Apologists for illiberal regulation often insist that the restriction on liberty is too small to worry about, that it is easy enough to get around and that, all things considered, it doesn’t really count as a ban at all. These arguments were all swiftly deployed last week. Martin Samuel, the Sunday Times’ “voice of sport”, explained that “It is not as if alcohol is not available in the stadium; just not in sight of the pitch”, as if being in sight of the pitch were not a prerequisite for watching a sporting fixture. The Guardian’s Barney Ronay told his readers that “if you really must drink, it’s not that hard to smuggle in the gin flask.” Don’t try to change the law, just break it! Both journalists resorted to implying that there is something wrong with anyone who resents being bossed around for no good reason. Ronay opined that “nobody really needs to be more drunk at football” while Samuel offered some sneering advice, saying: “If you can’t go 45 minutes without alcohol you should be in the Betty Ford clinic, not the Hill Dickinson Stadium.”
This is the same straw man argument that is sometimes used to justify banning alcohol on trains or banning vaping anywhere. “Can’t you just wait a few hours? What’s wrong with you?!” It flips the conversation from a debate about the appropriate limits of state coercion and puts the onus on the individual to explain why they “need” to do something. Of course nobody needs to have a drink while watching sport, but then nobody needs to watch sport. Life would be unbearably dull if we were only allowed to meet our physical needs. But we are not talking about drinking at eight in the morning or drinking in the workplace. We are talking about how people choose to spend their leisure time on a Saturday afternoon. Having a pint and watching a game of football is a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the weekend and it should be none of the government’s business.
Wednesday, 30 September 2026
Let us drink at the football
ASH have become shameless grifters
When the government first proposed a ban on disposable vapes, ASH said it would disadvantage mental health patients, elderly smokers and those who have dexterity issues. They said that “the risk of unintended consequences is too great for us to support a ban”.
But once it was clear that the government was serious about the ban, this supposedly “independent” charity dropped its objections and, when it came into force last year, ASH called it “a step in the right direction”.
For several years, ASH have been calling on regulation to stop “cartoon characters, garish colours and sweet names” being used on vape packaging. I think this is a policy that most adult vapers could live with. ASH never called for plain packaging for vapes which is hardly surprising since they once insisted that the idea that “once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false.” It was only in September 2025, after the then-health secretary Wes Streeting announced his desire to put vapes in plain packaging, that ASH came out in favour of this policy. I can find no record of them ever supporting a full display ban for vapes and, as the image above shows, they still don’t. They say, quite rightly, that treating cigarettes and vapes as if they were equally dangerous “risks undermining the role of vapes for smoking cessation”. You’d think that smoking cessation would be a priority for an anti-smoking group, but they are urging their supporters to support a full ban anyway because that’s what the government wants to hear.
These people are amoral grifters. They have achieved everything an anti-smoking group could dream of and now exist purely to ensure their own preservation. They were always going to throw vapers under the bus, but their attack on a real health charity (the NNA) is a new low. ASH are cynical, unprincipled agents of the state that who say anything to keep the grant cheques rolling in.
Friday, 25 September 2026
Nanny State Newsletter #4
Wednesday, 23 September 2026
All that is not proven safe must be banned
Last week, the House of Lords Liaison Committee called for a “comprehensive ban” on gambling advertising, reversing its previous that there wasn't enough evidence to justify it. The U-turn is a good example of how stupid "public health" concepts like the Total Consumption Model and the precautionary principle infect policy-making.
Establishing a definitive causal link between gambling advertising and gambling harms is subject to major and intrinsic methodological challenges.
The Government’s focus on the lack of such a causal link, despite clear explanations of the methodological difficulties by academic experts, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of social science research and the ways in which it can usefully contribute to policy development. Continued reliance on this argument is contrary to the principles of evidence-based policy making and sets a largely unattainable standard of proof that has been used to justify unwillingness to take decisive action.
We note that the Government’s expectation of a clear, proven causal link is also atypical of the standard of proof required in other areas of public health policy to which social science research has made valuable contributions.
There is no clear evidence to suggest that gambling advertising is safe and does not contribute to gambling harms. The current permissive framework is therefore inconsistent with a public health approach.
Monday, 21 September 2026
Moral economics?
I have never been fond of the term “demerit good”. It bestows the objective language of the economist onto something that is fundamentally subjective. Alcohol is supposedly a demerit good because of its effect on health, which would be fine if moderate drinkers didn’t live longer than teetotalers and if health were the only thing that mattered, but it isn’t. No decent economist would be arrogant enough to tell someone that the risks of heavy drinking outweigh their enjoyment of getting drunk.
In 2007, Alvin Roth coined the term “repugnant transactions” to describe the exchange of controversial goods and services. I prefer this to the term “demerit good” because what people find repugnant varies in time and place and the word “repugnant” more accurately reflects the fact that this is really a question of personal taste and morality. Roth’s argument was that repugnance can be an unhelpful constraint on markets. Moral opposition to the sale of live organs, for example, costs lives.
Roth’s new book Moral Economics expands on this theme. Opposition to repugnant transactions is often difficult to justify in logical terms. California’s ban on horse meat – one of Roth’s favourite examples – applies only to horse meat sold for human consumption. It is not illegal to kill a horse for other purposes, nor is it illegal to turn a horse into pet food. It is only illegal to kill a horse “if that person knows or should have known that any part of that horse will be used for human consumption.” It is not a question of animal rights or food safety. The law reflects nothing more than an irrational disgust.
Moral objections are usually framed as consequentialist objections, but further probing often reveals these to be hollow. Those who favour laws against incest (of whom I am one, fwiw) on the grounds that it can lead to birth defects are generally not prepared to make exceptions for family members who use failsafe contraception. Those who support laws against tobacco on the grounds that smoking imposes a cost on the health service seldom change their minds when it is explained that the net cost is less than zero. Those who, like me, support the criminalisation of child pornography on the grounds that it fuels demand for the creation of more child pornography, and thus child abuse, remain deeply uneasy (at best) about such images being generated by CGI or AI.
We are not, therefore, talking about market transactions that necessarily create negative externalities. Activities such as prostitution and dwarf tossing are consensual and have no direct spillover effects onto others, but are nevertheless widely condemned.
Monday, 14 September 2026
School dinners: leave those kids alone
Pastries and croissants will no longer be permitted in breakfast clubs. Sausages and bacon are allowed, but only once a week. Fried eggs are banned completely. Only breakfast cereals that are very low in sugar can be served. Teacakes, crumpets and unsweetened pancakes can be served, but only twice a week. Porridge is permitted but only if it is ‘plain’ and ‘unflavoured’ – no sugar, honey, syrups or sweeteners are to be made available.
For lunch, kids can no longer be offered fried chips or any other deep-fried food. Processed meat and ‘foods containing pastry’ can only be served once a week. Meals containing cheese, such as lasagna, are limited to three portions a week. Lentils and chickpeas are to be compulsory at least once a week. No foods containing chocolate are permitted. ‘Sweetened desserts’ can only be served twice a week.
As for the tuck shop, the government has decreed that the ‘only permitted snacks are plain fruits, vegetables, savoury crackers, breadsticks, yoghurt / plant-based versions (as per the dairy food group) and houmous’. Nom, nom!
The new rules go far beyond ensuring that kids have a balanced diet and consume enough calories to get through the day. They are a grab bag of arbitrary prohibitions on random food products and compulsory targets that seem to have been devised by rolling dice. Their only redeeming feature is that they will save the taxpayer money if children decide to eat their breakfast at home and take a packed lunch with them to school.
This is why Jamie Oliver was so keen to ban packed lunches 20 years ago and it is why nanny statists have been echoing his demand ever since. Only last month, the cake-promoting anti-obesity campaigner Prue Leith said the quiet part out loud when she called for packed lunches to be banned because the government ‘can’t police’ what parents put in them. The constant expansion of breakfast clubs and ‘free’ school meals isn’t about preventing children from going hungry. It is about control. The state doesn’t trust parents to follow the latest food fad and it wants to overrule the preferences of not just the child, but also of the child’s family.
Schools to police children’s lunch boxesSchools will be expected to tell parents what they can put in their children’s lunch boxes as part of Labour’s plans to promote healthier meals for pupils.
... From September next year, schools will have to publish their packed lunch policies online to “strengthen accountability and improve compliance”.
The DfE has also reiterated that teachers are encouraged to offer prizes or other incentives to pupils for bringing in a healthy lunch.
Schools will be expected to continue following guidance from 2019, which recommended restrictions on sugary and fatty foods.
The rise of command capitalism
I've got a new paper out with the IEA about a growing trend in the British economy: command capitalism.
