The over-provision of 'public health' ignorance

From The Times...

Call to tackle the ‘retail clusters’ that help cause ill‑health in Glasgow

Not this nonsense again?! How many times are we going to have to go over this? Retailers go where the demand and footfall are. If there was 'over-provision', the shops would close down.

Many of Glasgow’s most deprived areas are populated by “health-damaging” retail clusters that offer easy access to alcohol, fast food, cigarettes and gambling.

The finding, by researchers from Glasgow and Edinburgh universities, has prompted calls for tighter regulation to reduce the density of unhealthy outlets.

That was the intention, of course. There is no academic justification for the publication of a study that shows, for the umpteenth time, that city centre high streets have more off licences and bookmakers than the leafy suburbs.

“Our local environment shapes what we have access to and what we can afford,” said Linda Bauld, professor of health policy at Stirling university.

“The density of fast food, gambling, tobacco and alcohol outlets in deprived areas is almost certainly contributing to the health gap between rich and poor. This density can be changed through local planning processes and also through regulation.”

The question that people like Bauld can never answer is why, if businesses can make people engage in certain activities by merely existing, do retailers not 'target' wealthy areas where people have more money to spend? What kind of capitalist would waste his coercive powers on people who have little disposable income?

Miles Briggs, the Conservative MSP and the party spokesman on public health, has called for “determined local authority action” to tackle the problem.

 Ah yes, the Conservatives.

Frank McAveety, the Labour former leader of Glasgow council, said: “Clearly there is overprovision in some working class areas, creating a fatal combination of bookies, fast food shops and off-licences. There has to be a fundamental look at the legislative framework around overprovision and where powers lie and can be applied.”

The only over-provision I can see is a surplus of economically illiterate 'public health' studies written by people who don't understand supply and demand.

And yet, right at the end of the article, we get this...

Laura Macdonald, a co-author of the study, hopes the findings will influence change...

Naturellement.

...but said: “We cannot ascertain why outlets are colocated in deprived areas — it could reflect shopper convenience or because retailers purposely choose areas close to populations with greater demand for specific goods.”

Yes, Laura! And the truth shall set you free!

It is both, of course, and that is all there is to say.

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Insufferable bastards

Public Health England had their annual conference last week with 1,600 delegates. It's probably best not to think about how much it cost the taxpayer.

Head honcho Duncan Selbie (salary: £220,000) kicked off proceedings with a speech in which he paid tribute to my Twitter #content. You can watch it below from 11 minutes 43 seconds...


The best of the quotes pertains to PHE being "insufferable bastards". Whilst I wish I had said this - and it does sound like the kind of thing I might say - I can't find any evidence that I did. And whilst I did indeed call Selbie an overpaid, parasitic quangocrat, this was in relation to his decision to stop everybody smoking by 2030 and not, as he claims, the recent advice to have two days off drinking a week. 

This suggests - not for the first time - that Big Dunc might not have full mastery of the facts. But there is no doubt that he is doing an outstanding job by his own criteria...

"But we need to work in world where people are and if we're not irritating someone, we're not doing our job properly." #PHEConf18

— Public Health England (@PHE_uk) September 11, 2018

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Snowdon and Delingpole

James Delingpole's excellent podcast is the only podcast I always listen to. If you haven't subscribed to it yet, you should do so. If you haven't, you can listen to the latest edition, featuring my good self, below...

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Mexico's sugar tax flop

Who could forget Mexico's sugar tax? Introduced at the start of 2014, it is the jewel in the crown of the growing movement to tax sugary drinks (and 'junk food', which Mexico also taxes). The Lancet describes it as a 'success', as does Bloomberg. A couple of studies have concluded that sugary drink sales fell appreciably after the tax was introduced, although these claims appear to be false. 

The World Health Organisation didn't wait to see if the taxes on soda and 'junk food' had an effect on obesity before it started campaigning for them. But in 2016, it said...

Mexico’s soda tax has reduced sales of sugar-sweetened beverages. Time will tell whether the tax helps to reduce obesity prevalence as well.

Now the wait is over. The years have passed and the jury is in. As Mexico News Daily reports...

Mexico’s obesity numbers are up nearly 4 million in 4 years to 24.3 million

Close to 4 million adult Mexicans joined the ranks of the obese between 2012 and 2016, a result of food insecurity and undernourishment according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In 2012, 20.5 million adults were considered obese, a figure that has since risen to 24.3 million.

Great success!

No other media outlet has reported these facts and the 'public health' lobby will ignore them. Real world evidence counts for nothing in this racket, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a study published soon claiming that obesity has fallen as a result of the taxes, based on an activist's 'computer model'.


PS. I'm quoted in this Euractiv article about sugar taxes: 

“If taxes on soft drinks were a pharmaceutical drug, they would never be licensed by a medical authority”. “The costs are significant while the benefits are wholly unproven. Soft drink taxes might be a good way to raise revenue and a nice way for politicians to feel that they are doing something, but they do not qualify as an anti-obesity policy. They are remarkably ineffective as a way of getting people to reduce their consumption of sugary drinks.”

 

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Toys out of the pram

Ian Gilmore: "Do as I said or I shoot!"

You may fondly recall neo-temperance extremists walking out of the government's Responsibility Deal project in a huff in 2011. You may also recall the same 'public health' groups storming out of the EU's Alcohol and Health Forum in 2015. When these people don't get what they want, they exclude themselves from positions of influence. It's a brilliant strategy!

Ian Gilmore, the chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance, is throwing a similar hissy fit today, 'threatening' to walk out on Public Health England if they continue to promote sensible drinking advice with the semi-temperance charity Drinkaware. Why? Because Drinkaware is funded by the dreaded alcohol industry. Never mind that it is patently independent and does not further the drink industry's interests (as anti-alcohol morons understand them) in any way.

Gilmore and the anti-smoking fanatic John Britton, have written a pompous letter to The Times about it...

Sir, The launch of a new public awareness campaign on alcohol, jointly between Public Heath England (PHE) and the alcohol industry-funded organisation Drinkaware, marks a major shift in PHE policy in its willingness to share a public platform with the alcohol industry. It also demonstrates a failure at senior level in Public Health England to learn the lessons from the use by the tobacco and alcohol industries of voluntary agreements and other partnerships with health bodies to undermine, water down or otherwise neutralise policies to reduce consumption.

Given that responses to our submissions to PHE’s chief executive, Duncan Selbie, have confirmed that the lessons of history have not been learnt, we feel our respective roles as co-chairmen of the Alcohol Leadership and Tobacco Control Implementation Boards of PHE are undermined and must cause us to consider our positions if the partnership with Drinkaware is not terminated with immediate effect.

Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, chairman, Alcohol Health Alliance, University of Liverpool; Professor John Britton, director, UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, University of Nottingham

The Times and The Sun are both reporting that Gilmore has already quit. If so, it's not a moment too soon. His involvement in the guidelines rigging process should have been a resignation issue and there should be no place for a hardline temperance zealot in a powerful government agency.

So long, Ian! Shut the door behind you.

One day these people will realise that they need the government more than the government needs them.

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The secrecy and paranoia of the WHO

With the WHO's anti-nicotine COP8 conference on the horizon, Harry Shapiro has written a timely article about the way the fanatics who run this shindig have weaponised Article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. I'd nearly forgotten about them excluding Interpol from the conference in Delhi on the grounds that it is some sort of tobacco industry front group...

As originally written, Article 5.3 simply required Parties to protect their tobacco control policies from tobacco industry influence. Period. Even the subsequently published Guidelines to 5.3 broken down into four Principles only required Parties to have ‘accountable and transparent’ dealings with the industry. But these ‘Guidelines’ have morphed into Holy Writ, turning the whole enterprise into something resembling a fundamentalist Doomsday cult seeing conspiracy and ‘interference’ at every turn. There is now FCTC lore which has become insanely over-interpreted to mean that there should be no contact whatsoever not only with the industry, but with any organisation or individual that has any links whatsoever with the industry in any capacity. This manifests itself, for example, in the COP meetings which unlike for example the Climate Change Framework meetings, will not allow entry to industrial interests or any organisations that do not agree with its views. Any NGO wishing access has to be a member of the FCA while, on the grounds that somebody from the evil Empire might just hear what is going on, the public and the media are also pretty much excluded from the whole event and from reading the deliberations of the meeting. This is taken to ludicrous lengths by refusing access to Interpol because one of the world’s major law enforcement agencies has been working with the industry to combat the illicit tobacco trade. The FCTC Secretariat, clearly intoxicated with power, is now even trying to dictate to the Parties by attempting for a second time to push through a new rule which would exclude any delegate with links to state-owned tobacco industries. Even the Parties have been pushing back on that one.

But cloaking a publicly funded and therefore publicly accountable agency in secrecy is bad enough, but for a global public health agency to put millions of lives at risk in the service of rampant self-aggrandisement is another matter altogether. Because the WHO persists in the fallacy against all the evidence that safer nicotine products are just a ruse by Big Tobacco to renormalise smoking, wherever possible, the agency along with its NGO allies, invokes 5.3 to effectively close down any debate on the matter by simply accusing advocacy and consumer groups and any professionals engaged in tobacco harm reduction as being Big Tobacco stooges.

Do read it all.

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The EU throws vapers under the bus again

The WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is holding its biennial conference in Geneva next month. It is the eighth 'Conference of the Parties', hence it is known as COP8.

In preparation for the event, various documents have been circling the global anti-smoking community to get a consensus on what to ban next. The depiction of tobacco use in the arts is one candidate. You can read the WHO's proposal here. The most notable part of the document is the WHO's intention to include tobacco use on film and television as tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship (TAPS) because:

Entertainment media content such as movies, music videos, online videos, television programmes, streaming services, social media posts, video games and mobile phone applications have all been shown to depict and promote tobacco use and tobacco products in ways that may encourage youth smoking uptake... Therefore, policies that reduce youth exposure to entertainment media depictions are required.

What policies are needed to achieve this desired level of censorship? The WHO suggests the following...

Parties are urged to develop legislation or administrative measures to reduce tobacco depictions in entrainment [sic] media such as requiring tobacco industry disclosure of all expenditures associated with TAPS [tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship], requiring health and content warnings on material that depicts tobacco, banning tobacco branding from all entertainment media, requiring that any tobacco products shown must include required health warnings and other regulatory requirements relating to packaging (such as plain packaging), and requiring age ratings on entertainment media including music videos and video games. Further, Parties are urged to prohibit tax concessions and subsidies for films that include tobacco promotions.

The EU is one of the FCTC's members and, due to its size, it is rather influential. So have they objected to this? Yes, they have. But not because the proposals are too extreme. They object because they don't go far enough. In particular, the EU wants vaping to be included. In a document from the EU to the FCTC dated 30th August that was leaked to me this morning, the EU says (emphasis in the original):

The EU welcomes the report of the Expert Group on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship and supports its recommendations... [The EU] stresses that TAPS [tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship] regulatory frameworks and their implementation at national, regional and international levels do not only cover all tobacco products, both traditional and emerging ones such as heated products, but should also consider tobacco-related products such as ENDS.

ENDS are electronic nicotine delivery systems: e-cigarettes. The EU's position - which it will be voicing in Geneva next month - is that there should not only be a worldwide ban on advertising, promotion and sponsorship of tobacco products, but that there should be a worldwide ban on advertising, promotion and sponsorship of e-cigarettes. Furthermore, it wants the proposed restrictions on people smoking in movies, music videos, reality TV programmes, etc. to apply to people who are vaping. For example, a film which shows someone using an e-cigarette would automatically get an 18 certificate.

Has the UK gone along with this? If it has - and surely it must have done - how is it consistent with the government's pro-vaping Tobacco Control Plan or Public Health England's harm reduction agenda?

And if this is the EU's position on the 'advertising, promotion and sponsorship' of e-cigarettes, how bad is its position on the other regulatory issues going to be?

Once again, the EU and the Department of Health have shown that they cannot be trusted to represent consumers. It looks like we'll have to represent ourselves. I'll be going to Geneva next month. Who's with me?

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