Minimum pricing in Wales - another fail

Minimum pricing has failed to badly in Wales that even the BBC didn't buy the government's spin when the evaluation claimed it had been a success last week.

 

A change in alcohol pricing in Wales has pushed problem drinkers away from cheap cider and towards strong spirits, a study suggests.

A minimum price of 50p per unit was introduced in Wales in March 2020.

A survey of 138 people in Wales who had sought help for problem drinking found some had swapped to "buying litres of vodka".

The report, published on Wednesday by the Welsh government, also says that some problem drinkers are going without food or heating, begging, turning to sex work, or stealing to pay for drink.

That is largely what you take away from the various reports that made up the evaluation. The claim that "the implementation of the policy has been successful" in the final report bares no relation to the evidence presented and is a cope designed to get around the sunset clause that kicks in next year.

I've written all about it for The Critic.

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Ryanair's Baptists and Bootleggers booze ban

Ryanair has once again called for a two drink limit in European airports. I discuss the possible reasons for this in City AM today...

 

Now let us consider what it would take for somebody to become drunk and disorderly on a Ryanair flight. We must assume that they were not inebriated when the flight took off since Ryanair would not have allowed them to board. Something must have happened in mid-air to increase their blood alcohol level and yet passengers are not allowed to bring their own alcohol on board to drink, so it can’t be that. Maybe Ryanair makes alcohol available for passengers to buy during the flight, perhaps using some sort of trolley service?

It turns out that this is exactly what it does! Ryanair sells a range of beer, wine and spirits and has no intention of stopping. Nor does it plan to set a limit on how many drinks it sells to each passenger, regardless of the problems this may cause to airport staff and taxi drivers at the final destination. Fancy that!

 

Read it all (free).

 

The neo-temperance lobby are keen on the same policy but for different reasons...

 

An interesting proposal to limit the sale of alcohol in airports. Equally clear that harm from alcohol arises whether sold in airports, supermarkets or late night night bars. Hence restrictions on availability such as trading hours should not be relaxedhttps://t.co/dPEKlnJYSu.

— AlcoholActionIreland (@AlcoholIreland) January 13, 2025

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A plan for freedom

I've written about my report, Defanging the Nanny State, which was released during the Christmas perineum, for Con Home.

It is in these first days of January that our minds turn to self-improvement. Good luck to you if you are starting a new diet or giving up smoking. The masochists among you may be abstaining from alcohol this month. Some of you may even have joined a gym.

For the killjoys in ‘public health’, this is the most wonderful time of the year. After weeks of over-indulgence, we are more susceptible to a bit of finger-wagging. In the past, the conversation would be about what we can do to make ourselves healthier. These days, it is about what the government should do to force us to be healthier.

The Alcohol Health Alliance was straight out of the blocks on New Year’s Day demanding a clampdown on booze advertising; the Obesity Health Alliance has been calling for “robust prevention measures” to protect us from “unhealthy [food] options”.

It is a bad time to propose liberalisation, but that is what I will do. With the help of European partners, I edit the Nanny State Index. It is a league table of 30 countries based on how much they over-regulate food, alcohol, soft drinks, tobacco and e-cigarettes. The UK is consistently at the wrong end of the table.

It is due to get worse thanks to the forthcoming ban on HFSS food advertising, the vape tax, incremental tobacco prohibition and other policies conceived by the last Conservative government and eagerly brought to fruition by the current Labour administration.

Another world is possible. Countries such as Germany and Luxembourg have relatively little paternalistic regulation and seem to do alright. Instead of trying to compete with Turkey and Norway to become Europe’s top nanny state, let’s try to beat Germany and be the best country for consumer freedom. What would that involve?

 

Do read the rest.

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Drinkers are on notice

The US 'public health' industry is preparing the ground for a renewed assault on alcohol. The Surgeon General called for cigarette-style warnings on booze last week in a report that he put out to take people's minds off the rather more rigorous report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in December which once more confirmed that moderate drinkers live longer than teetotallers.

The ICCPUD report (Interagency Coordination Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking) is expected to strike another blow for the neo-temperance lobby. Stuffed with anti-alcohol academics, don't be surprised if it goes beyond its remit and spouts 'no safe level' dogma.

 

This all serves to grease the slippery slope. Denormalisation, here we come. And they're not even hiding it.

 

Timothy Rebbeck, Vincent L. Gregory, Jr. Professor of Cancer Prevention, told USA Today that considering putting warning labels on alcohol is just a start. He noted that after the surgeon general first warned about the dangers of smoking in 1964, it still took decades to develop strategies to curb smoking, such as limiting ads for cigarette, banning them in public spaces, and taxing them.

“It took time for people’s mindset to change and it’s going to be the same for alcohol,” he said.

 

Drinkers, you have been warned.

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Mum buys son cigarettes to get him off the vapes

Remember the doctor in Australia who bought his son cigarettes to get him off the vapes? An incredible story but not impossible to believe since Australia is a cesspool of disinformation about e-cigarettes.

Now the same thing has happened in the Netherlands. The Dutch appear to be up to their necks in a similar cesspool.

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Farewell, 2024

I'm not going to do a review of the year. I'm sure you can remember what happened as well as I can. But as 2024 draws to a close I'd like to thank all the people who read my stuff here and elsewhere. As I was saying to Paul 'Guido' Staines on the Last Orders podcast recently, blogging ain't what it used to be, but I should give a shout out to Michael Siegel who is back at The Rest of the Story after a few years absence and to the Angry Chef who fired up his blog yesterday to write about why 'ultra-processed food' is dumb (a must read).

If you don't follow David Zaruk's Firebreak blog, you should. In his wish list for 2025, he hopes that governments will stop funding NGOs. Amen to that and a happy new year to you.

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Defanging the nanny state

AI generated

 

I have a new IEA report out today. It's called Defanging the Nanny State and it looks at what politicians would have to do to get the UK to the bottom of the Nanny State Index. I suggest the following steps:

1. Alcohol taxes: set them at 13p per unit for all drinks to cover the external costs. This would be a significant reduction for most products. Wine duty would still be higher than in most EU countries.

2. Tobacco taxes: halve them to bring them in line with places like Italy and Cyprus. This wouldn't even cost HMRC much money because so much tobacco is sold illegally in the UK at the moment.  

3. The sugar tax: get rid of it. It hasn't worked and most European countries don't have one.

4. E-cigarette and heated tobacco advertising: legalise it on all platforms with appropriate regulation of content. The e-cig ad ban is a hangover from EU membership. Ditto all other silly EU regs, e.g. banning vape juices bottles larger than 10ml.

5. Legalise snus. Another hangover from the EU.

6. Maintain the smoking ban in all state-owned buildings open to the public and have no-smoking as the legal default in privately owned buildings unless the owner explicitly permits it.

7. Abolish minimum pricing in Scotland and Wales. Ireland is the only other country that has it. The policy hasn't worked and has cost drinkers a fortune.

8. Abolish restrictions on where tasty food can be positioned in shops and cancel the forthcoming advertising ban.

9. Abolish licensing hours. Of the 30 countries in the 2023 Nanny State Index, 18 have no national legislation dictating when licensed premises have to close. Restaurants and bars should close when their owners wants them to.

Doing all this would get the UK below Germany in the Nanny State Index - but only just. Is it going to happen? No. More nanny state legislation is on its way. But this wish list shows two things. 

Firstly, we have a hell of a lot of nanny state regulation and our sin taxes are sky high.

Secondly, it is politically feasible insofar as other countries have a much smaller nanny state and their governments don't get kicked out for not being paternalistic enough. 

Some people might consider the proposals above to be dramatic but they would leave us in a very similar position to the likes of Luxembourg and the Czech Republic. I could have gone much further. I haven't touched daft policies like plain packaging (which only a small handful of European countries have) and I have kept the cigarette advertising ban in place. That doesn't mean I agree with them, but the task I set myself was to do the minimum required to get the UK to the bottom of the index.

Read the full report here. 

  

 

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