Boris Johnson is, following his brush with covid-death, to ensure that the profits of butter producers are protected forever more. It might have been more useful if he’d just lost his own weight and allowed us to all worry about our own.

For he’s bringing forward this ban on junk food advertising. The point about advertising being to tell people you’ve got something they might like and if you can’t do that then it’s very difficult to launch a new product. Thus advertising bans aid the current producers of whatever it is because the ban cuts off the arising of any future competitors.

So, you’re a butter producer now. No one can come in and create a new brand to compete with you. Thus your profits are nice and safe. Further, you’ve not got the ability to spend on advertising now, meaning your profits go up. The junk food advertising brand simply raises the profits of the extant producers:

The government is set to implement strict rules on how junk food is advertised and sold in the UK, with restrictions such as a ban on online adverts and TV commercials before the 9pm television watershed.

We have no legal definition of junk food that we can use. It’s actually this that is meant:

TV broadcasters have previously said that a pre-watershed ban advertising products high in fat, salt and sugar, commonly referred to as junk food, would cost them more than £200m in revenues annually.

As Chris Snowdon has so gleefully pointed out this means that things like bacon and butter cannot be advertised:

As I have been saying for some time, a ban on ‘junk food’ advertising is nothing of the sort. Reality has just caught up with a company called Farmdrop who have had this advert rejected by TfL because it shows bacon and butter.

There is a solution to this, of course there is. Boris, and perhaps Carrie if she’s still interested, watch the size of Boris’ gut and we deal with our own. But that would be to be sensible which is why it isn’t going to happen.