Public health comes second to the drink and tobacco industries? No surprise

Packets of cigarettes in a London shop. The government announced it had postponed plans to introduce plain packaging on cigarettes. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty

It was a bleak day for public health , in the opinion of John Middleton, vice-president of the Faculty of Public Health. Nobody else in the field would disagree with him.

Not only did the government postpone – probably indefinitely – the move to plain cigarette packaging that those on the frontline of the war on smoking say would deter some children from getting a habit that will kill some of them, but it became perfectly clear that next week it will ditch the idea of a minimum price per unit of alcohol, to make stronger drinks more expensive.

Scientists, doctors and campaigners were angry and dismayed. There was a time when they thought they had won the arguments. David Cameron said last year that he was personally in favour of alcohol unit pricing. Andrew Lansley, his former health secretary, launched a consultation on plain packaging saying he believed it would reduce the numbers of young people starting to smoke. Anna Soubry, the public health minister, whose father died of lung cancer, said in April that she had been "personally persuaded".

But both measures are now in the long grass and unlikely to be pulled out before the next election. Campaigners say the coalition has given in to lobbying and prioritised business over health.

Middleton, also director of public heath for Sandwell in the West Midlands, talks of government's broken promises. "It is fairly clear that the government has caved in on this one to big business because there is nobody else arguing that plain or standard packaging should not have come in," he said.

In truth, there has been plenty of evidence from the start that this government would put business first and regards public health largely as a matter for the public.

Cameron, even while in opposition, said in a keynote speech that obesity was in effect the fault of the individual who chooses to eat badly. Once in power, his government launched the Responsibility Deal on public health, where the food and drink industries sat negotiated with health organisations over what measures they were prepared to take voluntarily to discourage young people from drinking, and to reduce the fat, sugar and salt content of the food in the supermarkets, restaurants and takeaways around us. Naturally there were suggestions that turkeys were being asked to vote for Christmas.

The government claims there have been successes. The biggest of these was the traffic light labelling system, recently agreed with industry – although how it looks on supermarket shelves has yet to be seen and not all the food companies have yet signed up.

But the end of the plain packaging and minimum alcohol pricing dreams – at least for the foreseeable future – reinforce what has been clear from the start. First, that the coalition government has no intention of leaving itself open to accusations of nanny statism, and second, that it will not upset business. It seems that no amount of evidence or rhetoric on the savings to the NHS from fewer young people starting to smoke and binge drink will shift that perspective.

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