Drink driving and the bootleggers

I've written for the Morning Advertiser about the drink-drive limit after receiving a press release from a company called AlcoSense. You'll never guess what they sell...

 

I received a press release the other day from an organisation called AlcoSense applauding the government for proposing a lower drink-drive limit. Labour will soon be consulting on whether to cut the limit from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg, bringing it in line with Scotland and the EU. AlcoSense says that this is “a welcome and overdue move”, although they would ideally like it to drop to the zero-tolerance level of just 20mg.

I had never heard of AlcoSense before. My first thought was that it must yet another neo-temperance lobby group funded by the government. In fact, it is a company that makes breathalysers. Its managing director, Hunter Abbott, says that “only” 37% of drivers are breathalysed after a collision. He thinks the figure should be 100%. He also thinks there should be more random breath testing. It is not hard to see why.  

 

Free to read. 

 

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Mario Rizzo on behavioural economics

I was delighted to share a stage with Prof Mario Rizzo, co-author of Escaping Paternalism and other fine works, at the IEA earlier this year. I never got around to posting the video, but here it is. Mario is an articulate critique of behavioural economics and "nudge" policies. I also mentioned his work on the slippery slope in my introduction, in particular The Camel's Nose is in the Tent which is well worth a read.

 

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Gambling disorder does not cause suicide - study

Gambling with lies

 

Loyal readers may recall that Public Health England misused a study of Swedish hospital patients to make the claim that 409 suicides a year are linked to problem gambling. The science was so shoddy that the claim was shelved by its successor, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, who then used the same study and made the same mistakes to claim that "up to 496" suicides are linked to gambling. Although government agencies have been careful to use terms like "linked to" and "associated with", campaigners and journalists have been less careful with their language.

 

But, as I mentioned last year, one of the authors of the Swedish study used the same dataset for her PhD thesis and concluded that gambling disorder was not an independent risk factor for suicide among the hospital patients. It turns out that people in hospital with a range of psychiatric problems suffer from a lot of issues associated with premature mortality and that you can't use an inherently high-risk group to extrapolate across the entire population of a different country. Who knew?

Along with the co-author of the original study, she has now published a new study which comes to the same conclusion: people with gambling disorder are more likely to commit suicide but this is because of various co-morbidities, not gambling disorder.  

 

Individuals with gambling disorder had an increase in levels of mortality and suicide mortality compared to age, gender and municipality-matched controls. However, gambling disorder itself was not at the 0.05 alpha-level statistically associated with neither suicide nor general mortality when controlling for somatic and psychiatric comorbidities, gender, age and socioeconomic status. Thus individuals with gambling disorder suffer from increased mortality and suicide mortality and reasons for these appear to be multifactorial motivating careful suicide risk assessment and screening for somatic comorbidities in individuals with gambling disorder.

 

Or, to put it another way... 

 

In the regression model gambling disorder was not significantly associated with mortality, this was predicted by socioeconomic status, increasing age, low education level, somatic comorbidity, substance use disorder and previous intentional self-harm in men and for women by increasing age and somatic comorbidity. 

 

Of course, this is only one study and one cohort of people. But it is the same cohort of people that PHE and OHID used to come up with their spurious statistics (and those spurious statistics were then used to come up with equally useless claims about the cost of gambling to the health service). 

 

If you extrapolate the findings from this study, you get the result that no suicides are causally linked to problem gambling in the UK. Stick that on a t-shirt.

 

 

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Horse racing strike

No horse racing today in Britain. Find out why at the Snowdon Substack. 

 

The subplot to all this is that the anti-gambling lobby have been working with the racing lobby to throw the rest of the gambling industry under the bus. The anti-gambling lobby in Britain is effectively Derek Webb and the various lobbyists and think tanks he funds or has funded, particularly Matt Zarb-Cousin (Clean Up Gambling), Will Prochaska (Coalition to End Gambling Ads) and the Social Market Foundation (SMF).

The SMF have called for remote gaming duty to rise to 50% (!) while Matt “not anti-gambling, just anti-FOBTs” Zarb-Cousin has called for online casinos to be taxed “into oblivion”. The SMF’s ‘concession’ to sports bookies is a 25% tax consisting 5% duty and 20% Horserace Betting Levy which amounts to the same as they pay now (15% duty plus 10% racing levy). This is because they know that horse racing is popular with the public and it gives them a way to “peel off and neutralise racing” - to quote Zarb-Cousin - while they hammer the rest of the remote gaming sector.

 

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The endless "public health" playbook

Yawn. 

 

Food industry lobbying is leading Labour to drop public health plans, experts say

 

How could they possibly know that? Lobbying is virtually impossible to measure and there is no way of knowing whether it is effective or not. The fact that politicians side with one special interest over another does not prove that it was the lobbying wot won it. And even if the lobbying was effective, it only means that the politicians were more persuaded by one set of arguments than another. So what?

 

Labour has scrapped ambitious plans to tackle Britain’s growing toll of lifestyle-related illness after lobbying by food and alcohol firms, health experts have said.

Ministerial inaction on ill-health caused by bad diet, alcohol and smoking is so serious that the NHS could collapse as a result of conditions such as heart disease and diabetes, they warn.

 

The NHS could collapse as the result of government not doing what these people want, could it? Actually collapse? Who are they anyway?

 

The charge against ministers has been made by Sarah Woolnough and Jennifer Dixon, the chief executives of the influential King’s Fund and Health Foundation thinktanks.

 

The King's Fund exists solely to pressure governments to pour more money down the bottomless pit of the NHS, as far as I can see. It never used to get involved in campaigning for illiberal lifestyle regulation, but it is now run by Sarah Woolnough who turned Cancer Research UK into a lobbying outfit, so that is sadly changing.  

 

"There is a long history of lobbying from the food, alcohol and tobacco industries weakening and delaying measures that would improve people’s health."

 

It's a shame they're not as effective as the single-issue pressure groups that work night and day (or rather 9 to 5, except weekends and bank holidays) trying to relieve consumers of their freedom.

 

They have said Labour are repeating the mistakes of previous governments by letting “vested interests” wield too much influence and water down planned policies.

 

Plain packaging? The sugar tax? Banning disposable vapes? Which of these was "watered down"? Banning supermarkets from putting tasty food at the end of aisles? Banning everyone born after 2008 from ever buying cigarettes, cigars or Rizla? Where is the evidence of industries wielding too much influence when these were announced?   

 

“And once again long-promised restrictions on junk food advertising have been delayed while Labour’s proposals to extend smoking restrictions to outdoor areas of pubs and restaurants were squashed,” Woolnough and Dixon say in a joint blog.

 

The "junk food" advertising ban has been delayed by three months because the legislation was so badly written it would have prevented McDonalds from advertising salads. It will now take effect in January 2026, but the industry has voluntarily agreed to stop advertising HFSS food in October anyway. Is that going to make the NHS collapse?

 

“Minimum unit pricing for alcohol – successfully implemented in Scotland ..."

 

 – and a Clean Air Act, regularly promised by Labour in opposition, have both failed to materialise.”

 

I don't think the latter has anything to so with "the food, alcohol and tobacco industries" while the former had more to do with Westminster politicians looking at the alcohol-specific death rate in Scotland and concluding that minimum pricing is a policy they can do without.

 

Woolnough and Dixon single out the health secretary Wes Streeting’s threat to food firms in February 2024 that he would use a “steamroller” to force them to reformulate their products by putting less fat, salt and sugar in them. He has not acted on that pledge while in office, though, and instead published weaker plans intended to promote the take-up of more nutritious food.

 

He's going to literally fine supermarkets if they don't sell people less sugar, salt and fat. Are you lot never satisfied?

 

The answer, of course, is that they are not. They also want a ban on alcohol advertising (which wouldn't work). That, combined with an outdoor smoking ban, will supposedly be enough to stop the NHS collapsing. It's bollocks, obviously. Neither policy will have any measurable effect on the NHS workload and it is impossible for something that receives £200 billion a year to "collapse". What we need is for someone to deal with the NHS's horrendous productivity problem, but that would require a bit of effort rather than a finger-wagging blog post.

 

Even if the government capitulated to this wish-list, the King's Fund and the rest of the nanny state blob would be back five minutes later with another list of "bold" and "brave" policies to save the NHS from collapse. They will make an unreasonable demand. The government will decide against it but do lots of other things they want. They will then accuse the government of succumbing to industry lobbying and the Guardian will write it up as a story. It's just so boring and predictable now.

The lesson of the last fifteen years is that the amount of screaming the government will be subjected to if it does nothing that 'public health' lobbyists want is identical to amount of screaming it is subjected to if it does most of what they want. They will accuse politicians of being in the pocket of various industries. They will accuse the Health Secretary of being weak. They will claim that the NHS is going to collapse. 

It is the same script regardless. The government gets no thanks for capitulating to them again and again. Their list of demands is endless and their autistic screeching is loud and constant regardless of what any government does. On tobacco and food, in particular, no government in the world has done more to appease these fanatics in the last two decades. It hasn't worked. The obvious lesson is that politicians should stop trying to appease them. The only thing that is likely to make them shut up is a government that makes is clear that it will not be giving into any further demands.

There is a hint in DHSC's response to this latest outburst that Streeting is losing patience with these people.

 

The Department of Health and Social Care rejected the thinktank bosses’ criticisms. A spokesperson said: “We are legislating to make sure children today can never legally smoke, introducing a ban on high-caffeine energy drinks for children and new rules to make baby food better for families, preventing fast food shops from setting up outside schools, banning junk food adverts targeted at children, introducing supervised toothbrushing to prevent kids teeth from rotting, a Healthy Food Standard to make the healthy choice the easy choice, and investing an extra £200m in the public health grant after years of cuts.”

 

"Yeah, but apart from that, what has the government ever done for us?"

 

 

 

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More reasons to doubt the official data on the illicit tobacco trade

I have written before about why HMRC's estimates of illicit tobacco sales are demonstrably wrong and greatly underestimate the size of the market. Aside from their figures being a mathematical impossibility and defying the evidence of one's eyes, there is a further reason to be suspicious of HMRC's claims.

HMRC reckons the manufactured cigarettes sold illegally in 2023/24 would be worth £800 million if sold at the normal retail price. But HMRC also tells us that cigarettes worth £697 million were seized by the authorities in 2023/24. 

If true, this means that the authorities are seizing nearly half (46%) of the cigarettes that are entering Britain before they can be sold. Who knew the British state could be so effective? It is much less effective at seizing cocaine (19%) or cannabis (26%) for example. If the figures are right, it isn't very good at tackling rolling tobacco either, having got hold of only £42 million's worth of it in 2023/24, a mere 2% of the supposed total.  

It doesn't pass the smell test, does it? The overwhelmingly more likely explanation fits with what anybody can see if they have their eyes open: the streets are awash with illicit whites and the authorities are - as ever - only intercepting a small fraction of it.  

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Anti-capitalism and public health

A new IEA report from me - read it here.

And an article about it, also by me...

 

Academics who see disease spreading every time money changes hands tend to take a dim view of the market economy. As anti-corporate rhetoric ballooned into a blanket indictment of capitalism, many of them decided that the solution must lie in overthrowing the existing economic system. They urge the public to regard “neo-liberal capitalism as the fundamental cause of health harms” and call for “a fundamental restructure of the global political and socio- economic system”. During the pandemic, a former WHO advisor hailed China’s draconian COVID lockdowns for curbing economic activity and claimed that “switching off capitalism not only protects us from the virus, it protects us from ourselves.” Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, has told Socialist Worker that “we need a mass movement of resistance” against “neoliberalism”. A WHO report published last year blamed “deregulated forms of capitalism”, “trade liberalization” and “the promotion of free markets” for poor health, and concluded that “the importance of addressing that political economic system, and rethinking capitalism, cannot be ignored”.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

 

 

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