Shroud-waving as a basis for public policy

Shroud-waving is a terrible basis for public policy. We all know this. We know that hard cases make bad law. Being a victim of a terrible crime or a rare disease or a freak accident does not make you an expert on policy-making. Being the relative of a victim does not give you a unique ability to understand a contentious issue. On the contrary, it makes you uniquely susceptible to action bias and much less able than the average person to soberly evaluate trade-offs.

There are times when it is especially important to point this out, but they are the very moments when emotions are running at their hottest and the speaker of blunt truths is most likely to be accused of being heartless. It is an intimidating atmosphere and it is intended to be. That is how the emotional blackmail works. Whichever liberty millions of people are expected to give up seems small when compared to the horror that the victim has suffered. Who would want to add to their pain? For that reason, the immediate trigger for this article will go unmentioned. The point is general anyway.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.

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Last Orders - now in colour

You may have noticed that I don't plug Last Orders episodes here any more. That's because we've been doing it for years and if you haven't subscribed yet, you probably never will. 

But I should point out that we've been filming the show for some time now, so if YouTube is more your kind of thing, you can watch it there. Here's the latest episode...

 

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Nanny State Index 2025 - the downward spiral

It's Nanny State Index day! Every two years I plough through the taxes and regulations of 29 countries to find out which is the worst. You can visit the new website and download the publication. You can also read this short overview by me for the Spectator. Enjoy!

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Mounjaro and Wegovy

I've written about weight loss jabs for The Telegraph....

 

The arrival of a genuine solution to a significant health problem has caused some consternation among those who think that the way to tackle obesity is to fundamentally change society. A Guardian headline gave the game away in 2023 when it said that the emergence of effective weight-loss drugs was “no excuse to let junk food companies off the hook”. Dr Margaret McCartney, a broadcaster and GP, has said that her “big concern” about the drugs is that “the eye is taken off the ball with stopping people getting overweight in the first place” which, for her, means changing “the obesogenic environment”. 

The Guardian’s health editor Sarah Boseley has called on the government to reject the “quick fix” of semaglutide and instead “redesign our towns to get people walking”. Another Guardian writer has complained that weight-loss drugs are “trying to solve the wrong problem” and that the real issue is “primacy of work, long hours, low pay, hustle culture, structural inequalities, poverty and precarity.” 

What all these solutions have in common is that they are wholly impractical. If it was so easy to eradicate “structural inequalities”, we would have done it by now. Towns cannot be suddenly redesigned and commuters are not going to suddenly start walking to work. Attempts to change “the obesogenic environment” by moving so-called junk food away from supermarket checkouts have failed to reduce obesity, and more extensive interventions, such as banning or taxing certain foods, are unlikely to the tolerated by voters. And, incidentally, weight loss drugs have not “let junk food companies off the hook”. On the contrary, they are a threat to their profits because they make people eat less.

Nesta, a large charity that describes itself as an “innovation agency for social good”, has expressed concern that the drugs “might well deepen the emphasis in the public discourse on a “personal responsibility narrative”’. The geneticist Giles Yeo has said that he is worried that the existence of GLP-1 agonists might be used by politicians “as a cop-out not to make the hard policy decisions.” Nesta would prefer the government to focus on “reformulating food, reducing junk food advertising and shifting price promotions towards healthier foods”. Yeo puts it more bluntly, saying that “we’re going to have to lose some liberties”. 

 

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Remote Gaming Duty and the online betting industry

Rachel Reeves is short of cash and thinks she can squeeze more money out of the booming online betting industry. The problem, as I explain in The Critic, is that it is not really booming and the government risks killing the golden goose.

One of the failings of the British left is to take the Conservatives seriously when they claim to be the party of low taxes. Having talked themselves into believing that the Tories spent 14 years under-taxing businesses and the rich, the Labour Party came into power thinking that there were billions of pounds lying on the pavement waiting to be picked up. It only took one Budget for this idea to unravel. Before the election, a tax on non-doms was the magic money tree that would pay for free school breakfasts and fix the NHS. Today, the only question is whether the tax will raise a trivial sum of money or lose the government money. Hiking National Insurance contributions for employers seemed like a pain-free way of raising £25 billion, but it was soon understood as a tax on employment and, with business confidence collapsing, it no longer looks like such easy money. 

There is a dawning realisation that the Conservatives, who raised the tax burden to the highest level in 70 years through a combination of higher rates, new levies and fiscal drag, did not walk the walk as the party of low taxes. If they didn’t introduce a new tax or increase an old one, it was not because they were on the side of “the rich” but because they could see that it would do more harm than good. While the far-left call for a wealth tax in the deluded belief that it would raise £25 billion a year, the rich are already scarpering under the weight of existing taxes.

In practice, the government has a choice between raising taxes such as VAT and income tax which have a broad base or cutting the size of the state. The Cakeist electorate want neither and nor does the Labour Party and so the government continues to search for easy pickings.

One ruse, announced last week, is to raise the tax on online betting. The government did not quite put it like that. It said it wants to explore the possibility of a “single tax for UK-facing remote gambling”, but since the tax on online casinos is 21 per cent while the tax on online bookmakers is 15 per cent, the only realistic outcome is an increase in the latter to match the former.

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These people are insane

After 18 months of war, there is a public health crisis in Gaza. Tom Gatehouse from Bath University has written about it in a World Health Organisation journal. 

 

Media coverage of Israel's assault in Gaza has mostly focused on those killed and injured by bombs and bullets, and more recently, on the spread of infectious diseases due to the severe water shortages and the destruction of critical infrastructure (14). However, tobacco use is an important aspect of a public health crisis that has been unfolding under the shadows of war, and will have severe and long-lasting consequences unless it is addressed. 

 

I should perhaps have mentioned that Tom Gatehouse's role at Bath University is as a research assistant for the Bloomberg-funded conspiracy website Tobacco Tactics.

 

The tobacco industry thrives during times of crisis and chaos (11). In recent years, it has exploited conflict situations in countries like Ukraine and Sudan (11-13), yet the harm due to tobacco use often tends to be overlooked in such contexts.

 

That is because most people have a sense of perspective, Tom.

 

Tobacco control in the State of Palestine has long been in need of reinforcement. Its tobacco control laws have not been updated since 2011 (27) and implementation of WHO’s recommended tobacco control strategies has not been comprehensive (1). 

 

Yes, that's what's been holding it back. 

Although strengthening tobacco control may appear far-fetched in the current scenario, Israel’s military offensive may in fact have brought the State of Palestine closer to joining international legal frameworks, including the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC). 

 

Finally, some hope for this benighted region! 

The appalling suffering in Gaza has generated greater momentum towards recognition of a Palestinian State, with Norway, Spain and Ireland all formally recognising Palestine in 2024, bringing to 146 the number of countries that have done so. The World Health Assembly described Palestine as a State for the first time in May 2024 (28,29). The State of Palestine can leverage this international support to join the WHO FCTC and lay the foundation for a comprehensive tobacco control programme, as part of the wider effort to rebuild its now-ruined healthcare system.

 

I'm sure that will one of the top priorities of the government run by *checks notes* Hamas.

 

What this place needs is some graphic warnings and some above-inflation hikes in tobacco duty!

 

 

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IARC gets taken over by anti-alcohol activists

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was set up by the World Heath Organisation (WHO) in 1965 to research the causes of cancer. Every institution has been hollowed out by activists in the sixty years since and it comes as little surprise that it is now getting involved in policy. In a study published this week in the theoretically reputable New England Journal of Medicine, IARC has judged literal prohibition to be evidence-based.

Read the rest at The Critic.

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