It's Nanny State Index day! Every two years I plough through the taxes and regulations of 29 countries to find out which is the worst. You can visit the new website and download the publication. You can also read this short overview by me for the Spectator. Enjoy!
Thursday, 15 May 2025
Wednesday, 14 May 2025
Mounjaro and Wegovy
I've written about weight loss jabs for The Telegraph....
The arrival of a genuine solution to a significant health problem has caused some consternation among those who think that the way to tackle obesity is to fundamentally change society. A Guardian headline gave the game away in 2023 when it said that the emergence of effective weight-loss drugs was “no excuse to let junk food companies off the hook”. Dr Margaret McCartney, a broadcaster and GP, has said that her “big concern” about the drugs is that “the eye is taken off the ball with stopping people getting overweight in the first place” which, for her, means changing “the obesogenic environment”.
The Guardian’s health editor Sarah Boseley has called on the government to reject the “quick fix” of semaglutide and instead “redesign our towns to get people walking”. Another Guardian writer has complained that weight-loss drugs are “trying to solve the wrong problem” and that the real issue is “primacy of work, long hours, low pay, hustle culture, structural inequalities, poverty and precarity.”
What all these solutions have in common is that they are wholly impractical. If it was so easy to eradicate “structural inequalities”, we would have done it by now. Towns cannot be suddenly redesigned and commuters are not going to suddenly start walking to work. Attempts to change “the obesogenic environment” by moving so-called junk food away from supermarket checkouts have failed to reduce obesity, and more extensive interventions, such as banning or taxing certain foods, are unlikely to the tolerated by voters. And, incidentally, weight loss drugs have not “let junk food companies off the hook”. On the contrary, they are a threat to their profits because they make people eat less.
Nesta, a large charity that describes itself as an “innovation agency for social good”, has expressed concern that the drugs “might well deepen the emphasis in the public discourse on a “personal responsibility narrative”’. The geneticist Giles Yeo has said that he is worried that the existence of GLP-1 agonists might be used by politicians “as a cop-out not to make the hard policy decisions.” Nesta would prefer the government to focus on “reformulating food, reducing junk food advertising and shifting price promotions towards healthier foods”. Yeo puts it more bluntly, saying that “we’re going to have to lose some liberties”.
Saturday, 10 May 2025
Remote Gaming Duty and the online betting industry
Rachel Reeves is short of cash and thinks she can squeeze more money out of the booming online betting industry. The problem, as I explain in The Critic, is that it is not really booming and the government risks killing the golden goose.
One of the failings of the British left is to take the Conservatives seriously when they claim to be the party of low taxes. Having talked themselves into believing that the Tories spent 14 years under-taxing businesses and the rich, the Labour Party came into power thinking that there were billions of pounds lying on the pavement waiting to be picked up. It only took one Budget for this idea to unravel. Before the election, a tax on non-doms was the magic money tree that would pay for free school breakfasts and fix the NHS. Today, the only question is whether the tax will raise a trivial sum of money or lose the government money. Hiking National Insurance contributions for employers seemed like a pain-free way of raising £25 billion, but it was soon understood as a tax on employment and, with business confidence collapsing, it no longer looks like such easy money.
There is a dawning realisation that the Conservatives, who raised the tax burden to the highest level in 70 years through a combination of higher rates, new levies and fiscal drag, did not walk the walk as the party of low taxes. If they didn’t introduce a new tax or increase an old one, it was not because they were on the side of “the rich” but because they could see that it would do more harm than good. While the far-left call for a wealth tax in the deluded belief that it would raise £25 billion a year, the rich are already scarpering under the weight of existing taxes.
In practice, the government has a choice between raising taxes such as VAT and income tax which have a broad base or cutting the size of the state. The Cakeist electorate want neither and nor does the Labour Party and so the government continues to search for easy pickings.
One ruse, announced last week, is to raise the tax on online betting. The government did not quite put it like that. It said it wants to explore the possibility of a “single tax for UK-facing remote gambling”, but since the tax on online casinos is 21 per cent while the tax on online bookmakers is 15 per cent, the only realistic outcome is an increase in the latter to match the former.
Friday, 9 May 2025
These people are insane
After 18 months of war, there is a public health crisis in Gaza. Tom Gatehouse from Bath University has written about it in a World Health Organisation journal.
Media coverage of Israel's assault in Gaza has mostly focused on those killed and injured by bombs and bullets, and more recently, on the spread of infectious diseases due to the severe water shortages and the destruction of critical infrastructure (14). However, tobacco use is an important aspect of a public health crisis that has been unfolding under the shadows of war, and will have severe and long-lasting consequences unless it is addressed.
I should perhaps have mentioned that Tom Gatehouse's role at Bath University is as a research assistant for the Bloomberg-funded conspiracy website Tobacco Tactics.
The tobacco industry thrives during times of crisis and chaos (11). In recent years, it has exploited conflict situations in countries like Ukraine and Sudan (11-13), yet the harm due to tobacco use often tends to be overlooked in such contexts.
That is because most people have a sense of perspective, Tom.
Tobacco control in the State of Palestine has long been in need of reinforcement. Its tobacco control laws have not been updated since 2011 (27) and implementation of WHO’s recommended tobacco control strategies has not been comprehensive (1).
Yes, that's what's been holding it back.
Although strengthening tobacco control may appear far-fetched in the current scenario, Israel’s military offensive may in fact have brought the State of Palestine closer to joining international legal frameworks, including the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC).
Finally, some hope for this benighted region!
The appalling suffering in Gaza has generated greater momentum towards recognition of a Palestinian State, with Norway, Spain and Ireland all formally recognising Palestine in 2024, bringing to 146 the number of countries that have done so. The World Health Assembly described Palestine as a State for the first time in May 2024 (28,29). The State of Palestine can leverage this international support to join the WHO FCTC and lay the foundation for a comprehensive tobacco control programme, as part of the wider effort to rebuild its now-ruined healthcare system.
I'm sure that will one of the top priorities of the government run by *checks notes* Hamas.
What this place needs is some graphic warnings and some above-inflation hikes in tobacco duty!
Wednesday, 7 May 2025
IARC gets taken over by anti-alcohol activists
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was set up by the World Heath Organisation (WHO) in 1965 to research the causes of cancer. Every institution has been hollowed out by activists in the sixty years since and it comes as little surprise that it is now getting involved in policy. In a study published this week in the theoretically reputable New England Journal of Medicine, IARC has judged literal prohibition to be evidence-based.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Friday, 2 May 2025
The Skeleton Army
I've written about grassroots resistance to the temperance lobby in Victorian Britain. It got quite violent.
It was in Worthing that I first heard of the Skeleton Army. Could it really be true that there were organised mobs beating up temperance activists in Victorian Britain? It seemed too good to be true. Yet true it was. The Salvation Army invited trouble from the start. Founded in 1878 by the self-styled “General” William Booth, they would pitch up in town, find themselves a “barracks” to live in and march through the streets saving drunks for Jesus.
Most of the drunks did not want to be saved. They mostly just wanted to drink. Even those who did not drink disapproved of a bunch of do-gooders with military pretensions parading around with a brass band.
The Skeleton Army, formed in Exeter in October 1881, was only the latest incarnation of violent opposition to the Salvationists. They had been attacked by “roughs” calling themselves the “2nd Squad of The Salvation Army” in Coventry two years earlier.
In Whitechapel, the “Unconverted Salvation Army” had been making its presence felt. There had already been two anti-Salvationist riots in Basingstoke at the hands of the puzzlingly named “Massagainians”.
Gangs of mostly young men hurled stones, flour, beer, paint, dead rats and mud at the Sally Army wherever they found them. Blood was shed. Bones were broken. The windows of the Army’s “barracks” were smashed. This happened all over the country, often night after night.
Some incidents were less serious than others, but as Nigel Bovey says in his history of the Skeleton Army, Blood and Flag, “in today’s Britain even a single incident of the type endured 150 years ago would be considered a major outrage”.
I can't say I condone all their behaviour but we could do with a bit of their spirit now.
Friday, 25 April 2025
The fatuous rhetoric of the "tobacco playbook"
I've been studying policy-making a lot recently, contrasting the economist's public choice approach with the activist-academics' 'public health' approach. I have a study in the pipeline for later this year and have published two reports with the IEA this year - People vs Paternalism and The Corporate Playbook. The latter came out yesterday and looks at the idea that there is some distinctive playbook, sometimes known as the 'tobacco playbook', that various 'unhealthy commodity industries' work from.
It's a fatuous, self-serving myth. The supposed playbook is defined so broadly that every industry that engages in the policy-making process is bound to follow large parts of it, as is any other interest group, including all the 'public health' lobby groups. It's meaningless rhetoric designed to stigmatise anyone who opposes state paternalism.
A nice example of the 'playbook' phrase being thrown around appeared in the BMJ last week. I have written about it for The Critic and mentioned it in this video.
These studies contribute nothing to the field of political science, but they do serve several purposes. The first is to make political pygmies feel as if they are taking on Big Tobacco when they ban adverts for ice cream. The second is to discourage policy-makers from engaging with business; these studies often conclude with an appeal for certain industries to be excluded from the policy-making process. The third is to divert attention from the people who are really following a playbook. HFSS food advertising will be banned online and on TV before 9pm in October. The BMJ article makes the case for banning it everywhere else. This is what happened with tobacco and is what the “public health” lobby hopes will happen with alcohol and gambling in due course.
There is an anti-tobacco blueprint that is being inexorably applied to other products: ban advertising, raise taxes, apply warning labels, demonise industry, stigmatise consumers, put it in plain packaging and then go for full prohibition. It is all so predictable because we’ve seen it rolled out before. That is the real playbook. Everything else is projection.
Do read it all and download The Corporate Playbook.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)