Philippa Simmonds and Signild Vallgårda
This paper qualitatively explores arguments in the UK meat tax debate, including how they align with values from specific political ideologies and perspectives on sustainable food…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper qualitatively explores arguments in the UK meat tax debate, including how they align with values from specific political ideologies and perspectives on sustainable food security.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a scoping media analysis of articles published over 1 year in six leading UK newspapers, followed by semi-structured interviews with ten key stakeholders in late 2019. The authors identified categories of arguments, distilled the core conflicts and analysed how arguments reflected different ideas about human nature, the role of the state and solutions to food system challenges.
Findings
Arguments were categorised into five major topics: climate change and environment; human health; effects on animals; fairness; and acceptability of government intervention. Pro-meat tax arguments often aligned with modern liberal ideology, and sometimes echoed demand restraint or food system transformation perspectives on sustainable food security. Arguments against meat taxes were more likely to align with the efficiency perspective or classical liberal ideology.
Originality/value
To the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first interpretive analyses of this controversial suggested policy. Despite having similarities with other debates around taxation – particularly taxes on sugar sweetened beverages – the meat tax debate contains unique complexities due to the prominence of environmental arguments, and differing values pertaining to animal welfare and rights. This study highlights the need for policy research exploring values, in addition to quantitative evidence.
Details
Keywords
Kay Whitehead and Kay Morris Matthews
In this article we focus on two women, Catherine Francis (1836‐1916) and Dorothy Dolling (1897‐ 1967), whose lives traversed England, New Zealand and South Australia. At the…
Abstract
In this article we focus on two women, Catherine Francis (1836‐1916) and Dorothy Dolling (1897‐ 1967), whose lives traversed England, New Zealand and South Australia. At the beginning of this period the British Empire was expanding and New Zealand and South Australia had much in common. They were white settler societies, that is ‘forms of colonial society which had displaced indigenous peoples from their land’. We have organised the article chronologically so the first section commences with Catherine’s birth in England and early life in South Australia, where she mostly inhabited the world of the young ladies school, a transnational phenomenon. The next section investigates her career in New Zealand from 1878 where she led the Mount Cook Infant’s School in Wellington and became one of the colony’s first renowned women principals. We turn to Dorothy Dolling in the third section, describing her childhood and work as a university student and tutor in New Zealand and England. The final section of our article focuses on the ways in which both women have been represented in the national memories of Australia and New Zealand. In so doing, we show that understandings about nationhood are also transnational, and that writing about Francis and Dolling reflects the shifting relationships between the three countries in the twentieth century.