Why Should Working Brits Pay for the WHO’s Failures?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has just launched a new project called the “3 by 35 Initiative.” Essentially, the WHO is demanding countries raise taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and sugary drinks by 50 percent by 2035. Ostensibly this is designed to fight chronic disease and fund public services. The new initiative is also being sold as a public health triumph. In reality, it is a deeply regressive policy designed to squeeze more money from ordinary consumers to cover up the WHO’s own financial mismanagement.

Nowhere is this policy more out of step than in the UK, where the new Labour government appears dangerously receptive to precisely this kind of punitive thinking.

Having already caved to pressure from its own MPs on welfare spending and winter fuel subsidies for pensioners, Chancellor Rachel Reeves (or whoever might succeed her) is under mounting pressure to raise taxes in the next budget. The question is no longer if taxes will rise, but how. And sin taxes, those levied on the everyday pleasures of working people, are a politically convenient target judged on the Labour Party’s previous record.

It’s no secret that Labour has flirted with lifestyle crackdowns before. The party has recently threatened to ban alcohol advertising before 9pm on TV and social media. It toyed with the idea of banning smoking in outdoor pub areas, before a fierce backlash from the hospitality sector forced a humiliating (but necessary) retreat. These ideas come straight from the prohibitionist playbook and it’s a playbook the WHO is aggressively pushing.

The WHO’s proposal, fresh from a global conference in Sevilla, comes as the organisation faces a staggering $600 million budget shortfall, thanks in part to the United States pulling its funding after accusing the WHO of policy failure and mismanagement. But instead of reforming, the WHO has decided that taxpayers and consumers around the world should foot the bill for its mistakes.

Do not be fooled that this is a health initiative. It is a massive global tax grab dressed up in moral language. The idea that people’s lives in the UK and beyond should be made more expensive after a damaging global cost-of-living crisis, just to paper over the WHO’s gaping financial holes, is not just absurd, it’s morally repugnant.

And Labour may well go along with it.

Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been a cheerleader for this policy. His obsession with extracting ever more revenue from people in the name of “health” has found new life in the WHO’s 3 by 35 Initiative. Now, with Labour in power, the stars are aligned for these ideas to gain traction.

But the consequences will be devastating. Raising taxes on products like tobacco, alcohol, and sugary drinks doesn’t punish corporations, it punishes people. These taxes are inherently regressive, hitting the poorest hardest. They make everyday life more expensive for the very people Labour claims to stand up for, working families, low-income earners, and pensioners on tight budgets.

And it’s not just consumers who will suffer. The UK’s hospitality industry, already burdened by rising costs, would be dealt another blow. Labour has already increased employer National Insurance contributions and lowered the earnings threshold, hiking up the cost of hiring staff. Adding steep sin taxes on top of this is a recipe for job losses, shuttered pubs, and struggling high streets.

Meanwhile, the WHO continues to posture as a moral authority, despite being an unelected and unaccountable body largely funded by taxpayers. It is stubbornly resistant to innovation which could improve health and save the NHS billions. Instead, its playbook is stuck in a prohibitionist past, where sin taxes are the only weapon it knows how to wield.

And now, the WHO expects the UK public to help plug its funding gap.

British taxpayers, already among the most burdened in Europe, should not be expected to subsidise the WHO’s incompetence. A London barista or a pensioner in Leeds should not be forced to pay more for a beer or a can of Sprite so highly-paid WHO executives can keep flying first class to international conferences.

It’s time for some political courage. The UK government should summarily reject the WHO’s 3 by 35 initiative and defend the economic interests of British consumers. If Labour wants to raise revenue, it should target waste and get serious about public sector efficiency. The answer is not to endorse the WHO’s absurd plan to treat the public with contempt and penalise ordinary people for living their lives.

This is moral blackmail from unelected and out-of-touch international bureaucrats. A stealth tax on the working class. It endorses a worldview where health policy is driven not by compassion or evidence, but by coercion and control.

The UK Labour government, and governments of other WHO member states, should recognise that their people deserve much better.

Martin Cullip is International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.