Lowering the drink-drive limit

Lacking anything else to do, the Labour government is planning to lower the drink-drive limit. England and Wales have a higher limit than most European countries and fewer drink-related road accidents per capita than nearly all of them. We also know from Scotland that lowering the limit won't have any effect on road safety but will damage the pub trade. 

The worst people in the country are all in favour of this, namely the anti-motorists ("Just walk lol"), the pub gentrifiers ("I support my pub by going in every now and again for a lime soda") and the people who support every pointless restriction on liberty by saying "What's the fuss? All you have to do is obey the law."

But it is a pointless restriction on liberty. As I say in Spiked, it is the opposite of evidence-based policy. If you support unnecessary restrictions on liberty which damage businesses just so you can feel morally righteous, you are the problem.

Read my Spiked piece. 

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Food advertising ban introduced - what's next?

The "junk food" advertising ban came into full effect on Monday. As I argue in The Critic, the whole thing is built on lies: a policy based on quack science designed to tackle a problem that has been wilfully exaggerated to reduce costs to the NHS that don't exist. And where has the opposition been?

 

It takes wilful blindness not to see that food is being dragged down the same slippery slope as tobacco, with a full advertising ban being the next step. Where is the food industry in all this? Where are the advertising platforms and TV companies? The Food and Drink Federation hasn’t put out a press release since mid-December and hasn’t tweeted for over a month. In an unbelievably tepid quote given to the BBC, it said that it was “committed to working in partnership with the government and others to help people make healthier choices” and claimed that its members’ products “now have a third of the salt and sugar and a quarter of the calories than they did ten years ago”. Whoopee. Where has that got them? With the most hostile business environment in the developed world, that’s where. And there is undoubtedly more to come. I don’t expect a trade association to call for the head of Wes Streeting but it could at least say that it is disappointed with the government and call for a ceasefire. Instead they essentially boasted about shrinkflation.

As for the broadcasters, they have spent years whipping up hysteria about food and are now sowing what they reaped. The boss of Channel 4 has said that the ad ban could cost her company £50 million a year. She should have thought about that before she commissioned all those Jamie Oliver documentaries. ITV has been no better with its scaremongering about “ultra-processed food”. These companies were perfectly placed to put out an alternative viewpoint and had years to do so, but they never did, even though it would have been justified in the name of balance.

 

Read the rest.

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The stakeholder state

We need to strip funding from all politically active NGOs, charities and pressure groups. We need a true bonfire of the quangos. We need to - for want of a better word - purge those “arm’s-length bodies” and government departments that have been “captured” by ideologues. Above all, we need to repeal or significantly amend a number of laws, including the Climate Change Act, the Equality Act, the Children and Families Act, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act, the Town and Country Planning Act, the Employment Rights Act, and the Human Rights Act. We probably need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Much of this will be unpopular, and not just with the “stakeholder state”, because all this legislation sounds nice (governments never call a law ‘The Anti-Growth Act’ or ‘The Business Suffocation Act’). Some of these laws have only just been introduced.

The government - this government, the last government and the next government - is in a strait-jacket of well-meaning but badly drafted laws that have been exploited by activist judges and single-issue campaigners. There is no point complaining about the judges and the campaigners. The only way out of the woods is do the one thing that politicians can do and change the law.

 

Read the rest (free) on my Substack.  

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Michael McFadden RIP

Some sad news to start the year. The writer and activist Michael J. McFadden passed away just before Christmas aged 75. His 2004 book Dissecting Antismokers' Brains was ahead of its time in critiquing the tactics, arguments and evidence of the prohibitionist tobacco control lobby. He usefully divided anti-smokers into nine categories: the innocents, the neurotics, the truly affected, the bereaved, the ex-smokers, the controllers, the idealists, the moralists and the greedy. 

 

Michael went on to write another book about the coming prohibition of tobacco (TobakkoNacht – The Antismoking Endgame), but could mostly be found in forums and "below the line" in a Sisyphean struggle against online misinformation. He was kind enough to read an early draft of my book Velvet Glove, Iron Fist and provided many helpful comments, particularly with regards to the situation in his native USA. He continued pinging me occasional e-mails with encouraging words for the rest of his life. 

His background surprised some people:

 

Michael J. McFadden grew up in Brooklyn in the ’60s, studied Peace Studies and Peace Research at Manhattan College (BA) and the U of PA’s Wharton Graduate School, and then moved to being an activist/trainer in a nonviolence commune, canvassing door-to-door for an anti-nuke group, organizing bicycle activism, and eventually writing two books aimed at fighting the antismoking movement.

So how does a hippie peace/bicycle activist become a pro-smoking activist and writer?

The answer is that I’m NOT a “pro-smoking” anything: I’m a pro-freedom, pro-science, anti-overpowering-government-control, anti-manipulation-through-dishonest-propaganda activist and writer.

He'll be missed. 

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Stay safe this Christmas with 'public health' advice

A Christmas message from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities

Seasons’s greetings! Christmas is a time for eating, drinking and merriment, and is therefore a serious threat to public health. Banning it is not yet politically feasible, but there are a number of precautions you can take over the festive period to avoid being too much of a burden on our precious NHS.

The greatest peril comes on Christmas Day when many people behave as if the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines do not apply to them. Even some doctors have been known to succumb to temptation, but with a few simple heuristics, it is easier to have a compliant and abstemious Christmas than you might think. The key is to never allow “fun” and “merriment” to push thoughts of death and disease out of your mind. Our glorious former Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies once advised women to “do as I do when I reach for my glass of wine and think, ‘Do I want my glass of wine or do I want to raise my risk of breast cancer?’” This might seem morbid, but it is not as morbid as actually dying, which you will if you don’t follow public health advice.

We at OHID might not have the common touch of Sally Davies or the joie de vivre of Chris Whitty, but we have come up with a simple rhyme to help you get through the holidays: “If you want to avoid heart disease, go easy on the festivities”. 

Read the rest at The Critic and yourself a very merry Christmas.

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Australia's prohibition double whammy

The government of South Australia has launched an anti-vaping campaign on social media aimed at impressionable youngsters. It features some woman from the Cancer Council asserting that vaping "definitely" causes lung cancer based on a speculative report that doesn't even make that claim.

 

EXCLUSIVE: A new anti-vaping campaign is being rolled out across social media apps, targeting impressionable young South Australians. Authorities say while teen vaping rates are declining, there are still far too many becoming addicted to nicotine. @HanniHowe pic.twitter.com/pq99iNjbp9

— 7NEWS Adelaide (@7NewsAdelaide) December 15, 2025

 

Aside from the misinformation, there is an obvious problem with this campaign. Australia banned all social media for the under-16s last week (including YouTube!). The most likely outcome of this is that the cool kids will find a workaround (VPNs, for example) and leave the minority excluded. Perhaps the government thinks the same so is targeting kids on the platforms that it has just banned.

 

The sale of vapes is not just banned to the under-16s but to everybody in Australia. So we have a public information campaign telling kids who cannot legally see the adverts not to buy a product that nobody can legally buy. It's almost as if the government doesn't have much faith in prohibition, isn't it?

 

Incidentally, the news report notes that the youth vaping rate in Australia has fallen from 15% to 11% recently. In the UK, where vapes are legal (though only to adults) and there is less of a moral panic about vaping, the rate is 7%.

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From harm reduction to harm elimination

After the WHO anti-nicotine conference last month, I wrote...

 

It is very clear that the Bloomberg/WHO approach from now on will be to demonise nicotine and portray harm reduction as an industry scam.

 

This will require some sharp U-turns given that nicotine products are on the WHO's list of essential medicines and "harm reduction" is an explicit part of the WHO's definition of tobacco control, but we're dealing with seasoned liars who face no pushback from the media so they have every chance of success.

 

Nicotine was literally advertised as being "therapeutic" when Big Pharma was the main seller of it outside of cigarettes. It is now portrayed as some sort of brain poison. And the WHO's war on harm reduction goes beyond the demonstrably false narrative of it being an "industry" invention. They are now changing the very meaning of the term, as some of Bloomberg's minions explained in an article in Tobacco Control this week...

 

This year’s discussion demonstrated the strong interest among Parties in identifying the best approaches to protect future generations from both tobacco and nicotine addiction. In preparation for this discussion, the Convention Secretariat prepared a report, making it clear that there is no legitimate ‘tobacco harm reduction’ based on advancing the commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry. In the context of the WHO FCTC, ‘harm reduction’ is ‘harm elimination,’ the intended outcome from the full implementation of the treaty’s existing, evidence-based measures. 

 

This is a grotesque rewriting of history and the dictionary. Harm reduction has never meant, or even implied, harm elimination, and if the authors of the FCTC had meant 'harm elimination' they would have said so. This is truly Orwellian.

 

As Michael Siegel says:

 

The rejection of harm reduction by WHO endangers the lives of millions of smokers worldwide. The WHO is literally abandoning smokers and using them as sacrificial lambs in an effort to demonize safer alternatives to cigarettes because the FCTC leaders can't stand the idea that the use of a nicotine product could actually be beneficial to health (even though they have no problem with pharmaceutical companies reaping in billions of dollars based on the same concept - perhaps this is because the WHO Foundation receives millions from the pharmaceutical industry). 

While it is bad enough that tobacco control organizations and health agencies in the United States have shunned harm reduction in tobacco control, the fact that WHO has rejected harm reduction strategies to address the worldwide burden of smoking-related disease is truly a global public health disaster. 

 

It would be interesting to know to what extent this is being driven by the pharmaceutical industry, as Siegel implies. My sense is that it is the Tobacco Taliban within the various Bloomberg front groups who are really pulling the strings. After all, if the goal is total harm elimination, Big Pharma's products are in the cross-hairs too. 0.4% of the risk of cigarettes is 0.4% too much!

 

 

 

Can someone tell me what the hell is the ethical basis for a harm elimination strategy backed up by state coercion?

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