Freeze the minimum wage

It must have been at least ten years ago now, but I remember watching a BBC compilation of humorous moments from its late-night current affairs programme Question Time. Bloopers and gaffes, as Danny Baker would call them. Studio lights going out, people storming off, accidental innuendos. Anything can happen on live TV! Sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the light-hearted nostalgia was a clip of a Conservative politician—I think it was Michael Howard—explaining that he was against introducing a minimum wage because it would lead to unemployment. The BBC put up a smug caption at the end of the clip saying something along the lines of “unemployment has gone down since the minimum wage was introduced in 1999”.

And so, it did, but Howard (if it was he) was only repeating what economists had told him. The theory is perfectly sound: if employers are forced to pay £15 an hour and your labour is worth less than £15 an hour, you will not be able to find work. Some leftists consider this to be an immoral argument. No one, they say, is worth less than [insert your arbitrary figure here]. But we are not talking about the worth of the person. We are talking about the value that a person can add to the business. Employing people at a loss is a one-way road to bankruptcy, and unemployment will surely be the result.

An understanding that some people’s labour is worth more than others, and that forcing employers to pay above the market rate will freeze them out of the labour market, is implicit in the current system which has lower rates for people aged under 21. It should be self-evident that a minimum wage of £100 an hour would bring the economy to its knees. It is equally obvious that a minimum wage of £5 an hour would make no real difference to anybody. At some point in between, the minimum wage gets so high that it causes significant and visible unemployment. The only question is where. In this paper, Matthew Bowles and Emmanuel Igwe argue that the tipping point has been reached and that it is time for a cooling-off period.

Successive governments have been keen to improve the lot of the lowest paid, not by growing the economy but by forcing employers to pay 

them more. “Britain deserves a pay rise”, said George Osborne when he raised the minimum wage and rebranded it as the National Living Wage in 2015. Such generosity with other people’s money led to the minimum wage rising from 46 per cent of the median wage in 1999 to 56 per cent in 2015. It currently stands at 66 per cent, one of the highest ‘bite ratios’ in the world. The negative consequences are becoming difficult to ignore.

Since 2022, the unemployment rate has risen from 3.6 per cent to 4.9 per cent. Most of the increase occurred after 2023 when the economy was growing, albeit modestly. Unemployment is never monocausal, and there are other factors, such as the rise in the employer National Insurance rate, that likely contributed, but it coincided with the standard minimum wage rate rising from £9.50 to £12.71 per hour. The hospitality sector, and pubs in particular, often cite the minimum wage as a leading cause of business closures.

The youth unemployment statistics are even more alarming. Whatever else was going wrong with the British economy, we used to be able to console ourselves that we didn’t suffer from Europe’s seemingly endemic scourge of youth unemployment. That cope is no longer available to us. Youth unemployment in the UK has risen from 9.3 per cent in 2022 to 16.2 per cent today. It is predicted to rise to 17.6 per cent next year. The EU has seen no significant increase in recent years and has a youth unemployment rate of 15.1 per cent. Perhaps the difference is that the UK dropped the age threshold for the National Living Wage in 2021 (from 25 to 23) and then again in 2024 (to 21).

If the analysis of Bowles and Igwe is correct, the BBC gloated too soon. The initial warnings about the minimum wage turned out to be overblown, but only because the bite ratio was set at a reasonable level. Subsequent governments became complacent and pushed the dial too far, harming the very people the minimum wage was supposed to protect. The authors’ recommendation of a five-year freeze may not be popular, but it is eminently sensible.

 

This is my foreword to a new report from the Prosperity Institute 

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Shouting at vitamins

The end of the COVID-19 pandemic left a hole in the lives of two groups of people. The first are those who loved the pandemic because it allowed them to flaunt their hypochondria. They have largely disappeared but they can occasionally be spotted, fully masked up, sounding the alarm about things like monkeypox. The second are those who loved the pandemic because it allowed imbeciles to masquerade as contrarians. They graduated to taking photographs of contrails in the sky, but nothing could quite recapture the thrill of talking with ill-deserved confidence about Gompertz curves, spike proteins and false positives.

But now they’ve found a new target for their rage: vitamin B9, otherwise known as folic acid. It has been known for decades that consumption of folic acid at the start of a pregnancy prevents spina bifida, a neural tube defect that often condemns children to a life in a wheelchair. From December, most of the flour sold in Britain will be fortified with folic acid by law at a level of 250ug (micrograms) per 100g. 

 

As I mention in The Critic, the campaign against flour fortification is being run by "Pathological" Clare Craig who some readers will remember as a disinformation merchant during the pandemic. It took her four months, but she has managed to get 100,000 people to sign her online petition.

 

The whole panic is demonstrable nonsense. What I found interesting in researching that article was how long the UK government has waited and how eagerly the scientists have been looking for evidence of potential harm. Rightly so, I would say, given that folic acid becomes hard to avoid with fortification, but the only 'harm' it could find is a pretty dubious one. 

 

I don't go into this in the piece, but the evidence that folic acid pills can mask B12 vitamin deficiency comes almost entirely from people with a B12 deficiency being given folic acid as treatment between 1947 and 1951, not long after the B9 and B12 vitamins were isolated for the first time. As Wald et al. explain in this article, this is a problem of misdiagnosis and it wouldn't happen today because we have simple tests of B9 (folic acid) deficiency and B12 deficiency. And yet, because it happened in the past, the guidance level (which is taken to be the safe upper limit) is set at a fraction of the level at which folic acid has been known to mask the effects of B12 deficiency.   

 

That is the only reason there is a guidance level for folic acid. It is perhaps unsurprising that people infer that if they exceed that level then they are at risk of something, but they really aren't. As Wald et al. say, there doesn't need to be a limit at all. 

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Christopher Snowdon on Pints and Policy

I was on Great British Think Tank's Pints and Policy podcast yesterday. You can watch it below. 

 

Thanks to GBTT's thorough description of the chat, I can tell you exactly what we discussed:

0:00 Pints & Policy 

0:08 Welcome: Chris Snowdon and the IEA 

0:49 What is a capitalist command economy? 

4:08 Fined for missing heat pump and EV targets 

5:14 Back to the 1970s under Labour? 

6:45 Riots, immigration and public anger 

8:24 The mini-budget v now: gilts, debt and the deficit 

9:53 Do we need a bond crisis? 

11:15 Austerity "was barely done at all" 

12:03 Wealth taxes, rent controls and the Laffer curve 

14:00 Are young people less liberal? 

17:01 "Is it time to ban...?" The BBC and the media 

19:14 More vapers than smokers 

20:04 Cheap Chinese EVs 

20:42 An £11 broadband levy for the BBC? 

23:17 Inside the Sausage Factory: does evidence matter? 

25:24 Minimum unit pricing: 65p in Wales 

26:09 20mph limits 

27:34 Impact assessments: costs counted, benefits not 

31:22 Devolution as a policy trial 

34:38 Will the state ever get smaller? 

36:31 The simple fixes: repeal and deregulate 

37:44 Blair, Brown and the Tories 

39:06 Tory hangovers: plastic taxes and the "Uni Party" 

40:35 Busy with Brexit and Covid, so why ban straws? 

42:40 The one policy to change first 

44:20 Disability benefits and the TaxPayers' Alliance tool

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Smoking down, tobacco sales down a lot more

New ONS stats out today report that the smoking rate has dropped to 9.8% in the UK. This means that the number of smokers has dropped by a quarter since 2021.

All well and good, except that legal tobacco sales have fallen by more than half since 2021. 

If you're thinking that this could be because smokers are consuming fewer cigarettes, well done for being a critical thinker, but that's not the reason. The same data set shows that average cigarette consumption per smoker was 9.8 a day in 2021 and was 10.0 a day in 2025.

 

The data since 2021 show that it is impossible for the illicit tobacco market to be "only" 14%, as HMRC claims. It's simple maths. 

 

And, by the way...

 

 And, moreover, look at the drop in smoking rates among the under 35s since vaping went mainstream...

 

 

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Let us drink at the football

With regards to Andy Burnham's call for repealing the ban on drinking and watching live football...

 

Apologists for illiberal regulation often insist that the restriction on liberty is too small to worry about, that it is easy enough to get around and that, all things considered, it doesn’t really count as a ban at all. These arguments were all swiftly deployed last week. Martin Samuel, the Sunday Times’ “voice of sport”, explained that “It is not as if alcohol is not available in the stadium; just not in sight of the pitch”, as if being in sight of the pitch were not a prerequisite for watching a sporting fixture. The Guardian’s Barney Ronay told his readers that “if you really must drink, it’s not that hard to smuggle in the gin flask.” Don’t try to change the law, just break it! Both journalists resorted to implying that there is something wrong with anyone who resents being bossed around for no good reason. Ronay opined that “nobody really needs to be more drunk at football” while Samuel offered some sneering advice, saying: “If you can’t go 45 minutes without alcohol you should be in the Betty Ford clinic, not the Hill Dickinson Stadium.”

This is the same straw man argument that is sometimes used to justify banning alcohol on trains or banning vaping anywhere. “Can’t you just wait a few hours? What’s wrong with you?!” It flips the conversation from a debate about the appropriate limits of state coercion and puts the onus on the individual to explain why they “need” to do something. Of course nobody needs to have a drink while watching sport, but then nobody needs to watch sport. Life would be unbearably dull if we were only allowed to meet our physical needs. But we are not talking about drinking at eight in the morning or drinking in the workplace. We are talking about how people choose to spend their leisure time on a Saturday afternoon. Having a pint and watching a game of football is a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the weekend and it should be none of the government’s business.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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ASH have become shameless grifters

When the government first proposed a ban on disposable vapes, ASH said it would disadvantage mental health patients, elderly smokers and those who have dexterity issues. They said that “the risk of unintended consequences is too great for us to support a ban”.

But once it was clear that the government was serious about the ban, this supposedly “independent” charity dropped its objections and, when it came into force last year, ASH called it “a step in the right direction”.

For several years, ASH have been calling on regulation to stop “cartoon characters, garish colours and sweet names” being used on vape packaging. I think this is a policy that most adult vapers could live with. ASH never called for plain packaging for vapes which is hardly surprising since they once insisted that the idea that “once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false.” It was only in September 2025, after the then-health secretary Wes Streeting announced his desire to put vapes in plain packaging, that ASH came out in favour of this policy. I can find no record of them ever supporting a full display ban for vapes and, as the image above shows, they still don’t. They say, quite rightly, that treating cigarettes and vapes as if they were equally dangerous “risks undermining the role of vapes for smoking cessation”. You’d think that smoking cessation would be a priority for an anti-smoking group, but they are urging their supporters to support a full ban anyway because that’s what the government wants to hear.

These people are amoral grifters. They have achieved everything an anti-smoking group could dream of and now exist purely to ensure their own preservation. They were always going to throw vapers under the bus, but their attack on a real health charity (the NNA) is a new low. ASH are cynical, unprincipled agents of the state that who say anything to keep the grant cheques rolling in. 

 

Read the rest (and subscribe) at the Snowdon Substack. 

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Nanny State Newsletter #4

The new Snowdon Substack newsletter is out now. If you haven't subscribed (it's free) please do so.

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