I was on Geoff Norcott's podcast What Most People Think again this week, talking about Andy Burnham, leaving the IEA, vaping, smoking, folic acid and more. Geoff's a great man and I enjoy his pod. Hopefully, we'll get him on Last Orders again soon.
You can watch it here and listen to it in all sorts of ways, such as here.
I was on the (relatively) new Guido Fawkes Show talking about sin taxes in the Budget, what bans I'd scrap and British Summer Time. All the old favourites. You can catch up below.
The state-funded prohibitionist pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) has published a report claiming that “the UK’s illicit tobacco market is now only a fraction of the size it was at the turn of the century” and that “the UK has one of the most effectively controlled illicit markets in the world”.
Even for the seasoned liars at ASH, this is risible. Their entire argument hinges on HMRC’s tobacco tax gap estimates being correct and everyone else being wrong. But HMRC’s figures are blatant underestimates. It hasn’t had the data needed to make a half-decent estimate since 2019. Its figures between 2020 and 2023 were “imputed” because it didn’t have tobacco consumption data from the Office for National Statistics, and its figures since then have been “projected” from the imputed figures because of problems with “data availability and small sample sizes”.
In short, it is guesswork, and not very good guesswork at that. As I have said before, their claim that “only” 14% of the tobacco market is illicit is impossible to square with the 52% decline in legal tobacco sales between 2021 and 2025.
The latest Nanny State Newsletter has gone out to all the subscribers to my Substack and you can read it here.
It must have been at least ten years ago now, but I remember watching a BBC compilation of humorous moments from its late-night current affairs programme Question Time. Bloopers and gaffes, as Danny Baker would call them. Studio lights going out, people storming off, accidental innuendos. Anything can happen on live TV! Sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the light-hearted nostalgia was a clip of a Conservative politician—I think it was Michael Howard—explaining that he was against introducing a minimum wage because it would lead to unemployment. The BBC put up a smug caption at the end of the clip saying something along the lines of “unemployment has gone down since the minimum wage was introduced in 1999”.
And so, it did, but Howard (if it was he) was only repeating what economists had told him. The theory is perfectly sound: if employers are forced to pay £15 an hour and your labour is worth less than £15 an hour, you will not be able to find work. Some leftists consider this to be an immoral argument. No one, they say, is worth less than [insert your arbitrary figure here]. But we are not talking about the worth of the person. We are talking about the value that a person can add to the business. Employing people at a loss is a one-way road to bankruptcy, and unemployment will surely be the result.
An understanding that some people’s labour is worth more than others, and that forcing employers to pay above the market rate will freeze them out of the labour market, is implicit in the current system which has lower rates for people aged under 21. It should be self-evident that a minimum wage of £100 an hour would bring the economy to its knees. It is equally obvious that a minimum wage of £5 an hour would make no real difference to anybody. At some point in between, the minimum wage gets so high that it causes significant and visible unemployment. The only question is where. In this paper, Matthew Bowles and Emmanuel Igwe argue that the tipping point has been reached and that it is time for a cooling-off period.
Successive governments have been keen to improve the lot of the lowest paid, not by growing the economy but by forcing employers to pay
them more. “Britain deserves a pay rise”, said George Osborne when he raised the minimum wage and rebranded it as the National Living Wage in 2015. Such generosity with other people’s money led to the minimum wage rising from 46 per cent of the median wage in 1999 to 56 per cent in 2015. It currently stands at 66 per cent, one of the highest ‘bite ratios’ in the world. The negative consequences are becoming difficult to ignore.
Since 2022, the unemployment rate has risen from 3.6 per cent to 4.9 per cent. Most of the increase occurred after 2023 when the economy was growing, albeit modestly. Unemployment is never monocausal, and there are other factors, such as the rise in the employer National Insurance rate, that likely contributed, but it coincided with the standard minimum wage rate rising from £9.50 to £12.71 per hour. The hospitality sector, and pubs in particular, often cite the minimum wage as a leading cause of business closures.
The youth unemployment statistics are even more alarming. Whatever else was going wrong with the British economy, we used to be able to console ourselves that we didn’t suffer from Europe’s seemingly endemic scourge of youth unemployment. That cope is no longer available to us. Youth unemployment in the UK has risen from 9.3 per cent in 2022 to 16.2 per cent today. It is predicted to rise to 17.6 per cent next year. The EU has seen no significant increase in recent years and has a youth unemployment rate of 15.1 per cent. Perhaps the difference is that the UK dropped the age threshold for the National Living Wage in 2021 (from 25 to 23) and then again in 2024 (to 21).
If the analysis of Bowles and Igwe is correct, the BBC gloated too soon. The initial warnings about the minimum wage turned out to be overblown, but only because the bite ratio was set at a reasonable level. Subsequent governments became complacent and pushed the dial too far, harming the very people the minimum wage was supposed to protect. The authors’ recommendation of a five-year freeze may not be popular, but it is eminently sensible.
This is my foreword to a new report from the Prosperity Institute
The end of the COVID-19 pandemic left a hole in the lives of two groups of people. The first are those who loved the pandemic because it allowed them to flaunt their hypochondria. They have largely disappeared but they can occasionally be spotted, fully masked up, sounding the alarm about things like monkeypox. The second are those who loved the pandemic because it allowed imbeciles to masquerade as contrarians. They graduated to taking photographs of contrails in the sky, but nothing could quite recapture the thrill of talking with ill-deserved confidence about Gompertz curves, spike proteins and false positives.
But now they’ve found a new target for their rage: vitamin B9, otherwise known as folic acid. It has been known for decades that consumption of folic acid at the start of a pregnancy prevents spina bifida, a neural tube defect that often condemns children to a life in a wheelchair. From December, most of the flour sold in Britain will be fortified with folic acid by law at a level of 250ug (micrograms) per 100g.
I was on Great British Think Tank's Pints and Policy podcast yesterday. You can watch it below.
Thanks to GBTT's thorough description of the chat, I can tell you exactly what we discussed:
0:00 Pints & Policy
0:08 Welcome: Chris Snowdon and the IEA
0:49 What is a capitalist command economy?
4:08 Fined for missing heat pump and EV targets
5:14 Back to the 1970s under Labour?
6:45 Riots, immigration and public anger
8:24 The mini-budget v now: gilts, debt and the deficit
9:53 Do we need a bond crisis?
11:15 Austerity "was barely done at all"
12:03 Wealth taxes, rent controls and the Laffer curve
14:00 Are young people less liberal?
17:01 "Is it time to ban...?" The BBC and the media
19:14 More vapers than smokers
20:04 Cheap Chinese EVs
20:42 An £11 broadband levy for the BBC?
23:17 Inside the Sausage Factory: does evidence matter?
25:24 Minimum unit pricing: 65p in Wales
26:09 20mph limits
27:34 Impact assessments: costs counted, benefits not
31:22 Devolution as a policy trial
34:38 Will the state ever get smaller?
36:31 The simple fixes: repeal and deregulate
37:44 Blair, Brown and the Tories
39:06 Tory hangovers: plastic taxes and the "Uni Party"
40:35 Busy with Brexit and Covid, so why ban straws?
42:40 The one policy to change first
44:20 Disability benefits and the TaxPayers' Alliance tool
