The sugar tax and the infantilisation of coffee

"Osborne’s new sugar tax is a tax on the poor" announces an article in the Spectator - a magazine not hitherto noted for its concern for the poor.

In the short term it may operate like that, but the long-term effect of the tax is likely to be that manufacturers reformulate their products to avoid having to charge the tax.

Good news for the poor, though not for the school sports schemes that will benefit from the money it raises.

Children like sweet things and there are good evolutionary reasons why this should be so. Sweet things tend to be safe to eat. If children loved bitter green things the race would never have survived.

But in the last few years something terrible has happened to coffee. Queue in one of the chains today and the odds are you will find yourself queuing behind an adult buying a drink that looks like an ice cream sundae. It may well contain a similar amount of sugar.

We are, of course, free to eat as much sugar as we like, but there is a political dimension to this remaking of public taste.

Maybe it is the coffee shops that should be reformulating their products to avoid a sugar tax?