Environmental regulations are under threat, and the funding of scientific research (despite government protestations) is threatened.

But at this stage they are concerns, not as yet actualities.

We now have an actuality – the scrapping of tough new measures to combat obesity proposed by health secretary, Jeremy Hunt. We’re left with a sugar tax and a plan to encourage primary school children to do at least one hour’s exercise a day, which is merely repeating exhortations made over the last twenty years, which have come to little. And what have we lost? Two specific items:

#  Restrictions on two-for-one offers on junk food – 40% of the food we buy is bought on promotion. So it’s hardly surprising that cash-strapped families buy junk food – and suffer the consequences. (The chair of the Commons’ health select committee refers to ‘the burning issue of health inequality.’ Money can’t buy you love but it can buy you health.) Two-for-one offers on perishable foods are also an major cause of the appalling scourge of food waste.

# Restrictions on the advertising of high-sugar foods, with celebrities no longer employed to sell them.

We’re left with a challenge to food companies ‘to reduce overall sugar across a range of products… by at least 20% by 2020.’ The best way to make progress we’re told is government working in partnership with industry on a voluntary basis. Given ‘progress’ to date, I am profoundly cynical.

The Times reports that Downing Street ‘doesn’t want to burden the food industry as the economy falters.’ I can’t imagine that there would be many job losses – consumers would switch to other products. There’s another agenda – a small-state anti-regulation agenda – operating behind this, the more doctrinaire element of the Tory right asserting itself, at the expense of a clearly defined and enforceable national health agenda. Note also the phrase ‘as the economy falters’ – and whose responsibility is that, I wonder?

And finally, we have the Department of Health justifying the emasculation of its earlier proposals: ‘we are confident that our approach will rescue childhood obesity while respecting consumer choice, economic realities and, ultimately, our need to eat.’ [My italics.]

No-one, I should add, is underestimating the role parents, and schools, have to play in combating obesity in children, but it is a responsibility they share with government and the food industry, and if the government and the food industry rely on platitudes what chance do we have of really engaging with parents (I know how hard many schools already try), and getting them on board?