Britain and sugar go back a long way, and the history is not that glorious. Sugar, or white gold as it was known, was the reason for the infamous trade triangle, the round trip that took slaves from Africa to the American colonies, sugar from the colonial plantations to Britain, and goods from Britain back to Africa to buy more slaves. By the mid 18th Century, the trade was so lucrative that the then British Government, blissfully unaware of yet to come concepts of coercive healthism and the nanny state, did the fiscal thing, and slapped a tax on sugar, making it a luxury item. The situation was turned on its head in the mid 19th Century, when the Free Breakfast Table movement, an early Liberal free school meals idea aimed instead at the working classes as a whole, brought about the abolition of duties on sugar and other breakfast table commodities, and the masses were freed to shovel ever larger quantities of sugar down the cake hole. Every Little Helps, as they say at Tesco. Even today, The Great British Bake Off, when it isn’t about the BBC showing off its ethnic credentials, is all about devising yet more elaborate ways of getting yet more sugar through the cake hole.
