Not everything is a public health issue

Is gambling advertising a "public health issue"? And if it is, then what isn't? 

I've written for Spiked about this... 

If your definition of public health is so broad that it encompasses everything that could potentially have a direct or indirect effect on the health of somebody somewhere, then everything can be described as a public-health issue, but what is the point? If everything is a public-health issue, there can be no such thing as a public-health expert. Expertise requires specialised knowledge of a narrow field. A problem doesn’t become easier to solve just by putting it under the umbrella of ‘public health’. What do they teach people in schools of public health that makes them better equipped to solve every social and economic problem than anyone else?

Similarly, what do civil servants at the Department of Health know about gambling that the people at DCMS don’t? What expertise do they have on the three key licensing objectives of preventing gambling from being a source of crime, ensuring fair and open play, and protecting children and vulnerable people? At a push, they might have some ideas about how to protect the ‘vulnerable’, but they would be no more than the usual sledgehammer tactics of taxing and banning. ‘Public health’ academics have shown themselves to be hilariously out of their depth when they attempt to transfer their supposed wisdom to the world of gambling. If they can’t borrow a trick from the anti-smoking lobby, they don’t know what to do.

 

Read it all.

 

NB. Spiked has a partial paywall these days. I recommend subscribing, but if you don't you can still register and read three articles for free each month.

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The idiocy of MMT

Emmanuel Maggiori has a book about Modern Monetary Theory out today. It's very good and I was delighted to sit down with him on Tuesday to talk about it. 

There's a danger of giving credibility to this ridiculous theory just by talking about it. It's so idiotic that it feels like punching down, but since it seems to be growing in popularity, it needs to be addressed.

Enjoy!  

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The "stickiness" of betting shop customers

It was only six months ago that Carsten Jung from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) was telling the Treasury Select Committee not to listen to those silly gambling industry lobbyists who were warning about hundreds of betting shops closing if gambling duty was hiked up. I wrote at the time...

 

The IPPR claims that its tax rises would bring in an extra £3.2 billion a year which former Prime Minister Gordon Brown says should be used to “solve” the child poverty “crisis”. The government currently spends the thick end of £400 billion a year on social security and yet relative child poverty persists, so it is far from certain that an extra £3 billion would solve anything, but despite the Treasury’s notorious resistance to hypothecation, anti-gambling campaigners have craftily made the two issues of gambling taxation and child poverty synonymous. Whose side are you on? Hungry children or online casinos? And what kind of monster are you anyway?

Cunning though it may be, this plan does rather depend on the onshore gambling industry not being a smoldering ruin after these duties have been hiked sky high.

 

Reassured by the IPPR and the Social Market Foundation that any claims about shop closures and job losses were "scaremongering" and that betting shop customers were "sticky" (i.e. loyal with inelastic demand), the government did pretty much everything the IPPR wanted in the last budget. And lo and behold...

 

Gambling giant blames UK tax rises as they close hundreds of stores

 

Evoke, the owner of William Hill and 888, has confirmed the closure of approximately 270 betting shops across the UK.

This decision aims to offset the financial impact of higher gambling taxes and mounting debts faced by the company.

Evoke reported pre-tax losses more than doubled to £549.1 million in 2025, largely attributed to increased UK duty costs.

The shop closures are expected to result in hundreds of job losses, although the precise number has not yet been confirmed.

 

It would appear that the anti-gambling lobby have outwitted the politicians once again. 

 

The very thing that this sweaty little geezer from the IPPR said wouldn’t happen! pic.twitter.com/UrNKShOZsj

— Christopher Snowdon (@cjsnowdon) April 30, 2026

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Democratically Deficient Organizations

With Julian Morris and Roger Bate, I have written a short paper about Democratically Deficient Organizations (DoDOs). We focus on the World Health Organisation and the massive NGOs that fund it.

 

In tobacco control and pandemic governance, foundation funding, WHO authority, NGO advocacy, and academic research reinforce one another to produce policy consensus insulated from scrutiny. Law & economics frameworks help explain the result: incentives favor persistence over performance. The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has not accelerated global declines in smoking, while discouraging harm-reduction approaches that have succeeded in countries such as Sweden. Proposals to expand WHO authority in pandemic preparedness risk replicating the same institutional failures revealed during COVID-19.

The problem is not insufficient resources, but weak accountability. The brief proposes reforms to restore it: rebalance WHO funding toward assessed contributions, strengthen transparency and conflict-of-interest rules, open governance processes, embrace harm reduction, and return policymaking authority to domestic democratic institutions. Without such changes, the continued expansion of the DoDO model will deepen existing failures—with consequences measured in human lives.

 

You can read the whole thing for free. I also interviewed Roger for the IEA podcast last week...

 

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Drinking on the job

 “Churchill tries to find luck in drink, but the bottle distorts the view.” - Nazi propaganda, 1942

 

The online British public are having one of their fits of moral outrage because they have discovered, seemingly for the first time, that there are bars in the parliamentary estate and MPs use them. I have written about it for The Critic. 

 

After the latest attempt to assassinate the President of the United States on Saturday, an attendee at the White House correspondents’ dinner was spotted making off with a couple of bottles of wine. As several people noticed, many Americans seemed to think that this was a greater outrage than the shooting itself, whereas British observers were firmly on the side of the minesweeper. 

Perhaps the difference is that Americans can afford to turn away free booze, but it seems more like another manifestation of the USA’s strangely prudish attitude towards alcohol. It is still less than a hundred years since Prohibition ended. The Anti-Saloon League is no more, but its place has been taken by “sober influencers”, gym bros and longevity-obsessed billionaires who preach the gospel of total abstinence. Last year, the number of drinkers in America fell to an all-time low, with barely half of the adult population touching a drop. 

We Brits cannot afford to be complacent. As another viral video released over the weekend showed, the American culture of puritanism has spread to these shores. Hannah Spencer, the recently elected Green MP for Gorton and Denton, has exclusively revealed that members of Parliament can be a bibulous bunch. In an interview with Politics Joe, she said: “Like, there’s a room where I walked past and I doubled back and looked in because people are just sat having a drink.” That room, I fancy, is what is known as a “bar” and there are nine of them on the parliamentary estate. There are also several pubs within walking distance which, rather wonderfully, have a bell that rings when MPs need to stagger back and vote. 

 

Read the rest. (NB. The Critic has put up a paywall for magazine articles and old articles, but you can continue to read mine for free when they come out. Although I do recommend getting a subscription.) 

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The EU Tobacco Tax Directive

The European Commission is pressing on with its plans to have an EU-wide tax on nicotine pouches and e-cigarette fluid, in addition to a sharp increase in the minimum tax rate on tobacco. Epicenter's experts at the EU Regulatory Observatory have been assessing the proposals and are unimpressed. 

I've written a short briefing with Constantinos Saravakos outlining their views and discussing some of the main dangers.

The main findings are:

• The TTD’s extension of minimum taxes to low-risk nicotine products conflicts with the EU’s goal of reducing smoking prevalence.
• Taxing safer alternatives will likely increase consumption of more harmful cigarettes.
• Higher minimum tobacco taxes will stimulate the illicit market, particularly in Eastern Europe.
• The proposal is highly regressive and fails to account for income differences across member states.
• The principle of differentiating taxes by relative risk is sound and should be strengthened, not diluted.
• A risk-proportionate reform would impose minimal or zero EU-level taxes on e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches to maximise substitution away from smoking.

 

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Why 'public health' hates the public

I was in Brussels for the World Nicotine Congress last month and had a chat with my pal Peter Beckett from Clearing the Air about vaping. Video below.

 

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