In normal times I might shrug and attempt to rectify the situation by taking the stairs, instead of the lift, or with a lazy trip to the shops in search of a bigger waistband. But, alas, these are not normal times; according to new research from the Government, the more bulk I put on, the greater my risk of becoming seriously ill if I contract Covid-19. I’ve no choice but to lose this extra upholstery — and swiftly.

I’m not alone. A study by King’s College London found that almost half (48%) of those questioned admitted they had put on weight during lockdown. Boris Johnson, too, says he was “way overweight” when he contracted the virus. And just under two-thirds (63%) of adults in Britain are officially classed as overweight or obese; the UK has consistently ranked as one of Europe’s fattest nations.

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By Giles Fraser

Following his brush with death, the PM has undergone something of a damascene conversion. Once at the head of the charge against the nannying approach to tackling obesity; now he is wringing his hands, urging us to “do our bit” and fight that flab.

Partly in response to the pandemic, but also concerned with the nation’s health as a whole, the Government has unveiled a series of measures to tackle this obesity ‘time bomb’. So we have a ban on junk food advertising before the 9pm ‘watershed’, along with a prohibition on supermarket two-for-one offers. Calorie counts will also need to be added to menus in chain restaurants and cafes that employ over 250 people.

Tackling the junk food ads must have looked like an easy win. They currently appear up to nine times an hour at children’s peak viewing times. And kids who watched over three hours of television per day were almost three times more likely to buy junk food products than children who watched little or no television.

The usual caveats about correlation not implying causation apply, but if this advertising were not effective, food manufacturers wouldn’t spend such vast sums pumping it out — and targeting children in particular. Pester power is strong. I remember tugging on my own mother’s arm as a boy: pleading with her to buy me sweets and crisps after I had seen advertisements by cartoon characters with catchy theme tunes in-between episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine and Rainbow.

But it does feel rather like a tinkering around the edges. Of course a clampdown on hawking junk food to children is to be welcomed, but it also completely ignores the fact that people pile on weight for reasons beyond mere awareness of the existence of the biggest junk food brands.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the Government’s new zeal for fat fighting, though, is how it fights against its strategy to pump life back into Britain’s moribund economy. We have been urged, of late, to ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ and have been offered cut price grub in restaurants. But surely encouraging people to up their spending and consumption (quite literally) is at odds with asking them to also slim down. And, in a further contradiction, the Government’s own ‘Enjoy Summer Safely’ radio ads are encouraging people to “grab fish and chips on the beach”. It’s true that eating out needn’t be synonymous with eating unhealthily; yet it very often is.

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The chaotic response just shows that the Government doesn’t have a clue about our everyday lives and what we do — or don’t — have on our plates. Tackling overeating is actually much far more complicated than simply telling people to make healthier food choices and eat less. Take the King’s College survey which found us eating more during lockdown. It also determined that the same percentage of us (48%) are feeling more anxious and depressed than usual. We’re stressed, often without productive work, and generally confined to the house. As a consequence, we’re more likely to pig-out.

The relationship between enforced worklessness and obesity won’t come as news to some parts of the country. Britain’s fattest regions tend to be those places where industry was wound down at break-neck speed in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the north east and the west midlands. Conversely, Britain’s thinnest areas are the affluent London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea and Richmond upon Thames.

As our working lives have changed, so our eating habits have evolved. We work some of the longest hours in Europe and it tells: British households spend around half as much time preparing an evening meal today as they did in the 1980s. Researching my book on low-paid work in 2016, one of the most striking aspects was the steady deterioration of my diet. As I wrote in Hired:

“When we walked through the door at midnight at the end of a shift, we kicked off our boots and collapsed onto our beds with a bag of McDonald’s and a can of beer. We did not… come home and stand about in the kitchen for half an hour boiling broccoli.”

The paternalistic Left feels that healthy food is ‘more expensive’. Yet the main difference is really found in the time and knowledge it takes to prepare nourishing food. One in four people in Britain knows only three recipes and one in 10 cannot cook at all. Many of those asked blamed hectic lifestyles for their lack of culinary knowledge. Calory-dense food is not necessarily cheaper but it is usually easier to stick in a microwave with minimal fuss or boil quickly on a hob.

This is not to say that poverty does not have a direct impact on what people eat. Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy argues that “the best way to tackle food poverty is to tackle poverty”. It adds: “When funds run short, it is often spending on food that gets cut first”. It also warns of a new wave of poverty as firms let large number of workers go because of the Covid-19 downturn. “The data already show an alarming increase in food insecurity,” the report warns. “The number of people saying they could not afford enough food rose slightly over the same period, from 1.7 million to 1.8 million in May, presumably as redundancies started to be made.”

Junk food advertising may influence our buying habits but the main drivers of obesity are overwhelmingly structural. The type and amount of food we eat is an individual choice; however every choice is made in a wider environmental context. How much you weigh is determined more by where you live and what type of job you do than how many adverts for hamburgers and Mars bars you are exposed to in-between episodes of Coronation Street.

Structural change is a longer game though. And with another round of a deadly virus on the horizon, time is not something the Government has in abundance; no wonder sanctimonious compulsion is the order of the day.

Amazon warehouse workers are called ‘Associates’. When they are dismissed they are not sacked, fired or made redundant, but instead ‘released’. Budding Uber drivers are greeted during their ‘onboarding’ (hiring) by a hipster in jeans and t-shirt who talks in the language of a ubiquitous ‘hustle porn’ Instagram post that fetishises excessive overworking. Deliveroo couriers are referred to patronisingly as ‘Roos’ by management.

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Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

John Steinbeck said that socialism never took root in the United States because the American dream encouraged the poor to consider themselves not as a downtrodden proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Gig employers appear to be attempting to pull a similar trick on their employees – sorry, ‘partners’. “We’re here to make money. If your wheels aren’t turning, you aren’t earning”, I was told by an enthusiastic Uber employee when I drove for the company back in 2017.

I worked as a cab driver – or as an ‘entrepreneur’, if you are to believe Uber’s rhetoric – for around three months while researching my book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. I also interviewed my fellow drivers as well as couriers who worked for gig employers such as Deliveroo and CitySprint.

One thing that became strikingly apparent was the vast chasm between the rhetoric espoused by companies and the reality endured by those who worked for them. Despite being categorised as self-employed contractors – and as a consequence losing the right to sick pay, annual leave and the minimum wage – Uber tightly controlled much of what we did on the job. “You can’t pick and choose which jobs you do,” we were told during our induction.

There were even restrictions on the subjects we were allowed to talk about with the passengers in the back of the car. Politics, religion and sport were strictly off-limits. If an Uber driver’s customer service rating fell below 4.7 stars, they would be summoned into Uber’s headquarters for a dressing down and potentially ‘deactivated’ – another euphemism for losing your job.

We were induced to take up the job with Uber on the alluring basis of autonomy. “Always wanted to be your own boss and set your own times? This is your chance!” reads the marketing on Uber’s website. And there were positives about the Uber experience. We had the autonomy to log in and out of the Uber app at a time of our own choosing.

Moreover, the Uber algorithm was less capricious and tyrannical than a human line manager. At the very least, Uber’s algorithm was not going to stop you from earning enough to eat simply because it took a personal disliking to you.

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Warehouse work needn't be worthless

By Polly Mackenzie

Uber isn’t the only company operating in the gig economy of course. Callum Cant’s new book, Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy documents life as one of the food delivery company’s 15,000 UK couriers. As of 2018, there were around five million self-employed people in the United Kingdom, many of whom work in the booming gig economy.

Cant’s book resembles my own in many ways, not least because the author unflinchingly documents the methods used by gig employers to keep workers impoverished and under tight control and supervision. Making consumers aware of what really goes on when they order a taxi or food is an important task. As Cant writes, the reality of the gig economy is an economic landscape where “the worker takes all the risk”, while the company he or she works for “get all the reward”.

In the case of platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo, workers shoulder the cost of doing the job – the car, the petrol, the cost of time taken off through injury or ill health – while the companies themselves avoid the usual burdens associated with having employees. These are passed onto the workers themselves but also to the taxpayer. One Deliveroo courier I interviewed took time off with a ligament injury and ended up signing on for housing benefit because he was not entitled to sick pay.

The biggest difference between my own book and Cant’s, however, is that readers of my book tend to come away depressed after reading it, whereas Cant strikes a more optimistic tone. This is partly a consequence of gig workers making substantial progress in organising themselves (predominantly through the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain) since I wrote my book back in 2016-17. As Cant writes:

“This is not just a sob story about workers being exploited in bad conditions by bosses who get rich off their work, it’s about how workers have squared up and fought back”.

Indeed, several fashionable shibboleths are demolished very effectively in Cant’s book, from the notion that trade unions are irrelevant to those toiling away in the flexible economy, to the idea that migrant workers can’t be unionised.

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By Paul Embery

The book focuses predominantly on London and Brighton, where Deliveroo couriers used WhatsApp group chats to organise workers against exploitative piece-work and a local oversupply of labour which was driving down wages. Initially Deliveroo couriers in London protested against collusion between border enforcement agencies and Deliveroo managers, but the dispute quickly escalated as the company made changes to its payment structure. As Cant writes,

“The system would be changed from a flat hourly rate (£7) with a bonus per completed delivery (£1) plus an additional petrol bonus for moped riders, to a fee-per-delivery piece-wage (£3.75) with no hourly rate. If there were no orders, workers would earn no money.”

This prompted a wave of strike action among Deliveroo’s couriers.

Cant does get carried away. “Deliveroo workers have launched a militant struggle for a better world,” he writes. This is true as far as it goes, but Cant seems to define a better world strictly as one in which socialism has triumphed.

This is quite a philosophical jump, not least because contemporary socialism is spectacularly ill-defined, even by its adherents. “Fundamentally, the socialism movement relies on two parts,” Cant writes. “The first is the struggle of the working class against exploitation, and the second is a critique of capitalism and a socialist programme.”

But what is the socialist programme in 2019? For Cant, socialism entails the lofty idea of workers’ democratic control of every workplace. Yet socialism also requires a centralised plan if markets are to be eliminated. Herein lies the fundamental contradiction at socialism’s heart. As I wrote earlier this year for UnHerd:

“you cannot advocate central planning on the one hand and workplace democracy on the other. As soon as workers rebel against the state’s central plan, their democratic rights are stripped from them”.

I won’t dwell on this aspect of Cant’s work, because the book contains many important lessons about fighting back against exploitative gig employers. My own book was written to lift the lid on an underreported aspect of working-class life in Britain when gig practices – at least in their current guise – were relatively new.

We’ve moved on since then. We are now at a point where workers whom we were told had no time for trade unions –predominantly migrants and students – are getting organised and fighting back. Anyone who cares about social justice, whether you share Cant’s politics or not, should be cheering them on.