Under the heading “The case for liberal paternalism”, he makes such a shallow and uninformed case for lifestyle regulation that one starts to doubt whether he has read On Liberty. In addition to making a number of factual errors, he puts forward a series of hoary old chestnuts that he seems to think are argument-winning zingers. So you think you like freedom, eh? What about the drunk driver that kills someone? (Drink driving is banned.) Why should thin people have to pay for the healthcare of fat people? (The obese take less out of the welfare state than the thin because they don’t live as long.) He cites Richard Thaler’s work on behavioural economics to justify “nudging” and “soft paternalism” and then lists a slew of anti-smoking policies that Thaler would consider to be unacceptable because they impose costs and cannot be opted out of.
He rejoices in people being banned from smoking not only inside but outside and then says that similar tactics need to be used against people who eat “fattening foods”. He celebrates governments that put “comprehensive taxes on unhealthy food” and cheers on Japanese companies that “measure the waistlines of employees to make sure that they are not getting too fat”. “We should go further”, he says. “Why not use the proceeds of food taxes to subsidize healthy foods?” (Because the government doesn’t control the price of food.)
The problem with this is not so much that the policies he proposes are ineffective, though they are (Britain’s sugar tax, which Wooldridge thinks is wonderful, did absolutely nothing to reduce obesity and nor did the warning labels put on “unhealthy” food in Chile.) The real problem is twofold. Firstly, whatever else they might be, policies that “demonise” (his word) consumers of tobacco, cast them out from private buildings, extort money from them through sin taxes and restrict where they can buy the product are not liberal; a word that, as the author helpfully reminds us, is derived from the Latin word libertas, meaning liberty. Wooldridge is right to say that John Stuart Mill was comfortable with more state intervention than some libertarians care to admit, but when it came to state-sponsored paternalism he was crystal clear. “To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained,” he wrote, “is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition; and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase of cost is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price; and to those who do, it is a penalty laid on them for gratifying a particular taste.” Laws restricting where alcohol can be sold, said Mill, are “suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages.” If banning people from smoking outdoors and having the government define and prohibit “misinformation” is Wooldridge’s idea of liberalism, we can only be thankful that he never developed an interest in fascism.
The second problem is that if Wooldridge wants a government that will take on populism by hassling smokers, meddling with the food supply and censoring the internet, he has already got it. Under Boris Johnson — the supposed populist “strongman” — the UK put into legislation the most stringent restrictions on “junk food” marketing and promotion in the world. His successor, Rishi Sunk, announced the total prohibition of tobacco, albeit over a timeframe that is almost surreal. Both policies were eagerly pursued by Keir Starmer when he became Prime Minister, as was the Online Safety Act. The House of Lords recently tried to ban social media for under-16s, Kemi Badenoch has already said that the Conservatives will enact such a ban, and it is only a matter of time before it becomes official Labour policy. Is it any wonder that populists talk about the Uniparty?
Thursday, 16 April 2026
Illiberal liberalism
Tuesday, 14 April 2026
A discussion about Anti-Capitalism and "Public Health"
I spoke to my friends at the Sloavkian think tank INESS (the Institute of Economic and Social Studies) recently. We talked about my 2025 paper Anti-Capitalism and Public Health and you can watch the video below.
Monday, 13 April 2026
Chris Whitty, the man who broke Britain
Flattening the curve – i.e. allowing the virus to circulate while suppressing it enough to stop the health service being overwhelmed – was as much Whitty’s plan as it was anyone’s, but when he pivoted to supporting full lockdown in March 2020 he essentially never looked back. By May, the curve was flat but the country would remain in lockdown for another two months. The belief that everything is more important than the economy and nothing is more important than “public health” had taken hold.
Whitty seemed to become obsessed with the idea that epidemics are always halving or doubling. Since the only time the infection rate (the infamous R number) went down in the first 18 months of the pandemic was during lockdowns, this meant that he could always foresee the Tiber foaming with blood. The only solution was more lockdowns. Longer lockdowns. Lockdowns to prevent lockdowns. For the rest of the pandemic, every piece of advice from Sage, which was co-chaired by Whitty, was nudging the government towards that end.
Politicians decide, but their decisions are based on the advice and evidence given to them by experts. During Covid, the evidence presented appeared partial and excessively pessimistic and the advice seemed relentlessly illiberal. A few examples should suffice.
In October 2020, the NHS was nowhere near being overwhelmed. There were more empty hospital beds than there had been a year earlier. Things were worse in parts of northern England but local restrictions seemed to be working in the northwest and infection rates were falling in the northeast. Nevertheless, Chris Whitty appeared on television at Halloween with some graphs and Boris Johnson capitulated with a four-week lockdown. When that ended, Sage used out-of-date infection data to justify putting nearly every English county into the top two tiers, thereby extending lockdown in all but name and crushing the hospitality sector.
In December 2021, the Omicron variant was causing renewed panic around the world despite all the evidence showing that it was significantly milder than its predecessors and that hospitalisation rates in South Africa, where it had originated, were a small fraction of what they had been before. On 15 December, more than a fortnight after the chair of the South African Medical Association told us that we were “panicking unnecessarily” about an “extremely mild” variant, Whitty appeared on television to warn about the “misinterpretation” of the South African data and saying: “I want to be clear, this is going to be a problem.” He argued that South Africans benefited from high levels of immunity, seemingly forgetting that the British had been repeatedly vaccinated for the last year. “There are several things we don’t know [about Omicron]” he said, before adding inaccurately, “but what we do know is bad”. It seemed like every effort was made to bounce Boris Johnson into a fourth lockdown that Christmas. It is to his credit that he resisted. It was not until 23 December that Sage finally admitted that Omicron was indeed much milder. In February, Whitty conceded that Omicron’s impact on mortality had been “much more muted” and was “essentially not visible”. The government spent £9.3bn on lateral flow tests that winter.Whitty was not alone in pushing lockdowns at the drop of a hat. It took a team effort to lay waste to Britain’s economy and inflict an injury to the nation’s psyche from which it has yet to recover. Weak politicians, flawed modellers and hysterical journalists should all be held accountable. But if the finger has to be pointed at a single individual, it is the man who has never apologised and who was knighted when in my view he should have been sacked. Chris Whitty, the softly spoken boffin, the unassuming technocrat, broke Britain with Powerpoint.
Tuesday, 31 March 2026
Gamban canned
Gamban, the app that blocks gambling sites on the devices of problem gamblers (at their request), has been turned down for funding by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID).
Loyal readers will recall that the gambling industry used to pony up many millions of pounds for treatment, research and education. The puritans at the Department of Health decided that this was tainted money that could only be made clean by taking it from gambling companies by force. Most of the long-term recipients of this cash went along with the idea of replacing voluntary donations with a compulsory levy because they assumed that it would guarantee them funding for life.
It didn't quite work out that way. GambleAware were the first to be cut loose after the hardcore anti-gambling twunts and Jolyon Maugham tried to blacken their name. Despite playing up their anti-gambling credentials, the charity couldn't deny that it had received industry funding in the past and that is an unwashable sin now that gambling is a 'public health' issue.
Others have been simple victims of government incompetence. OHID is so useless that it can't even give away money without cocking it up. As Zak Thomas-Akoo has reported, treatment services, including Gordon Moody and GamCare, are in chaos because bureaucrats can't get them their grants in time.
This year, the UK government’s Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) oversaw the distribution of funding and decided to exclude Gamban on the basis of its entity status being a limited company.
— Gamban (@gambanapp) March 31, 2026
This was not a reasonable basis to omit the best available gambling… pic.twitter.com/l9Qid6c4HU
Scottish sockpuppetry
Chris Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the right-leaning think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, said Scotland was “in a league of its own when it comes to funding its own pressure groups”. He believes another flagship SNP policy — minimum unit pricing for alcohol — is an example of the public debate being influenced by charities which the SNP chose to fund well.
He cited Alcohol Focus Scotland, which last year received more than 85 per cent of its £792,000 annual income direct from the Scottish government in the form of a “core grant”, and Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems, entirely government funded. He said both groups acted as “the Praetorian Guard of the SNP” when it came to minimum unit pricing, a contentious policy introduced in Scotland in 2018.
After the policy was introduced, alcohol deaths in Scotland increased, with some evidence emerging that it had forced those addicted to drink to go without food.
A report by Public Health Scotland said there was “strong evidence” it had reduced deaths compared with how many would have died had it not been in place. However, it also acknowledged “negative health and social consequences at an individual level” including driving up debt, reduced spending or even alcoholics turning to “acquisitive crime”.
In 2024, after lobbying from charities heavily funded by the SNP, the minimum price was increased, from 50p to 65p. The SNP cited charities to back up its policy.
In February 2024, Sandesh Gulhane, a Scottish Tory GP, pointed out in Holyrood that despite minimum pricing, alcohol deaths were at a 14-year high, and only one out of 40 studies had claimed it led to a reduction in deaths. In response, Shona Robison, then the deputy first minister, quoted the chief executive of another charity, Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol & Drugs, accusing the MSP of being “the only person in the room who does not believe the evidence”.
It is another charity that the SNP has chosen to fund well because of its ideological position. Last year, it received almost £1.9 million in government, 17 times more than it received in donations. A decade earlier, it received only £447,000 from the devolved administration. Snowdon said: “It is creating a fake level of putatively public support that wouldn’t exist, or at least wouldn’t have any amplification, if it wasn’t for government money.”
Charities in England protected
A paper Snowdon wrote almost a decade and a half ago, “Sock Puppets: How the government lobbies itself and why”, led to changes in England.
Under David Cameron, the government banned charities from using government money to lobby the parliament or government, although they remained free to do so using income from other sources. SNP ministers rejected the idea, arguing that it would amount to “gagging” clauses against charities.
Last year, the Labour government introduced what was known as the civil society covenant, which explicitly states charities that criticise government policies cannot be penalised “by excluding them from policy discussions or funding opportunities”. Again, no such contract is in place north of the border.
In Scotland, there are claims that the SNP has in effect shut down criticism from the charity and voluntary sectors because of a system that leaves them umbilically tied to its political objectives and fearing grave consequences if they step out of line.
There are never explicit threats — and never anything put in writing. But according to numerous sources, a dependence on public funds has meant scores of charities in Scotland have been co-opted into becoming proxies for the SNP. Those with the same objectives as the SNP have been given millions of pounds in funding, allowing it to use them as advocates for its policies.
According to Alex Neil, who served in SNP governments under Sturgeon and Alex Salmond, including as health secretary, the administration would regularly ask “friendly” charities to support it publicly with controversial policies. He said any link between funding and the requests, often made by SNP special advisers, was always implied, but that it was understood their dependence on the government meant they would almost always fall into line.
A Scottish government spokesman said: “We are improving the way we provide funding to the third sector through our commitment to fairer funding”, a reference to a policy intended to make the awarding of grants more transparent and making them over several years.
He added: “The Scottish government agrees with the regulator’s position that political campaigning, such as advocating for or against changes in government policy or legislation is a legitimate way for some charities to pursue their aims. Charities play a vital role in civil society and it is right that they have the ability to advocate for change that aligns with their charitable purposes.”
Friday, 27 March 2026
A reponse to ASH on the black market
Earlier this month I reported that legal cigarette sales fell by 52% between 2021 and 2025 in the UK. These are official clearance figures from HMRC and show a rate of decline which far outstrips any estimate of the decline in smoking. The conclusion is obvious: more and more smokers are buying tobacco from illicit sources.
The state-funded pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) have responded by claiming that things are not as bad as they look. The accelerated decline since 2021 is, they say, “consistent with a long-term downward trend”. While they acknowledge that “the illicit trade may also be a factor” and that “ongoing cost of living pressures may have pushed some smokers, particularly those on lower incomes, to seek out cheaper, illicit alternatives”, they insist that “declining tobacco clearances appear to be driven mainly by falling smoking prevalence and reduced consumption among those who still smoke”.
Read the rest at IEA Insider
Friday, 20 March 2026
Had enough of 'experts'
Things will be bad enough after the government doubles the price of vaping in October with its new vape tax without going full prohibition, but the “ban it harder” mentality always seems to prevail. It is this kind of displacement politics that paves the road to anarcho-tyranny. You want to tackle systematic child exploitation in the Midlands? Sorry mate, the best I can do is regulation of vape flavours.
Australia, as ever, has taken things to tragicomic extremes. In the latest episode of its ongoing tobacco turf war, a gunman opened fire in a Melbourne shisha café this week, injuring a 49 year old man. In Melbourne alone, there have been over 130 arson attacks and several murders since the tobacco and vape market fell into the hands of organised crime. E-cigarettes have always been illegal in Australia and it has the highest cigarette taxes in the world. According to official estimates, between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of tobacco products are now sold on the black market.
On Thursday, a government minister came up with a brilliant new ruse to put an end to this: banning tobacconists. “Health advocates are doing interesting work”, he said, “asking why our society continues to permit standalone tobacconists.” Would those be the same “health advocates” who got Australia into this mess? The ones who swore on a stack of Bibles that there is no link between tobacco taxes and the illicit trade? The ones who lobbied for e-cigarettes to be banned in the first place and who successfully lobbied for the ban to be extended to nicotine-free vapes and imports for personal use? Sure, let’s hear what those guys have to say.