Black market, here we come

In my end-of-year article for Spiked I take a glimpse at Christmas future by looking at the black market.

 

As I write this, there have been 198 arson attacks on Australian tobacconists and vape retailers since its ‘tobacco turf wars’ began last year. By the time this article is published, there will probably have been 200. The root causes are so obvious that even the ABC, Australia’s left-wing state broadcaster, no longer denies them: Australia has the highest tobacco taxes in the world and has banned e-cigarettes in every form. The consequences have been worse than any opponent of the nanny state could have predicted: criminal gangs are firebombing retailers on an almost daily basis and people have been murdered in broad daylight.

This could all be stopped by legalising vapes and making cigarettes affordable for any adult who wants to buy them. The sky is hardly going to fall in if Australia starts taxing and regulating these products like a normal country. Yet there are almost no mainstream politicians in Australia making that case. Meanwhile, the British health secretary, Wes Streeting, has seen what’s going on Down Under and has decided that he would like a slice of it. Last year, Conservative MP Neil O’Brien, who was then the public-health minister, proudly announced that his government had not run an impact assessment to look at the effect of generational prohibition on the black market because he didn’t think it would be a problem.

 

After two firebombings in Melbourne overnight, Australia's tally has moved up to 202.

 

It is possible that things will have to get worse before they get better, but it is equally likely that things will get worse and stay worse. In any case, it is out of our hands. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill passed its second reading by 415 votes to 47 in November, a thumping victory for the prohibitionists. The political class has decided to let the black market rip. The rest of us will just have to adapt.

 

Merry Christmas!

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Moderate drinking continues to be good for you

Ongoing attempts to erase the health benefits of moderate drinking have suffered a setback in the USA. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has published a 230 page report to feed into the latest deliberations around the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025.

As (Bloomberg-funded) Stat News reports:

 

A major report on alcohol’s health effects — which will inform the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans — found moderate drinkers had lower all-cause mortality, and a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, than those who never drank. The findings are sure to cause a stir, especially once a separate panel of experts releases its own alcohol report in coming weeks.

 

We can expect the anti-alcohol academics on that panel to come out swinging with the usual cherry-picked studies (hello, Tim Stockwell!) and merchant of doubt rhetoric. But for now, we have the actual evidence...

 

According to its meta-analysis, the committee found those who consumed moderate levels of alcohol had a 16% lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who never drank. This conclusion was graded as being of moderate certainty, meaning there was enough evidence to determine the health effects, but there are limitations due to the quality of the evidence. Future data could change the conclusion.

Meta-analyses the committee reviewed found moderate drinking was associated with a lower risk of heart attack, stroke and cardiovascular disease mortality as compared to never drinking.

 

This much we have known for decades. These associations have had everything thrown at them. There is probably no finding in epidemiology that has been subjected to so much rigorous examination. The reason for that is obvious: a lot of people in 'public health' don't want it to be true. 

And yet here we are.

You can read the full report here.

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The unflushable Chris Whitty

Why won’t Chris Whitty go away? If he had any decency, the Chief Medical Officer would have resigned in 2021 after he told fibs about Omicron in an attempt to bounce Boris Johnson into yet another lockdown. (In case you’ve forgotten, he said that “all the things we do know are bad” about the manifestly less dangerous Covid variant.) Every other player in the nightmare of 2020-21 has shuffled off the stage, but Whitty lingers on, a slap-headed Rasputin whispering terrible ideas into the ears of our leaders.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.

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Food advertising - the next set of demands

On the face of it, the first line of this BBC article is stupefyingly obvious.

 

Brands that make unhealthy foods will be able to get round the government's junk food advertising ban if their adverts do not show products that break the rules.

 

Yes, that's how rules work. If you comply with them you 'get round' them. 

 

There is, of course, an agenda here. After a brief period of celebration following the government's introduction of new advertising regulations on Tuesday, the 'public health' lobby is teeing itself up for its next set of demands.

 

It means that adverts from fast food chains, for example, will not face restrictions as long as they do not feature products such as burgers or fries.

 

You can see where this is going, I'm sure.

 

Katharine Jenner, director of the Obesity Health Alliance, an umbrella group for health campaigners, had argued for brands to be included in the ban, and said she would like to see firms respond by making their products healthier.

"That would be the ideal thing, but they can get round it by just showing the brand and it's unclear what effect that would have, above and beyond what we've already got," she added.

"We are very supportive of [the restrictions] coming in as planned, but in future I think we'd like to see where loopholes could be closed".

 

So it's not about the food. It's about the companies. Or, as these cranks call them, the "unhealthy commodity industries".

But hang on. Didn't these very same people say that one of the 'benefits' of the ban on 'less healthy' food advertising was that it would encourage companies to reformulate their products with less sugar, fat and salt? Even in the quote above we are told that Jenner has "argued for brands to be included in the ban, and said she would like to see firms respond by making their products healthier." But if companies can't advertise at all - not even their own brand logo - what would be the point of reformulating their products?

It's a revealing quote because it shows her in mid-air, jumping from one horse to another. Her new line is that food companies she dislikes shouldn't be able to advertise at all, but she can't help parroting her old line about reformulation. It's a glitch, but I'm sure she'll smooth it out with practice and the old argument about reformulation will be erased from history. 

The BBC also says of the ban... 

But details of the restrictions, unveiled earlier this week, also showed that sugary breakfast cereals, crumpets and certain types of porridge would also fall on the ban - prompting criticism from some business owners.

 

Criticism has gone well beyond business owners, but the BBC can't admit this. The scope of the ban has been roundly mocked as the public have finally realised they've been sold a pig in a poke. I wish it would be criticised by business owners! How long are the broadcasters and food companies going to take this lying down? Where are they? I haven't heard a peep from the Food and Drink Federation this week, for example. Meanwhile, Chris van Tulleken and Greg Fell are in The Times claiming that the food industry is using "tobacco industry tactics". Maybe it's time to wake up, lads?

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Then they came for the croissants

Misleading the public until the bitter end, the Department of Health and Social Care issued a press release this morning confirming that “junk food adverts” will be banned on TV before 9pm and online 24/7 from next October. It used the legally meaningless phrase “junk food” five times. 

Junk food is in the eye of the beholder, but is obviously pejorative. That is why politicians and “public health” lobbyists use it. If they abandoned the weasel words and told us what is actually being prohibited, even natural allies of the nanny state might conclude that the advertising ban — which goes far beyond anything introduced elsewhere in the world — is a bit excessive. 

Find out why at The Critic.

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47 lions

MPs voted for the Tobacco and Vapes Bill yesterday by a landslide. The Bill legislates for the gradual prohibition of all tobacco products, a total ban on e-cigarette advertising and allows Wes Streeting to do whatever he likes with vape flavours, smoking bans, vaping bans, vape packaging, etc.

Labour MPs were given questions to ask and told what to think by the leadership. Not a single one voted against prohibition. Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs were given a free vote. 35 Tories, 7 Lib Dems and 4 Reform MPs voted against. Rishi Sunak, whose 'legacy' this was supposed to be, didn't bother to turn up to vote.

The conscience of these 47 MPs is clear. They could have gone with the crowd - they had no chance of winning - but they stood up for personal liberty. There are 72 Lib Dems so seven voting against isn't much, but it shows that liberalism hasn't been completely snuffed out in the party. 

It's been fifteen years since I published Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, the last chapters of which warned about the looming threat of prohibition and the slippery slope of regulation from tobacco to food and alcohol. I shouldn't be surprised that prohibition has returned and that the government is now planning taxes on 'junk food', but I never thought that Britain would be first out of the blocks with Prohibition 2.0. As one of the more prominent defenders of smokers' rights in the UK, this is obviously sub-optimal.

The more I think about it, the less it matters. The generational ban won't affect anybody until 2027 and won't really be noticeable until around 2030. Vaping is making cigarettes obsolete, especially among young people, but even if an 18 year old wanted to smoke, why would they buy cigarettes legally? 

I was on a night out in a city in the north-west recently when the trusty vape that I've had for two years finally packed up. I went to a shop to get a disposable vape and a pack of cigarettes in case I didn't like the disposable vape (I'm not into sweet flavours). I picked out a disposable vape, picked out a lighter and asked the guy behind the counter if he sold cigarettes. He pulled up a big plastic bag and showed me what he had - all loose packs with health warnings in a variety of different languages, obviously not legal. I chose a pack of Marlboro Touch, whatever that is, and he sold me the lot - disposable vape, lighter and a pack of premium cigarettes - for £14. The cigarettes alone are worth more than that on the legal market. The guy had never seen me before. I could have been anybody. The shop was in the middle of the city centre.

This is happening up and down the country. Tax morale among smokers is at rock bottom and the legal market is collapsing. The government has its head in the sand and no one is going to do anything about it. We know from Australia how bad this could get (it had firebombing number 150 at the weekend). Banning disposable vapes next June isn't exactly going to help. 

The point is that by the time this idiotic law starts to bite, there will be so little of the legal market left that the age at which people can legally buy tobacco will be largely academic. The de facto age at which people will be able to buy tobacco will be zero.

They can't say they haven't been warned. This is on the 415 lemmings who voted for the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. The 47 rebels can sleep soundly.

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Calorie labelling didn't work

Of all the anti-obesity policies that have been tabled in recent years, calorie labelling is the least objectionable. It is not regressive like the sugar tax or anti-competitive like the advertising ban. If it’s nannying, it is of the gentlest sort; a nudge rather than a shove. It would have been a nightmare for small businesses to implement, but they were given an exemption when the government made calorie counts mandatory in cafés, pubs and restaurants two years ago.

You could argue that the number of calories in a meal is basic information that consumers have a right to know, even if it doesn’t make any difference to what they eat. That is just as well because we now know that it doesn’t change what people eat. An evaluation funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research was published this week and concluded that “the introduction of the mandatory kcal labelling policy in England was not associated with a significant decrease in self-reported kcals purchased”. Monitoring the behaviour of 6,578 customers in pubs, fast food outlets, cafés and restaurants before and after the introduction of mandatory calorie counts, the authors found that the number of calories consumed actually rose from 909 per meal to 983 per meal.

Read the rest at the Telegraph.

It's been another bad week for 'evidence-based' public health policies. I've written about three of them on my Substack.

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