As I have argued before, the anti-smoking lobby created a playbook which has become the Bible of the anti-obesity, anti-alcohol and anti-gambling lobbies. Yesterday’s announcement follows that playbook to the letter. If you have something you would like to ban, here are some of the boxes to tick.
- Flatter politicians
Most parliamentarians are powerless pygmies with delusions of grandeur. Having no answers to the big problems facing the country, they indulge themselves in the displacement politics of petty prohibition. They want to be seen as heroic, so be sure to flatter them by portraying the policy you are proposing as “bold” and “brave”. When the Health Committee proposed a sugar tax in 2015, it subtitled its report “Brave and Bold Action”. Jamie Oliver urged ministers to be “big and bold”. This week’s report from the Health and Social Care Committee uses the words “bold” or “bolder” six times. The first line of the press release calls for “a new, bold approach”. The committee’s chair, Layla Moran, said: “We ask this government to be bold, not to fudge and delay food restrictions.”
In truth, there is nothing courageous about taking on food companies that have shown no interest in standing up for themselves, let alone individual kebab shop owners who are just trying to make a living, but that is the beauty of it. MPs want to feel brave but don’t want to take risks. You have just the policies for them.
Friday, 17 July 2026
How to get things banned
Monday, 13 July 2026
Ultra-processed documentary
I was invited to provide some balance to a short documentary on ultra-processed food recently. The programme was broadcast by Al Jazeera on Saturday and you can watch it below.
Thursday, 2 July 2026
End the licence fee to save the BBC
There is a new element to the BBC’s World Cup coverage this year. At some point in every match, the commentator will earnestly remind viewers that they need a TV licence to watch the game. It is a well targeted message, though almost certainly ineffective. If there is one time when the millions of people who claim to never watch the BBC are watching the BBC, it is during the World Cup.
The BBC’s doom loop is gathering pace. The trickle of non-payment of the licence fee is becoming a flood. Prosecutions for non-payment have plummeted in recent years and the threat of licence fee “evasion” being decriminalised hangs over the corporation. As revenue declines, budgets are cut and services are cancelled. Radio 4’s long wave broadcasts ended over the weekend and the BBC is looking for £500 million of savings by ending shows like The World Tonight and Money Box Live.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Thursday, 25 June 2026
HMRC is still downplaying the illicit trade
Simple maths shows that HMRC’s figures cannot possibly be accurate. Converting kilograms of rolling tobacco into sticks, the equivalent of 36.6 billion cigarettes were sold legally in the UK in 2022. If this declined at the same rate as smoking prevalence (-17 per cent), it would have been 30.4 billion by 2024. In fact, there were only 22.9 billion cigarettes sold legally in 2024, a shortfall of 7.5 billion.
If we imagine, for the sake of argument, that there was no illicit tobacco at all in 2022, this would mean that 25 per cent of the total market was illicit by 2024/25 (7.5 billion is 25 per cent of 30.4 billion). If you believe, as HMRC does, that 13 per cent of the market was illicit in 2022/23, it means that 33 per cent of the market was illicit in 2024/25. If HMRC underestimated the size of the black market in 2022/23, the real figure is higher still, but the absolute minimum it could be in a wildly optimistic and frankly impossible scenario is 25 per cent.
The only piece of solid data is the legal sales figure. We have survey data for the number of smokers and the number of cigarettes they consume, but the ONS survey HMRC relies on had its status as an official accredited statistic withdrawn in 2024 due to “ongoing challenges with the response rates, levels, and weighting approach”. Moreover, smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption figures always need to be adjusted upwards to account for shy smokers and under-reporting. This requires a certain amount of guesswork. Estimates of how much duty-free tobacco is brought into the UK are also based on surveys and may be inaccurate.
A further problem is that during the pandemic, the ONS stopped asking people how much they smoked. HMRC therefore “imputed” the figures for 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23. The question was asked again in 2023/24 and so HMRC describes its estimate for that year as “actual”, but it has gone back to guessing for 2024/25. Blaming “modifications to question sequencing and funding limitations” it says that “certain consumption data for 2024 to 2025 are incomplete”. It has therefore “projected consumption data” for 2024/25 “based on established historical trends.” But what we are seeing today is not in line with historical trends. That is the whole point!
The best way to gauge the size of the black market in tobacco is to gather a large and representative sample of disused tobacco packs and see whether they were sold legally. Tobacco companies have been doing this for years. KMPG, acting on behalf of Philip Morris International (PMI), produce an annual empty pack survey which recently found that 33 per cent of cigarette packs in the UK were contraband or counterfeit. Japan Tobacco International (JTI) use a slightly different methodology in which they interview smokers in their homes and offer to exchange their empty or current pack of cigarettes for a JTI brand. Using this system, they estimate that 33% of cigarettes and 50 per cent of hand-rolling tobacco were illicit in 2024/25 (their figures for 2025/26 suggest that this has risen to 42 per cent and 60 per cent respectively).
Many people are wary of claims made by tobacco companies, but the Irish government has been using a close cousin of the JTI survey since 2009 for its official estimates. With a similarly high level of tobacco duty, the official Irish figures are similar to the industry’s figures for the UK. Ireland’s 2025 survey found that 28 per cent of cigarettes and 37 per cent of hand-rolling tobacco was illicit.
Tuesday, 23 June 2026
The world won't listen
I spoke to Rohan Pike, the founder of the Australian Border Force’s Tobacco Strike Team, about his country’s black market tobacco nightmare. 80% of the market is illegal, tobacco tax revenue is down by three-quarters and there have been nearly 300 firebombings. It's a warning to the world but the world won't listen.
Today, HMRC produced its tobacco tax gap estimate for 2024/25. As I have explained before, HMRC's methodology systematically underestimates the size of the illicit market and should be scrapped in favour of empty pack surveys (as used in Ireland). In their latest edition, they have resorted to "imputing" the figures for 2024/25. This is essentially guesswork based on projecting from past trends - and the past trends are themselves unreliable. It's a farce and needs to stop. According to HMRC, the amount of illegal handrolling tobacco sold is at an all time low!
Watch my interview with Rohan below.
Friday, 19 June 2026
More sausage action
Inside the Sausage Factory remains free to download and I've written an article for Cap-X about how rational actions lead to irrational policies.
I also did a podcast with the IEA yesterday in which I outline my arguments...
Thursday, 18 June 2026
Tales from the sausage factory
Today sees the release of my new book Inside the Sausage Factory: The Illusion of Evidence-Based Policy-Making. The title is a reference to something Bismarck supposedly said about law-making. It can be a messy process, but it is supposed to be ‘evidence-based’ these days, especially in areas like public health.
The book looks at four campaigns for “public health” policies in Britain in the 2010s: plain packaging for tobacco, minimum pricing for alcohol, the sugary drinks tax and the de facto ban on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). I look at the evidence that was cited the most by politicians and the media, but the thing that stands out is that the decisions to introduce (or reject) each of the policies do not seem to have had much to do with evidence.
Instead, I argue that everybody involved in the policy-making process, from voters up to the Prime Minister, was acting in their own rational self-interest. Paradoxically, this led to irrational policies being introduced (none of them worked).
The evidence from Inside the Sausage Factory suggests that politicians will succumb to pressure on low-salience issues unless they believe that the policy will be widely unpopular or conspicuously backfire. Once the ‘public health’ interest groups had put their policies on the agenda, the government could not put off a decision forever. They became barnacles on the boat that needed to be scraped off. With the exception of minimum pricing in England, which had significant public and political opposition, the government in Westminster concluded that the reputational risks of inaction were greater than the political, economic and legal risks of acting. The squeaky wheel got the grease.
For those of us who are of a liberal disposition, this is not a happy conclusion to reach. It implies that politicians are hostages to small pressure groups manipulating public opinion and that the cycle will repeat itself again and again. Where will it end?
In the campaigns I write about in Inside the Sausage Factory, several studies were referenced again and again by politicians, journalists and activists. The policies didn’t work and the evidence wasn’t very good, but at least evidence was cited from time to time. The evidence for banning “junk food” adverts and social media for the under-16s is negligible and the evidence from the generational tobacco ban is non-existent. Scientific evidence was not a decisive factor in any of the campaigns I studied from the 2010s. Today, it seems to be entirely optional.
Inside the Sausage Factory is the last in a series of publications about policy-making in “public health”.
The Corporate Playbook examines the fatuous view of policy-making that is trendy in “public health” academia.
Bootlegging Baptists looks at the economic incentives of paternalistic pressure groups and reasons why consumers do not mobilise to defend themselves.
The People vs Paternalism proposes a way of overcoming the paradox of participation and building a grassroots consumer rights organisation.
Anti-Capitalism and Public Health does what it says on the tin and examines the economic agenda of the “public health” lobby.
Not Invented Here asks why certain pressure groups oppose practical solutions to the problems they supposedly care about.
