtNa9DRK

— Andrew Lilico (@andrew_lilico) October 3, 2025

I have to say that free refills isn’t something that particular concerns me personally. It’s a relative recent innovation anyway, and in general one soft drink is enough. Overall, I doubt whether the take-up is very great, but it something that appears generous and creates a positive impression. However, prohibiting this kind offer seems to have a struck a chord with a number of commentators who would not normally pay much attention to issues of this kind.

This illustrates how it often takes something that affects them personally to bring home to people the existence of a wider trend. For example, widespread closures of pubs may not have really registered with someone until one that they happen to like visiting shuts down. Only then do they begin to notice a pattern rather than an isolated instance.

Over the past fifteen or twenty years, we have seen a whole raft of new lifestyle restrictions brought in, many of which have been chronicled on this blog. Taken in isolation, they may not add up to very much, which is why they might have gone unnoticed, but as a whole they represent a significant change to the operation of the food and drink market.

In food, we have seen reductions in pack sizes, such as the phasing out of XL chocolate bars, restrictions on displays in supermarkets, attempts to reformulate dishes to reduce fat, salt and sugar content, the “sugar tax” on soft drinks, these curbs on refills and, from next January, sweeping restrictions on advertising and promotion of a huge range of everyday food items.

In the sphere of alcohol, we have seen producers “encouraged” to reduce strengths to “take alcohol units out of the market”, the recent duty changes which have made it financially attractive to reduce huge swathes of the beer market to 3.4% ABV and, in Scotland and Wales, minimum unit pricing and bans on multibuy offers. From the perspective of when I began this blog, it is perhaps surprising that much of the attention of public health has been diverted from alcohol to food, but there is sure to be more to come, especially in the area of advertising and promotions.

While the latest measures are being implemented under Labour, they were planned by the Conservatives, and indeed the Conservatives were power for most of the period under review. This policy area at least has been a cross-party initiative.

The government themselves have admitted that the effect of these measures will be trivial, amounting at most to a handful of calories removed from the average diet. So it is hard to see why the restrictions are justified, except to placate shrill pressure groups demanding that “Something Must be Done!” And it seems that some people derive a perverse pleasure from dictating how others live their lives. It’s also profoundly patronising. Adults are being treated not as intelligent, responsible individuals in control of their own lives, but as weak-willed, gullible dupes who have to be protected from themselves.

The whole thing perfectly exemplifies this famous quotation from C. S. Lewis:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

And don’t imagine for a minute that this is the end-point, because there’s still a long way further to go.