UK Budget 2025: Sugar Tax, Electric Vehicle Charges, and the Puberty Blocker Scandal.
How Westminster taxes milkshakes while Dublin jails teachers for pronouns—and nobody's talking about it.
Right. Deep breath. Let’s talk about the week we’ve just had, because if you’re not questioning your own sanity at this point, you haven’t been paying attention.
I’m going to lay out a sequence of events that actually happened—not in some dystopian novel, not in a Chris Morris sketch, but in the real world where allegedly competent adults make decisions that affect millions of lives. And I want you to tell me, honestly, whether I’m the one who’s lost the plot.
Milkshakes: Public Enemy Number One.
Rachel Reeves stood up on Monday and announced, with a straight face, that the greatest threat facing British children is milkshakes.
Not poverty. Not underfunded schools. Not the complete collapse of NHS dentistry that’s causing the tooth decay she’s suddenly concerned about. Milkshakes.
So from January 2028, pre-packaged milkshakes get the sugar tax. And fair enough—tooth decay is the leading reason 5-9 year olds end up in hospital. Between 2015 and 2024, the existing sugar levy cut sugar in soft drinks by 47%. The state must protect children from sugar because they lack impulse control, and parents are apparently incapable of saying “no” at the supermarket.
I’m with you so far. Children, sugar, dental caries, state intervention. The logic holds. The precautionary principle applies. We’re protecting the vulnerable.
Now explain to me why this same government—these exact same ministers clutching their pearls over Yazoo milkshakes—spent months needing doctors and independent medical experts to beg them to stop prescribing puberty blockers to children.
I’ll wait.
When Milkshakes Are More Dangerous Than Hormone Blockers.
The Conservatives banned puberty blockers in May 2024 after the Cass Review found—and I’m quoting here—” insufficient evidence that halting normal physiological development in children was safe or effective.”
Labour took power in July 2024. They had the Cass Review. They had the evidence, or rather the screaming absence of evidence. They had doctors saying, “we don’t actually know what we’re doing to these kids’ endocrine systems.”
And what did Labour do? Extended the ban? Immediately made it permanent? Acted with the same hair-trigger precaution they’re showing about fucking milkshakes?
No. They dithered. They consulted. They waited until December 2024, when the Commission on Human Medicines finally told them there was an “unacceptable safety risk” before making the ban indefinite.
Let that settle in your brain for a moment. A product containing sugar—which humanity has consumed since we worked out how to extract it from plants—requires immediate taxation to protect children from entirely predictable, well-documented health consequences.
But experimental medical intervention to halt puberty? That needed months of expert testimony, independent reviews, and very serious governmental chin-stroking before anyone would act.
Nobody needed a commission to tell them milkshakes contain sugar. But apparently we needed the full force of the British medical establishment to convince the government that maybe—just maybe—we shouldn’t be experimenting on children’s sexual development without robust evidence that it’s safe.
The state will tax your strawberry milkshake, but needed a peer-reviewed medical consensus to stop prescribing drugs that halt human development. Make it make sense.
The Green Dream Becomes the Green Shakedown.
But wait, there’s more cognitive dissonance where that came from.
For years—literally years—you’ve been lectured about electric vehicles. They’re cheaper to run! Better for the planet! The responsible choice! Tax breaks! Exemptions! Subsidies! Buy electric, save the world, save money, feel morally superior to your petrol-peasant neighbours!
And millions of people believed it. They bought the cars. They paid the premium. They charged them at home. They felt good about their carbon footprint.
This week’s budget: from April 2025, electric vehicles pay road tax for the first time. £10 for year one, then £190 annually. And today’s budget confirmed pay-per-mile charging by 2028—about 3p per mile, adding £250 annually for the average driver.
Surprised? Don’t be. Here’s the dirty secret they don’t mention when they’re selling you green virtue: fuel duty brings in revenue. As you dutifully abandon petrol and diesel, that revenue disappears. The Treasury faces a £35 billion black hole as millions switch to electric.
Their solution? Tax the thing they just spent a decade telling you to buy.
This is the scam at the heart of behavioural taxation. They dress it up as social engineering—modifying your behaviour for the greater good—but it’s actually just revenue collection with a conscience salve. You can’t have both. Once people comply, the money dries up, and suddenly the behaviour you were supposed to change becomes the behaviour that needs taxing.
Every electric vehicle owner who bought their car based on government promises about lower running costs? You’re the mug who fell for the pitch. The environmental rhetoric was window dressing. They wanted your money. They found a way to make you hand it over while feeling good about yourself.
Greta and the Green Vandals.
Speaking of environmental theatre, Greta Thunberg provided peak performance art last weekend.
She and 36 Extinction Rebellion mates dumped fluorescent green dye into Venice’s Grand Canal to protest “the massive effects of climate collapse.” They used fluorescein—a non-toxic tracer, they’re very keen to tell you. Completely harmless to aquatic life.
The Veneto governor had the only sane response: “These acts damage Venice, require restoration work, and—paradoxically—generate pollution.”
There it is. The perfect distillation of activist logic in 2025. You care so deeply about the environment that you create work, waste, cleanup operations, and resource expenditure that wouldn’t otherwise exist. You mobilise boats. You deploy council workers. You generate activity that requires energy and creates pollution.
To protest pollution.
They did this in ten Italian cities. Coordinated national campaign. Dyed rivers, fountains, waterways. All to raise awareness. All to show they care. All while generating a carbon footprint that rather undermines the fucking message.
Thunberg and her crew got €150 fines and 48-hour bans from Venice. Worth it for the Instagram engagement, presumably.
When your method of environmental activism requires cleanup crews to undo your stunt, you’re not an activist. You’re a vandal with a TED Talk.
Five Hundred Days in Prison for Pronoun Heresy.
But if you think governmental and activist contradictions represent peak dysfunction, meet Enoch Burke.
Burke is an Irish teacher who’s spent over 500 days in Mountjoy Prison. He’s been arrested again this week—his fourth stint inside. He’s accumulated €225,000 in fines. His crime?
Technically: contempt of court. He violated injunctions barring him from school property.
Why was he barred from school property?
He was suspended in August 2022 after refusing to use “they/them” pronouns for a transitioning student at Wilson’s Hospital School in County Westmeath.
Now, both sides will lie to you about what this case represents.
Burke’s supporters claim he’s imprisoned for his Christian beliefs and refusal to participate in transgender ideology. The courts claim he’s imprisoned for trespassing—repeatedly violating court orders to stay away from the school.
Both are technically true. Both are fundamentally dishonest.
Here’s what actually happened: a teacher was suspended for refusing to comply with a directive to use a student’s preferred pronouns. Being an Evangelical Christian with what the judge diplomatically called “aggression, unregulated anger and lack of self-control,” Burke decided the appropriate response was to show up to work anyway.
Repeatedly. Despite court orders. Despite the fines mounting. Despite being imprisoned. Again. And again. And again.
High Court Judge Brian Cregan stated Burke’s claims of being jailed for religious beliefs were “completely false.” Technically accurate—he’s jailed for breaching court orders.
But here’s the thing: Burke wouldn’t be violating court orders if there weren’t court orders. There wouldn’t be court orders if he hadn’t been suspended. He wasn’t suspended for being a bad teacher or for misconduct with students.
He was suspended for refusing to call a boy “they.”
So yes, he’s in prison for contempt of court. And he’s in contempt of court because he refused to participate in linguistic theatre. The legal system found a procedural route to punish what it couldn’t directly criminalise.
Five hundred days. For pronoun non-compliance.
The state gets to maintain the fiction that it doesn’t imprison people for refusing gender ideology, whilst everyone with eyes can see exactly what’s being enforced.
The Pattern.
So let’s review:
Milkshakes need immediate taxation because of the precautionary principle. Puberty blockers needed months of expert begging before anyone would act.
Electric vehicles were the environmental solution until they became a fiscal problem, at which point they became the environmental solution that needs taxing.
Environmental activists create pollution to protest pollution and call it awareness-raising.
A teacher spends 500 days in prison for linguistic non-compliance, whilst judges insist it’s really about trespassing.
This isn’t hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would require them to believe their own stated principles in the first place. This is advanced institutional incompetence pretending to be governance.
The connecting thread? Our governing and activist classes have completely abandoned logical consistency in favour of whatever generates the desired emotional response from their respective audiences.
They don’t care that the policies contradict each other. They’re not designed to be coherent. They’re designed to satisfy competing constituencies whilst maintaining the illusion that someone’s in charge and knows what they’re doing.
The Sanity Test.
So, am I mad? Are you? Or are we just the only ones left who haven’t learned to accept contradiction as the operating system?
The milkshake tax isn’t about child health—if it were, they’d have acted on puberty blockers immediately. The electric vehicle push wasn’t about the environment—if it were, they wouldn’t be taxing it now. Extinction Rebellion isn’t about protecting nature—if it were, they wouldn’t be vandalising cities to make a point. Burke’s imprisonment isn’t about contempt of court—if it were, the underlying suspension wouldn’t have been about pronouns.
These are institutions optimising for the appearance of action whilst ensuring that action never threatens anyone’s ideological commitments or revenue streams.
It’s theatre. It’s performance. It’s advanced incompetence in a good suit, using the right words, maintaining the appropriate tone of concern.
And if you point it out? If you notice that the Emperor’s bollock-naked and doing interpretive dance?
They’ll call you mad. They’ll question your motives. They’ll suggest you’re the problem.
But you’re not. You’re just paying attention. And that, apparently, is the most radical act available.
The Almighty Gob documents institutional collapse. Subscribe for weekly reminders that you’re not insane—they are.
Related Reading:
Bristol Green Party: When Activist Thinking Meets Engineering Problems
The Audit Report Scandal: How Bristol Council Buried Bad News
FOI Compliance Failures: Bristol’s Systematic Obstruction of Accountability