Letters From A Tory Daily views on British politics and the Conservative Party from a centre-right thinker who writes letters on his blog to politicians, journalists and many others.

Dear Vince Cable,

You do make me chuckle.  First came the Bean-Stalin line in the Commons, and now we have the most ridiculously half-baked policy I have heard in ages which aims to save this country from the obesity epidemic through the mighty power of fruit juices.

Obviously, you need to be reminded of a few issues related to fruit juices.  Although making these drinks cheaper might seem sensible, you have to realise that ‘fruit juices’ is a rather broad category that inevitably includes some products of very dubious quality.  Even though juices count as one of our five-a-day, they are often very acidic which can rot people’s teeth in no time (especially children) and even the Food Standards Agency admit that “when you juice fruit the natural sugars that are in the fruit are released into the drink and too much sugar can lead to tooth decay.” Furthermore, recent research has suggested that these drinks have so much sugar in them that they double the risk of becoming obese.  If you reduce the tax levels on these drinks and encourage consumption, you will be exacerbating these problems across all sections of the population and will fail to improve public health.  To suggest that knocking a few pence of these fruit juices will “lift the very heavy burden from people who want to live a healthy lifestyle” is laughable - has anyone ever heard of someone choosing not to buy fruit juice because it broke the bank?!?!  Geeeesh.

I think I’m going to call this a ‘beermat policy’.  Someone clearly decided on a whim that this would be a great way of getting some good press coverage for the Lib Dems, which has been in desperately short supply of late, but in reality you made yourselves look pretty stupid.  If this beermat policy is the best you can contribute, please don’t bother at all next time.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory