Can the high street be saved?

Andy Burnham thinks he can save the high street by stopping bookies and vape shops opening. I disagree.

 

The idea that the high street can be revived by killing off the few remaining businesses that are able to operate on it is just silly. These companies are not taking up shopfronts that WH Smith (now TG Jones!) is desperate to use. They are on the high street because WH Smith has gone.

The high street of the future will have fewer shops and those shops will be devoted to services - pubs, coffee shops, key-cutters, ice cream parlours, repair shops, cafés and, yes, barbers. The rest should be turned into residential housing.

 

Read the rest on my Substack. 

 

With weary predictability, the prohibitionists are taking the win but immediately demanding more.

 

 

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Nothing to see here, says ASH

ASH are still playing dumb about the illicit tobacco market. It's possible that they're not playing and are, in fact, dumb. The state-funded prohibitionist pressure group has been having a pop at Japan Tobacco International (JTI) for commissioning a survey which found that 31% of Brits have been offered illicit tobacco.

 

But how credible are JTI’s figures, and how do they compare with evidence that is independent from the tobacco industry?

A recent survey of smokers in the North East of England, commissioned by Fresh, found that 32% of smokers in the region had been offered illegal tobacco, most of them infrequently. Applying this figure to the UK as a whole would equate to roughly 3% of the total population (around a third of smokers), not 31%. On that basis, JTI's estimate appears to overstate the scale of the problem by 90%.

 

Can you see the problem with this logic? FRESH did a survey of smokers whereas JTI did a survey of the general population ("15,228 UK adults aged 19 and over, including 5,444 smokers"). ASH assumes that the smoking rate is only 9% (it is actually higher than that) and then disregards the other 91% of the population, as if only smokers are ever offered illicit tobacco. 

This will be news to a friend of mine who was recently telling me that he is offered pouches of tobacco every time he goes into a certain convenience store despite repeatedly telling them that he doesn't smoke.

 

This is nothing new. In their response to the latest national illicit tobacco estimates, JTI claimed that 42% of cigarettes consumed in the UK were illicit. If this is correct it would be the highest level off illicit cigarette consumption ever recorded. However, official data published by HMRC estimates that around 12% of cigarettes smoked in the UK are illicit, down from 20% in 2000 when the black market was at its peak...

 

Blah, blah, blah... The HMRC estimates are ASH's only life raft on this issue. I have explained at length why those estimates are worthless and have responded to ASH's cope as well. You only need to look at the collapse in the legal market to see that the illegal market has exploded in scale.

 

There are two possibilities. Either, JTI has identified a problem that every independent data source has somehow missed. Or this is another case of a tobacco company using dodgy stats or misleading reporting to cry wolf about the black market. 

 

FRESH is no more an independent data source than JTI. Like ASH, it is a tax-sponging prohibitionist outfit that will not take responsibility for the mess it has helped create. JTI and PMI both carry out empty pack surveys, both of which find that the illicit market share is much higher than HMRC's estimates suggest. HMRC itself admits that it has "low confidence" in its findings. The Irish government also uses empty pack surveys - the gold standard method of sizing up the black market - and these show that 26% of cigarette packs in Ireland were illegal in 2024 and a further 11% were legal but bought abroad via duty-free/EU. For rolling tobacco, the figures are 36% and 13% respectively. It is hard to see why the UK would be doing much better.

 

Moreover, ASH don't mention the study published last month, funded by Cancer Research UK, which found that the number of smokers buying tobacco from the black market doubled from 12.2% to 23.1% between mid-2023 and 2025. Given the illegal nature of this activity, we can assume that these are both underestimates. 

 

And then we have the halving of legal sales in three years and rapidly declining tobacco duty revenue. Alongside the obvious proliferation of illegal tobacco on the high street and the 1.2 billion illegal cigarettes seized last year, it is the HMRC estimate that looks like an outlier.

 

Meanwhile in Australia, the birthplace of plain packaging, child-friendly cigarettes are being sold by organised crime to anyone for a relative pittance...

 

Honestly, cigarette prohibition in Australia is probably the most innovative happening within any domestic market in 40 years.

Can you imagine a pack of whatever these are for under $15 even two decades ago?

Absolutely not. pic.twitter.com/92H5VpKCee

— 𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐚'𝐬 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐛𝐨𝐲 (@SardineTruther) August 9, 2026

Anti-smoking groups were sanguine about the illicit trade in Australia before the problem became too big (and violent) to ignore. Fool me once, etc.

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The dumbest epidemiology

Last week, the BBC publicised the results of a study which claimed that sugar consumption in early life increases the risk of dementia. People who don’t eat much sugar in the first years of life are supposedly 23 per cent less likely to develop the condition when they are older. “Our findings suggest that limiting sugar during the earliest stages of life may have lasting benefits for brain health,” said the study’s lead author Jiazhen Zheng.

How does he know this? He looked at data from the UK Biobank and found that people born between 1940 and 1953, when sugar was rationed, were less likely to develop dementia than those born afterwards. 

 

Of 15,025 who experienced sugar rationing before birth and during their first year of life, 388 developed dementia. Of 15,256 who experienced sugar rationing before birth and during their first two years of life, 456 developed dementia. Of 23,774 born after sugar rationing, 504 developed dementia. 

 

If you get your calculator out, you will find that these figures show that the rate of dementia actually fell over time, with 2.1 per cent of the youngest cohort suffering from the disease, compared to 2.6 per cent of the oldest cohort and 2.5 per cent of the second group. The claim that the people who endured sugar rationing were 23 per cent less likely to get dementia is based on numbers that have undergone substantial adjustment. 

But that is not the real problem with this study. The real problem is something that has doubtless already occurred to you and that would be obvious even to a small child. If people born between 1940 and 1953 are healthier than people born after 1953, there could be any number of explanations for it. There is no more reason to attribute it to sugar rationing than to anything else, including meat rationing and egg rationing. There is no reason to assume that it has anything to do with diet, nor indeed to anything people do in their first two years of life. These individuals grew up and lived in different times when the prevalence of some diseases declined and others increased. Focusing on one event and giving it the credit for everything that happened afterwards is so stupid that there is a name for it: the post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy. 

 

It gets worse. Read about it at The Critic. 

 

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A nation divided!

Nineteen years after the hated smoking ban was introduced, more than a third of the public still think smoking should be allowed, in designated smoking rooms at least. Simon Clark has the news at Taking Liberties.

  

Still, it is pretty worrying that 51% of UK adults refuse to mind their own business.

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The ongoing saga of the energy drink sales ban

You may not care about the freedom of teenagers to buy caffeinated fizzy drinks, but it will not just be children who find things more difficult if a ban is introduced. There are 170,000 vending machines in the UK selling cold drinks, none of which will be able to stock energy drinks once the ban comes into effect. This is ridiculous because, according to the Vending & Automated Retail Association, more than 82 per cent of vending machines are in places that either ban children or are of no interest to children, such as offices, factories and warehouses. Millions of adults will be inconvenienced for no obvious gain. 

Furthermore, adults will have to prove their age to buy these drinks. This is already a common complaint from those who shop at the virtue-signalling supermarkets that have brought in a voluntary ban. It will soon apply to every shop in England. 

 

Read all about it at The Critic. 

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Today's quack science

 You wait ages for the worst quack science of the year to show up and then two contenders arrive at once.

 Read about them on my Substack. 

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Repeal the smoking ban

Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore, incited howls of outrage even from his own supporters this week when he espoused the low-status opinion that pubs should be allowed to have a separate, well ventilated room in which people can smoke, as is the norm in much of Europe. “I detest smoking.” he said. “I would not use these rooms, but should that stop others?” In my view, Lowe did not go far enough. If a landlord wants to allow smoking throughout his pub, that is no business of the government. But even Lowe’s watered down policy proposal, accompanied by an elucidation of the most basic liberal principles, was treated as if he was calling for the slaughter of the first-born. 

No cliché went untouched. Why should I be forced to breathe someone’s ghastly cigarette? Why should I come home with my clothes stinking of smoke? What if the smoke drifts into another room? What about the poor bar staff? It was the only good thing Labour ever did!

Most of these arguments are undermined by the fact that no one would be forced to enter the smoking room. Insofar as bar staff would be obliged to enter it from time to time, the solution would be to make this part of the job description and only hire people who are smokers or who have no objection to going into a room in which people are smoking. In any case, with modern air conditioning the air in the smoking room would probably be cleaner than the air outside.

But the smoking ban was never really about secondhand smoke. The simple fact was that many nonsmokers disliked the smell of tobacco and, flattered by decades of propaganda which portrayed them as superior beings, they felt entitled to demand that it be eliminated from any building they might ever choose to enter. That this required a step-change in state control was welcomed by socialists and progressives as another milestone in the regimentation of society. More surprising was the failure of so many conservatives and liberals to push back on this assault on personal liberty and property rights. Instead, they joined forces with a “public health” lobby that was now unshackled from liberal norms in a broader war against other supposed vices.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.  

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