A near constant of this site is that a once progressive capitalism – the predominant system for organising social relations to produce and daily reproduce the material conditions of human existence – now threatens us and most other life forms with extinction.
My focus, given capitalism’s advanced stage of imperialism, is a propensity – hard wired into laws of motion which require ceaseless expansion – to global confrontation in a nuclear age.
That, and levels of inequality as dysfunctional as they are morally repellent and destabilising.
Others focus on its reckless disregard, equally baked in, for a trashed and overheating planet.
“Insulate Britain” activists block a road in Essex
But today’s focus is on one of the many other negative outcomes when private profits must, as a matter of systemic necessity, trump human need. Regulars on this site know of my love-hate relationship with the output of Richard Murphy: tax specialist, bird-watcher, Quaker, erstwhile fast food junkie, fen dweller, professor of economics in my own steel city, advocate for modern monetary theory, scourge of ‘austerity’, unwitting shill for empire in the Ukraine and doubtless much besides …
… homo sapiens sapiens being nothing if not all manner of things.
Only last month I wrote, apropos his talk of Crimea having been “seized” by Russia one month after the US-orchestrated coup of February 2014, that:
Professor Murphy shows not for the first time a lazily armchair abuse of his platform by pronouncing on matters he knows not the first thing about.
Can’t say I care either for the way he holds court below the line to a commentariat bordering on the fawning. All the same, I frequently quote him with approval on what he does so well: above all his damning of the immiserating consequences for the many, further enrichment for the few, of a UK led by Keir Starmer and his economically illiterate chancellor, Rachel Reeves. 1
Here though he’s in incisive form on the topic, related but distinct, of an epidemic – deadliest in a UK and USA furthest down the road of market fetishism – of junk food addiction induced by sophisticated and lavishly funded tools of persuasion. I speak of commercial propaganda in both the narrow sense of advertising, and the broader sense – from product placement and celebrity endorsement to society-wide conditioning as to what constitutes the good life – of a chronically neoliberal ‘developed’ West. 2 3
One last generalisation before we get to Disgusted of Ely. Not a fortnight ago – see Method in madness: Trump’s tariffs Part 3 – I quoted the Reverend Chris Hedges, pace Karl Marx:
Politics in late stage capitalism will become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content, and abjectly subservient to the dictates of corporations and oligarchs.
Bear this in mind while digesting Richard’s ire over a UK Health Secretary no less in bed with said corporations and oligarchs than are his colleagues at 10 and 11 Downing Street, London.
Craving the dopamine hits that Wes Streeting is dedicated to providing
April 29, 2025
I cannot help but note this report from The Guardian yesterday:
Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to an international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.
Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%, according to research in countries including the US and England.
They added:
UPF is so damaging to health that it is implicated in as many as one in seven of all premature deaths that occur in some countries, according to a paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
I am, to be candid, astonished that the suggested figure is as low as that. Diabetes, heart disease, cancers of all sorts and dementia are amongst the most common causes of death and the risks of all of them are increased significantly by ultra-processed food and the sugars within them, as I have noted here, often.
These may look tempting:
So do most ultra-processed foods. The companies that make them know what they are doing, just as the tobacco companies did. They are seeking to make you an addict. I know. I was one. I will be in recovery forever now. It’s a trade-off I am willing to make.
What we need is a government that is willing to act to end the abuse promoted by these companies. Until we do, the health of people in this country will decline.
Our economic well-being will also decline.
So, too, will our healthy life expectancy.
Demand for the NHS will grow exponentially.
And all because we’re hooked on the dopamine highs that the sugar kicks in ultra-processed foods, in particular, are chemically designed to deliver, so that we crave the next hit long before we should really need to eat again.
There is no excuse for Wes Streeting not to know that. But as Upton Sinclair once said:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I suspect Streeting suspects his whole future career depends on feigning such ignorance. He is an ethical black hole.
* * *
- Who am I to call Ms Reeves an economic illiterate? For all my gripes with Richard Murphy I’m happy to give credit where due, and acknowledge his aptitude – on show here – for proving her obsession with ‘balancing Britain’s books’ to be more akin to creationism or geocentrism than anything we could call science, or for that matter prudent stewardship. If anything, calling her economically illiterate is an insult to economic illiterates when the only other credible reading of her assaults on the poorest sections of society, as the rich get richer, bears out the truth of Chris Hedges remarks. Could it be that, like Mr Streeting, she is looking beyond her current office to that revolving door through which Tony Blair and so many others have passed into a sunlit upland of seven figure salaries?
- There are many ways of responding to the question – if consumer capitalism drives up obesity and other junk food-related diseases, how come some folk stay slim and lead healthy lives? – but the simplest draws on the statistical fact of an exponential rise in such ailments before standing the question on its head to ask, do you suppose that rise, and the power of the fast food lobby, to be pure coincidence? Of course there are those who, for reasons psychological and/or socioeconomic, are more or less prone to junk food indulgence. Just as there would be those who, for reasons psychological and/or socioeconomic, would be more or less prone to resolving neighbourhood conflicts with assault rifles were they on sale at Tesco. How does that alter the point Professor Murphy is making?
- Hours after writing this post I read another, featured in my second food post of the day, on Israel’s deliberate starving of Gaza. You might say I’m being reductive. You might say it’s one hell of a reach. But I say both have the same root cause.