March of the killjoys

First they came for tobacco, then it was alcohol, then sugar. After sugar came fats and ultra-processed foods. Then they went for calories, stigmatizing high calorie foods. Then it was processed meats such as bacon. They don’t want sweets, biscuits and other treats advertised before 9.00 pm on television, or not at all on Transport for London. These are all laws or recommendations based on Health Department advisories

There is a clear pattern. Each item on the list is something people find pleasurable, and each restriction is justified in the name of health. The sequence runs: tobacco, alcohol, sugar, fats, ultra-processed food, calories generally, processed meats, and now advertising bans on sweets and treats.

The pattern has a few features worth naming. It starts with tobacco, a single substance with a specific, well-documented harm, and one largely confined to the user. It then moves to broader and vaguer categories such as ‘ultra-processed foods,’ or ‘calories,’ where the harm is generalized, statistical, and applies to something almost everyone consumes rather than a minority habit.

The advisory becomes the law. Each stage begins as a Health Department ‘advisory’ or guideline, then hardens into an advertising ban or outright prohibition. The pattern is not health advice that remains advice. It is health advice that becomes enforcement.

This is a runaway train. Once ‘harm to health’ is accepted as sufficient grounds for restriction, there is no principled place to stop, because almost any source of pleasure carries some health cost at some level of consumption. Tobacco leads to alcohol leads to sugar leads to fat leads to calories leads to meat. Each substitution shows that the justification is elastic enough to be applied to whatever is targeted next.

Pleasure itself as the target. The unifying thread isn't really ‘harm,’ it is that each item is something enjoyable. My title ‘March of the killjoys’ points to this. The pattern reads less as a series of separate public-health interventions than as a continuous ratchet against pleasurable consumption, with health used as the justifying vocabulary each time.

My argument is building toward its inescapable conclusion. I want people to see all of the individual measures as instances of one recurring mechanism rather than as unrelated policies. That mechanism is to force us to live as a minority of Health Service and single issue NGOs think we should live, rather than as we want to live. There’s more to life than steamed fish and cucumber. You have been warned.

Madsen Pirie