I've got a new paper out with the IEA about a growing trend in the British economy: command capitalism.
Monday, 14 September 2026
Friday, 11 September 2026
The nanny state newsletter
I've started doing a nanny state newsletter for my Substack subscribers (free). There's no particular schedule but they've been coming out every two weeks so far. If you don't subscribe, head on over and sign up. Here's a sample...
Belgium’s slippery slope
The Belgian government passed a law in May to put warnings on alcohol advertisements saying ‘Alcohol is harmful to health’. Not ‘Alcohol can be harmful to health’ or ‘Excessive drinking is harmful to health’, but ‘Alcohol is harmful to health’.
Belgian Brewers, a trade association, has now published an open letter with more than 1,000 signatures opposing the measure. The Flemish Centre of Expertise on Alcohol and Other Drugs has been lobbying for the new warnings (the phrase ‘alcohol and other drugs’ is a massive red flag for prohibitionism). Its director, Kathleen Peleman, said:
“The core of this message is that alcohol is damaging to your health,” Peleman adds. “Not just for the small group that struggles with addiction, but for everyone who drinks.”
That is indeed the message and it is clearly untrue. The anti-alcohol lobby are copying the anti-tobacco blueprint again. They want to portray alcohol as harmful at any level. That is why activist-academics such as Tim Stockwell devote to much energy to torturing the evidence to erase the health benefits of moderate drinking. This is not an arcane academic dispute. ‘No safe level’ is a crucial rhetorical device for taking alcohol down tobacco road.
The government wants to force the Belgian booze industry to put information on their adverts that is misleading at best and a lie at worst. It will not end there. The industry should take legal action before this gets out of hand.
HMRC tries to get real
HMRC is finally trying to do something about its hopeless estimates of the size of the illicit tobacco market. The title of a document that has not yet been made public - The Tobacco Tax Gap: Improving Tax Gap Statistics Through Wastewater Analysis - indicates that it intends to follow Australia’s lead and look for nicotine in sewage. When the Australian Bureau for Statistics did this, it estimated that 80% of tobacco sold Down Under was illicit. In the House of Commons, the health minister James Murray was asked how the study will differentiate nicotine from tobacco and nicotine from vapes (or pouches or heated tobacco or patches, etc.). He replied:
The methodology will distinguish between tobacco and nicotine consumption by analysing different chemical metabolites present in wastewater samples.
Specifically, tobacco consumption will be measured using the metabolites anabasine and anatabine, while nicotine consumption will be measured using cotinine and its metabolite 3-hydroxycotinine.
It’s a nice methodology. Meanwhile, the Co-op supermarket - which is losing out to the illicit trade - has found that 36 per cent of UK smokers have bought illicit cigarettes, rising to 49 per cent among those aged 35-44. Time is running out for the black market deniers.
Thursday, 3 September 2026
The tyranny of surveys
There are supposedly 80,000 child gambling "addicts" in the UK. This is based on a tiny proportion of school kids self-reporting their behaviour. As I explain in The Critic, it is very likely that many of them are lying or don't understand the questions...
In the most recent edition of the YPGS, 44 young people out of the 3,666 surveyed were considered to be problem gamblers, which is not the same thing as being an “addict” but involves gamblers reporting such symptoms as chasing losses and often thinking about gambling.
How seriously can we take the responses of those 44 people? The gambling expert Dan Waugh recently looked under the bonnet of the last three editions of the survey, which yielded 125 “problem gamblers” out of 10,985 participants and noticed some curious findings.
Most striking were the six kids who claimed to have gambled in every conceivable way in the last week, including visiting casinos, visiting seaside amusement arcades, playing bingo online, playing bingo in a licensed bingo clubs, gambling on machines in a licensed betting shop, betting on e-sports and gambling in an online casino. One of them was only twelve years old.
This seems unlikely, to put it mildly. In total, 31 of the supposed problem gamblers claimed to have gambled in a bricks-and-mortar casino in the past week. While it is not impossible for an older teenager to fool a doorman with a fake ID, most of these kids were aged between 12 and 15. If you take the YPGS seriously, more 12 year olds have gambled in a casino in the last week than 17 year olds. One 13 year old claimed that they did not engage in any gambling activities that are legal for children, such as seaside arcades or having private bets with friends, and only gambled in licensed bookmakers, in online casinos and in actual casinos, all of which he or she had done in the last week.
Friday, 28 August 2026
Bootlicking gimps
As laws become more preposterous and governments intrude ever further into the private lives of individuals, you might expect the public to revolt. Instead, the growing state has given rise to a strange breed of bootlicking gimps who go out of their way to bat for the government.
The journalist Tom Harwood was in Washington D.C. this week and tweeted a video of himself unscrewing the cap from a bottle of Coke with the caption “Sweet land of liberty”. The point was that he was able to fully remove the plastic cap without violently twisting and tugging its tether — a freedom that has been denied to residents of the EU since 2024 thanks to Article 6 of the Single-Use Plastics Directive.
The bottle-top law has been a gift to eurosceptics. It epitomises the over-reach of pettifogging bureaucrats, the malign influence of fanatical NGOs and the apparently limitless ambitions of the “European project” to involve itself in every aspect of people’s lives. It is annoying and yet futile, a pointless irritation, and a daily reminder of the EU’s preference for regulation over innovation, but that didn’t stop the bootlicking gimps from crawling out from under their rocks to shoot the messenger. The law was intended to stop people throwing their bottle caps in the ocean, but almost none of the EU’s apologists defended it on environmental grounds. There was some whataboutery (“The USA doesn’t have universal healthcare”) and there was a novel cope about the supposed inconvenience of having to hold a bottle cap in the opposing hand, but mostly they complained about Harwood having the nerve to complain. “You know you can just tear the attached caps off with very little force if you want to, right?”, said one. “You do know that if you have the strength greater than a 5 year old girl, that you can just remove the attached cap, right?”, said another.
There was a great deal of this kind of chat, along with the usual “Is this really the hill you want to die on?” straw men. The government’s sycophants are always keen to remind you that there are worse things happening in the world and, by implication, that if you aren’t tweeting about the worst thing in the world, you shouldn’t be tweeting at all. It seems to escape them that they are tweeting about a petty irritation themselves and that their energy is being more thoroughly wasted because they are wrong.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Tuesday, 18 August 2026
That national alert
The government sent a noisy alert to every mobile phone in Britain on Friday to tell us not to light a barbecue. I have written about it for Spiked...
The nauseating thing about the national alert was how many bootlicking gimps came out in support of it. It’s just another text message, they said. You probably get notifications all the time, they said. True, but they are notifications from people I want to hear from and they don’t have the audacity to override the mute button. I don’t want to hear from the government on a sunny Friday evening. I don’t even want to be reminded of its existence. In the immortal words of Javier Milei, my contempt for the state is infinite. National alerts are another encroachment into our lives from a state that has already encroached too much.
The impact of gambling sponsorship bans - a preview
This is pretty basic economics but apparently it needs spelling out…
Sponsorship deals go to the highest bidder. If the highest bidder is excluded from the process then the organisation that is looking for a sponsor will have to take the next highest bid, which will be lower.
The upshot of banning a whole industry from sponsoring football clubs, for example, is therefore that the football clubs will make less money from sponsorship.
With a week to go before the English Premier League resumes, that lesson is now being learned.
Heading into this summer, almost half of the teams in the Premier League found themselves confronting the same commercial headache.
Back in April 2023, all 20 member clubs collectively agreed to end front‑of‑shirt sponsorship deals with gambling firms from summer 2026.
… For years, gambling companies have underpinned the commercial reality of the league’s middle and lower tier, offering inflated sponsorship fees that other industries simply could not, or would not, match.
You can see where this is going…
“Collectively, the gap these clubs had to plug, as we worked it out, was around £80m,” said Mike Haywood, vice‑president at Octagon, one of the world’s largest sports sponsorship consultation firms. “There were between eight and 12 clubs that needed to plug that gap. Some of those clubs are still looking for long‑term solutions, while some of them are waiting for the market to heat up.”
Many football fans will find it hard to sympathise with the big beasts of the Premier League. I’m sure they will be alright in the end. But it is worth remembering that the anti-gambling lobby insists that companies are queuing up to sponsor teams and that football clubs can make the same amount of money being sponsored by more wholesome companies. You hear the same kind of thing from those who want to ban sponsorships and advertising of alcohol brands or so-called ‘junk food’ companies.
It is nonsense. When tobacco sponsorship was banned in snooker, for example, the number of tournaments dwindled to a handful and the amount of money in the game collapsed. It had to settle for the second best bids, which these days are often from gambling companies. If gambling sponsorship is banned, it will have to settle for the third best bid. And so on. Banning the top sponsors inevitably leads to less revenue.
The Premier League ban is “voluntary” because the people who run it thought that they were being clever trying to appease the government of a command capitalist economy.
“There is an element of tokenism with all of this,” explained football finance expert and author of The Price of Football, Kieran Maguire. “When the Premier League were lobbying against the Independent Football Regulator this was seen as something they could do to show that they could self‑govern appropriately. Now, in their eyes, they have the worst of both worlds with the IFR and no gambling income.”
Appeasement rarely works in the short term and never works in the long term.
Maybe they’ll increase ticket prices to make up the shortfall.
Cross-posted from the Snowdon Substack
Tuesday, 11 August 2026
Can the high street be saved?
Andy Burnham thinks he can save the high street by stopping bookies and vape shops opening. I disagree.
The idea that the high street can be revived by killing off the few remaining businesses that are able to operate on it is just silly. These companies are not taking up shopfronts that WH Smith (now TG Jones!) is desperate to use. They are on the high street because WH Smith has gone.
The high street of the future will have fewer shops and those shops will be devoted to services - pubs, coffee shops, key-cutters, ice cream parlours, repair shops, cafés and, yes, barbers. The rest should be turned into residential housing.
Read the rest on my Substack.
With weary predictability, the prohibitionists are taking the win but immediately demanding more.
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