The contrast between the playfulness of Hockney’s bouts of libertarian activism and the po-faced outrage he received in response only served to underline his point. After Hockney sent the Guardian a piece of art criticising ‘anti-smoking fanatics’ in 2012, its readers responded by making drawings of their own – the artistic equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight – to whine about how ghastly smoking is. Unsurprisingly, they were the height of cringe.
After the Guardian ran a sycophantic interview with the Australian anti-smoking academic Simon Chapman, Hockney wrote a letter to the newspaper explaining why it would have been better off talking to him. Hockney listed all the things that he was and Chapman wasn’t, including being ‘a good and satisfied customer of the tobacco companies’, ‘not a professional agitator’ and ‘someone who prefers the centre of Bohemia to Australian suburbia’. As Chapman’s flaccid reply showed, it was the charge of not being Bohemian that stung him the most. It was hard to believe that a septuagenarian living in Bridlington was more edgy than a sociologist living in Melbourne, and yet we all knew it to be so.
The puritans and killjoys of ‘public health’ had no answer to him. He was a living legend and they weren’t. Spending all day painting and smoking is not everybody’s idea of a fulfilling life, but it sounded better than whatever Chris Whitty was doing. By shifting the debate from the risks of death to the joys of life, Hockney had taken them out of their comfort zone. All they could do was ignore him. It must have pained them to see him live too long for them to say, ‘I told you so’, but he was bound to die eventually. And now he has, and the world is a drearier place for it.
Tuesday, 16 June 2026
Hockney's war on the dreary
Monday, 15 June 2026
Uninventing the internet
We will continue to regress as a society until we learn to judge new legislation by its likely consequences rather than by the intentions of its advocates. The looming ban on under-16s having access to platforms “whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material” has all the hallmarks of another government failure. It has already been tried — and failed — in Australia. It is being framed as an attack on Big Tech rather than its satisfied customers. It has been pushed through by the conflicted old media off the back of a narrow selection of bereaved parents who have been used a human shield against criticism. It seems designed to give Starmer a “legacy”.
These are all red flags. So too is the familiar refrain that the ban will not be a “silver bullet” and that the public should therefore brace themselves for further restrictions. (Many of the problems the ban is supposed to address were meant to have been solved by the Online Safety Act. Remember that?). In his early morning address to the nation, Starmer urged us to not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Teenagers sometimes drink alcohol, he said, but that was no reason not to ban the sale of alcohol to children.
Fair enough, you might say, but leaving aside the fact that children can legally drink alcohol in Britain from the age of five, reducing some teenagers’ access to social media is clearly not perfect, but is it even good? The consequences of Australia’s “world leading” social media ban have been largely ignored by those who seek to emulate it, but any attempt to create evidence-based policy must start there. The Australian government’s eSafety commissioner found that 70 per cent of parents said their children still had active social media accounts three months after the “social media minimum age” was introduced. If, like Wes Streeting, you think that social media is as bad as tobacco, this sounds like a modest but non-trivial improvement, but who are the teenagers being denied this means of communication and what platforms are the rest using?
Saturday, 13 June 2026
David Hockney, enemy of the dreary
I'll be writing more about the great, late David Hockney next week. But for now, enjoy this interview from 2004.
Thursday, 11 June 2026
Activist-academia
High School Students Learn Activism and Policymaking through SPH Initiative
David Jernigan leads the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy Coalition, a coalition of school- and community-based preventive healthcare programs he cofounded to prepare young people to address pressing issues.
In the three months before the visit, Jernigan, professor of health law, policy, and management at BU’s School of Public Health, drilled them in democracy and alcohol policy via Zoom and an in-person training at BU, assisted by Hannah Martuscello (SPH’26).
It’s the second year that Jernigan has recruited young activists from the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy Coalition, a statewide coalition of school- and community-based preventive healthcare programs he cofounded.
“I grew up steeped in the Christianity of witness to injustice,” he says. “And the more I got into alcohol research, the more obvious it was to me: this is a huge injustice that’s being perpetrated.”
Rutherford went on to set up neo-temperance organisations all over the world, including Eurocare and the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance (Jernigan is on the board of the latter) and he was chairman of the Advisory Board at the Institute of Alcohol Studies.
"When you have a product that kills three million people a year worldwide, is carcinogenic and is associated with more than 200 disease and injury conditions, you need to do a lot of marketing."
Despite being a religiously inspired temperance advocate who doesn't understand the market he has spent his career writing about, Jernigan has been an advisor to the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO) and was the principal author of WHO’s first Global Status Report on Alcohol and Global Status Report on Alcohol and Youth.
And now he is using children "to share data and insights on alcohol policy with lawmakers". Many such cases.
Vaping and lung cancer
A study was published this week claiming that vaping causes lung cancer. The journal has helpfully published the peer review comments. One reviewer provided a strong reason why the researchers had drawn the wrong conclusion from the data, but the study was published anyway.
Read all about it on my Substack.
Monday, 8 June 2026
Game over for Australia
The growth of the black market could have been prevented if the government had listened to economists, historians and criminologists. Instead, they fell under the spell of dogmatic fanatics masquerading as “public health” experts. As predictable as this fiasco was, the statistics in the ABS report are still breathtaking. The black market share of the tobacco trade went from 12 per cent in 2017 to 26 per cent in 2020 and then exploded after the pandemic from 40 per cent in 2022 to 80.6 per cent in 2025. In the same period, the quantity of nicotine consumed in the country rose by almost 40 per cent. The price of legal cigarettes nearly tripled between 2016 and 2025 while tobacco duty revenue more than halved.
The blame lies squarely on the charlatans masquerading as public health experts who opposed the legalisation of vapes and pushed for ever higher tobacco taxes while scoffing at the idea that any of the obvious unintended consequences would come to pass.
In a sensible country, these people would have gone into hiding to live the rest of their lives in disgrace.
Wednesday, 3 June 2026
Extended Producer Responsibility, more government failure
Extended Producer Responsibility is a boring name for a boring regulation, but it is worth understanding if you want to see how the government squeezes the life out of British industry and contributes to the cost of living “crisis”.
The story begins, as such stories often do, with Theresa May and Michael Gove. After watching too many David Attenborough documentaries, Gove became obsessed with recycling. His first idea was to introduce a bottle deposit return scheme, which would have had huge operational costs and been largely pointless since everybody has a recycling bin at home. His second idea was Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which he said would “cement our place as a world leader in resource efficiency” by taxing businesses for every tonne of packaging they produce, on the basis that “the polluter pays”. Seven years and four Prime Ministers later, EPR came into force last April.
The logic of EPR is not entirely without merit. A company that produces packaging is not actually a “polluter” — although the end user might be — but there is an argument for making companies internalise the costs of recycling the packaging they produce. In effect, the policy takes billions of pounds from manufacturing firms and gives it to local authorities to spend on recycling and landfill.
The problem is one that is often overlooked by politicians. Since businesses get their money from consumers, an increase in costs to business is bound to lead to an increase in prices. Since it is consumers who pay the higher prices, the real question is whether it is better for recycling of widely used packaging to be paid for by individuals as taxpayers or by individuals as shoppers.
Read the rest at The Critic.