The "stickiness" of betting shop customers

It was only six months ago that Carsten Jung from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) was telling the Treasury Select Committee not to listen to those silly gambling industry lobbyists who were warning about hundreds of betting shops closing if gambling duty was hiked up. I wrote at the time...

 

The IPPR claims that its tax rises would bring in an extra £3.2 billion a year which former Prime Minister Gordon Brown says should be used to “solve” the child poverty “crisis”. The government currently spends the thick end of £400 billion a year on social security and yet relative child poverty persists, so it is far from certain that an extra £3 billion would solve anything, but despite the Treasury’s notorious resistance to hypothecation, anti-gambling campaigners have craftily made the two issues of gambling taxation and child poverty synonymous. Whose side are you on? Hungry children or online casinos? And what kind of monster are you anyway?

Cunning though it may be, this plan does rather depend on the onshore gambling industry not being a smoldering ruin after these duties have been hiked sky high.

 

Reassured by the IPPR and the Social Market Foundation that any claims about shop closures and job losses were "scaremongering" and that betting shop customers were "sticky" (i.e. loyal with inelastic demand), the government did pretty much everything the IPPR wanted in the last budget. And lo and behold...

 

Gambling giant blames UK tax rises as they close hundreds of stores

 

Evoke, the owner of William Hill and 888, has confirmed the closure of approximately 270 betting shops across the UK.

This decision aims to offset the financial impact of higher gambling taxes and mounting debts faced by the company.

Evoke reported pre-tax losses more than doubled to £549.1 million in 2025, largely attributed to increased UK duty costs.

The shop closures are expected to result in hundreds of job losses, although the precise number has not yet been confirmed.

 

It would appear that the anti-gambling lobby have outwitted the politicians once again. 

 

The very thing that this sweaty little geezer from the IPPR said wouldn’t happen! pic.twitter.com/UrNKShOZsj

— Christopher Snowdon (@cjsnowdon) April 30, 2026

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Democratically Deficient Organizations

With Julian Morris and Roger Bate, I have written a short paper about Democratically Deficient Organizations (DoDOs). We focus on the World Health Organisation and the massive NGOs that fund it.

 

In tobacco control and pandemic governance, foundation funding, WHO authority, NGO advocacy, and academic research reinforce one another to produce policy consensus insulated from scrutiny. Law & economics frameworks help explain the result: incentives favor persistence over performance. The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has not accelerated global declines in smoking, while discouraging harm-reduction approaches that have succeeded in countries such as Sweden. Proposals to expand WHO authority in pandemic preparedness risk replicating the same institutional failures revealed during COVID-19.

The problem is not insufficient resources, but weak accountability. The brief proposes reforms to restore it: rebalance WHO funding toward assessed contributions, strengthen transparency and conflict-of-interest rules, open governance processes, embrace harm reduction, and return policymaking authority to domestic democratic institutions. Without such changes, the continued expansion of the DoDO model will deepen existing failures—with consequences measured in human lives.

 

You can read the whole thing for free. I also interviewed Roger for the IEA podcast last week...

 

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Drinking on the job

 “Churchill tries to find luck in drink, but the bottle distorts the view.” - Nazi propaganda, 1942

 

The online British public are having one of their fits of moral outrage because they have discovered, seemingly for the first time, that there are bars in the parliamentary estate and MPs use them. I have written about it for The Critic. 

 

After the latest attempt to assassinate the President of the United States on Saturday, an attendee at the White House correspondents’ dinner was spotted making off with a couple of bottles of wine. As several people noticed, many Americans seemed to think that this was a greater outrage than the shooting itself, whereas British observers were firmly on the side of the minesweeper. 

Perhaps the difference is that Americans can afford to turn away free booze, but it seems more like another manifestation of the USA’s strangely prudish attitude towards alcohol. It is still less than a hundred years since Prohibition ended. The Anti-Saloon League is no more, but its place has been taken by “sober influencers”, gym bros and longevity-obsessed billionaires who preach the gospel of total abstinence. Last year, the number of drinkers in America fell to an all-time low, with barely half of the adult population touching a drop. 

We Brits cannot afford to be complacent. As another viral video released over the weekend showed, the American culture of puritanism has spread to these shores. Hannah Spencer, the recently elected Green MP for Gorton and Denton, has exclusively revealed that members of Parliament can be a bibulous bunch. In an interview with Politics Joe, she said: “Like, there’s a room where I walked past and I doubled back and looked in because people are just sat having a drink.” That room, I fancy, is what is known as a “bar” and there are nine of them on the parliamentary estate. There are also several pubs within walking distance which, rather wonderfully, have a bell that rings when MPs need to stagger back and vote. 

 

Read the rest. (NB. The Critic has put up a paywall for magazine articles and old articles, but you can continue to read mine for free when they come out. Although I do recommend getting a subscription.) 

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The EU Tobacco Tax Directive

The European Commission is pressing on with its plans to have an EU-wide tax on nicotine pouches and e-cigarette fluid, in addition to a sharp increase in the minimum tax rate on tobacco. Epicenter's experts at the EU Regulatory Observatory have been assessing the proposals and are unimpressed. 

I've written a short briefing with Constantinos Saravakos outlining their views and discussing some of the main dangers.

The main findings are:

• The TTD’s extension of minimum taxes to low-risk nicotine products conflicts with the EU’s goal of reducing smoking prevalence.
• Taxing safer alternatives will likely increase consumption of more harmful cigarettes.
• Higher minimum tobacco taxes will stimulate the illicit market, particularly in Eastern Europe.
• The proposal is highly regressive and fails to account for income differences across member states.
• The principle of differentiating taxes by relative risk is sound and should be strengthened, not diluted.
• A risk-proportionate reform would impose minimal or zero EU-level taxes on e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches to maximise substitution away from smoking.

 

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Why 'public health' hates the public

I was in Brussels for the World Nicotine Congress last month and had a chat with my pal Peter Beckett from Clearing the Air about vaping. Video below.

 

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The least conservative Conservatives

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill will very soon become the Tobacco and Vapes Act. I've written about it for Spiked.

 

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which is soon to receive royal assent, is the most empty-headed and illiberal piece of legislation passed in my lifetime. It is a pathetic epitaph for a vacuous political class, a sad fart from the rotting corpse of Blairism, and a new low for the nanny state. Waved through by the political pygmies in the House of Commons and cheered on by the freedom-hating gibbons in the House of Lords, it has given a quick dopamine rush to self-righteous windbags as the British state crumbles around them.

Most people have been only vaguely aware of what the new law says, but the media coverage yesterday alerted millions to the fact that the so-called generational smoking ban has nothing to do with smoking in pubs (which was banned in 2007) or selling cigarettes to children (which was banned in 1908). Instead, it will create an almost surreal two-tier society in which people born after 2008 become permanent children in the eyes of the law. 

 

Read the rest. 

 

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has described the generational tobacco sales ban as the least conservative policy of the last 14 years (it was put into motion, lest we forget, by Rishi Sunak). Most of the 41 MPs who voted against it yesterday were Conservatives (all the Reform MPs voted agin and there were four liberal Lib Dems), but there were quite a few Tories who didn't, including Sunak himself and a few obvious ones like Bob Blackman (ASH's man in parliament) and Caroline Johnson (horrendous nanny statist). Former ministers such as Jeremy Hunt and Steve Barclay did the walk of shame to join Labour MPs in voting for prohibition and a two-tier society (no Labour MPs voted against). 

 

The rest of the alleged conservatives were: 

 

John Glen

Geoffrey Clifton-Browne

Peter Fortune

Helen Grant

Damian Hinds

Neil Hudson

Alicia Kearns

John Lamont

Robbie Moore

Andrew Murrison

Joe Robertson

Neil Shastri-Hunt

David Simmonds

Graham Stuart

Martin Vickers

Mike Wood

 

They all voted for a policy which their leader says, correctly, is profoundly unconservative. None of them had to do it - the Bill was bound to pass. They did it because they wanted to. This is the kind of thing that really gets them going.

 

I'm not necessarily saying that all these freedom hating authoritarians should be kicked out of the party, but how is Caroline Johnson - who is not only an anti-smoking zealot but also a crank about vaping - the shadow health secretary?! So much for the party being under new management.  

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Audit the Gambling Commission

It has been nearly six years since the Social Market Foundation, a leftish think tank, came up with the brilliant wheeze of banning people from spending more money on gambling than they can afford. They proposed a £23 a week cap on gambling expenditure and said that anyone who wanted to exceed this “socially acceptable gambling budget” would have to prove that they were good for it. They did not explain how this would work in practice, but in a submission to the Gambling Commission in 2021, their gambling regulation spokesman, Dr James Noyes, said that the checks should be “non-intrusive” and “based on the data already held” by the company. 

The idea of “frictionless affordability checks” was supported by the the Gambling Commission, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Gambling Related Harm, the House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Social and Economic Impact of the Gambling Industry and every anti-gambling group worth its salt, but it was a mirage. Background checks for County Court Judgements and past bankruptcies are insufficient to show whether a person is spending beyond their means. Customers can be phoned up and asked if they have an adequate income, but nothing compels them to tell the truth. When push comes to shove, you need bank statements and pay slips, but two-thirds of punters are unwilling to show these to a bookmaker. 

And why should they? Gambling companies use all sorts of methods to identify problematic patterns of play and intervene with questions and advice, but they cannot look into their customers’ souls. If they ask too many questions, there are plenty of unregulated and offshore websites for punters to bet on. And since those websites do not pay tax, they often offer better odds. When General Betting Duty rises from 15 per cent to 25 per cent next year, “black market” sites will gain a further competitive advantage over the companies that are regulated by the Gambling Commission.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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