I spoke to Rohan Pike, the founder of the Australian Border Force’s Tobacco Strike Team, about his country’s black market tobacco nightmare. 80% of the market is illegal, tobacco tax revenue is down by three-quarters and there have been nearly 300 firebombings. It's a warning to the world but the world won't listen.
Today, HMRC produced its tobacco tax gap estimate for 2024/25. As I have explained before, HMRC's methodology systematically underestimates the size of the illicit market and should be scrapped in favour of empty pack surveys (as used in Ireland). In their latest edition, they have resorted to "imputing" the figures for 2024/25. This is essentially guesswork based on projecting from past trends - and the past trends are themselves unreliable. It's a farce and needs to stop. According to HMRC, the amount of illegal handrolling tobacco sold is at an all time low!
The book looks at four campaigns for “public health” policies in Britain in the 2010s: plain packaging for tobacco, minimum pricing for alcohol, the sugary drinks tax and the de facto ban on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). I look at the evidence that was cited the most by politicians and the media, but the thing that stands out is that the decisions to introduce (or reject) each of the policies do not seem to have had much to do with evidence.
Instead, I argue that everybody involved in the policy-making process, from voters up to the Prime Minister, was acting in their own rational self-interest. Paradoxically, this led to irrational policies being introduced (none of them worked).
I outline some of my findings at the Spectator today…
The evidence from Inside the Sausage Factory suggests that politicians will succumb to pressure on low-salience issues unless they believe that the policy will be widely unpopular or conspicuously backfire. Once the ‘public health’ interest groups had put their policies on the agenda, the government could not put off a decision forever. They became barnacles on the boat that needed to be scraped off. With the exception of minimum pricing in England, which had significant public and political opposition, the government in Westminster concluded that the reputational risks of inaction were greater than the political, economic and legal risks of acting. The squeaky wheel got the grease.
For those of us who are of a liberal disposition, this is not a happy conclusion to reach. It implies that politicians are hostages to small pressure groups manipulating public opinion and that the cycle will repeat itself again and again. Where will it end?
In the campaigns I write about in Inside the Sausage Factory, several studies were referenced again and again by politicians, journalists and activists. The policies didn’t work and the evidence wasn’t very good, but at least evidence was cited from time to time. The evidence for banning “junk food” adverts and social media for the under-16s is negligible and the evidence from the generational tobacco ban is non-existent. Scientific evidence was not a decisive factor in any of the campaigns I studied from the 2010s. Today, it seems to be entirely optional.
I've written about David Hockney's anti-nanny state activism for Spiked. I had always hoped to meet him (he attended a few FOREST parties), but sadly I never will.
The contrast between the playfulness of Hockney’s bouts of
libertarian activism and the po-faced outrage he received in response
only served to underline his point. After Hockney sent the Guardian a piece of art criticising ‘anti-smoking fanatics’ in 2012, its readers responded by making drawings of their own
– the artistic equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight – to whine
about how ghastly smoking is. Unsurprisingly, they were the height of
cringe.
After the Guardian ran a sycophantic interview with the Australian anti-smoking academic Simon Chapman, Hockney wrote a letter
to the newspaper explaining why it would have been better off talking
to him. Hockney listed all the things that he was and Chapman wasn’t,
including being ‘a good and satisfied customer of the tobacco
companies’, ‘not a professional agitator’ and ‘someone who prefers the
centre of Bohemia to Australian suburbia’. As Chapman’s flaccid reply
showed, it was the charge of not being Bohemian that stung him the
most. It was hard to believe that a septuagenarian living in Bridlington
was more edgy than a sociologist living in Melbourne, and yet we all
knew it to be so.
The puritans and killjoys of ‘public health’ had no answer to him. He
was a living legend and they weren’t. Spending all day painting and
smoking is not everybody’s idea of a fulfilling life, but it sounded
better than whatever Chris Whitty was doing. By shifting the debate from
the risks of death to the joys of life, Hockney had taken them out of
their comfort zone. All they could do was ignore him. It must have
pained them to see him live too long for them to say, ‘I told you so’,
but he was bound to die eventually. And now he has, and the world is a
drearier place for it.
Read it all (non-subscribers get three article free per month).
Keir Starmer's attempt to build legacy is, like Blair and Sunak's, a ban, this time on kids using social media. I've written about it for The Critic...
We will continue to regress as a
society until we learn to judge new legislation by its likely
consequences rather than by the intentions of its advocates. The looming
ban on under-16s having access to platforms “whose purpose is to enable
social interaction and
which allow users to post material” has all the hallmarks of another
government failure. It has already been tried — and failed — in
Australia. It is being framed as an attack on Big Tech rather than its
satisfied customers. It has been pushed through by the conflicted old
media off the back of a narrow selection of bereaved parents who have
been used a human shield against criticism. It seems designed to give
Starmer a “legacy”.
These are all red flags. So too is the familiar refrain that the ban will not be a “silver bullet”
and that the public should therefore brace themselves for further
restrictions. (Many of the problems the ban is supposed to address were
meant to have been solved by the Online Safety Act. Remember that?). In
his early morning address to the nation, Starmer urged us to not make
the perfect the enemy of the good. Teenagers sometimes drink alcohol, he
said, but that was no reason not to ban the sale of alcohol to
children.
Fair enough, you might say, but
leaving aside the fact that children can legally drink alcohol in
Britain from the age of five, reducing some teenagers’ access to social
media is clearly not perfect, but is it even good? The consequences of
Australia’s “world leading” social media ban have been largely ignored
by those who seek to emulate it, but any attempt to create
evidence-based policy must start there. The Australian government’s eSafety commissioner
found that 70 per cent of parents said their children still had active
social media accounts three months after the “social media minimum age”
was introduced. If, like Wes Streeting,
you think that social media is as bad as tobacco, this sounds like a
modest but non-trivial improvement, but who are the teenagers being
denied this means of communication and what platforms are the rest
using?
High School Students Learn Activism and Policymaking through SPH Initiative
David Jernigan leads the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy
Coalition, a coalition of school- and community-based preventive
healthcare programs he cofounded to prepare young people to address
pressing issues.
This guy has got 60 Massachusetts high schoolers "to share
data and insights on alcohol policy with lawmakers."
In the three months before the visit, Jernigan, professor of health
law, policy, and management at BU’s School of Public Health, drilled
them in democracy and alcohol policy via Zoom and an in-person training
at BU, assisted by Hannah Martuscello (SPH’26).
It’s the second year that Jernigan has recruited young activists from
the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy Coalition, a statewide coalition of
school- and community-based preventive healthcare programs he
cofounded.
How very academic.
David Jernigan is a sociologist working at Boston University School of Public Health. He has over 200 publications to his name, mostly pushing neo-temperance policies. Examples of his efforts to extend the field of human knowledge include Alcohol Problems and Policies: the States Have the Power, But Will They Use It?, Strengthening Advocacy Skills for Public Health Leaders, and Media advocacy: lessons from community experiences.
“I grew up steeped in the Christianity of witness to injustice,” he says. “And the more I got into alcohol research, the more obvious it was to me: this is a huge injustice that’s being perpetrated.”
In 2000, he became friends with Derek Rutherford who took the pledge at the age of 9 and has said: "In my youth I had three loves: the temperance movement; the church, because I was also an active member of the Baptist Church in Easington; and the Labour Party."
Rutherford went on to set up neo-temperance organisations all over the world, including Eurocare and the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance (Jernigan is on the board of the latter) and he was chairman of the Advisory Board at the Institute of Alcohol Studies.
In a video for the Institute of Alcohol Studies (the successor to the UK Temperance Alliance), Jernigan uses rhetoric straight from the anti-tobacco playbook.
"When
you have a product that kills three million people a year worldwide, is
carcinogenic and is associated with more than 200 disease and injury
conditions, you need to do a lot of marketing."
Although delivered with a self-satisfied smile, this is nonsense to anybody who gives it more than two seconds thought. Alcohol has been widely consumed for thousands of years, long before the advent of marketing, and it continues to be widely consumed in countries that ban alcohol marketing today.
Despite being a religiously inspired temperance advocate who doesn't understand the market he has spent his career writing about, Jernigan
has been an advisor to the World Bank and the World Health Organization
(WHO) and was the principal author of WHO’s first Global Status Report
on Alcohol and Global Status Report on Alcohol and Youth.
And now he is using children "to share data and insights on alcohol policy with lawmakers". Many such cases.
