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.

 

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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.

 

Read the rest.

 

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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. 

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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.

 

Read it all.

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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 

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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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Nothing to see here, says ASH

ASH are still playing dumb about the illicit tobacco market. It's possible that they're not playing and are, in fact, dumb. The state-funded prohibitionist pressure group has been having a pop at Japan Tobacco International (JTI) for commissioning a survey which found that 31% of Brits have been offered illicit tobacco.

 

But how credible are JTI’s figures, and how do they compare with evidence that is independent from the tobacco industry?

A recent survey of smokers in the North East of England, commissioned by Fresh, found that 32% of smokers in the region had been offered illegal tobacco, most of them infrequently. Applying this figure to the UK as a whole would equate to roughly 3% of the total population (around a third of smokers), not 31%. On that basis, JTI's estimate appears to overstate the scale of the problem by 90%.

 

Can you see the problem with this logic? FRESH did a survey of smokers whereas JTI did a survey of the general population ("15,228 UK adults aged 19 and over, including 5,444 smokers"). ASH assumes that the smoking rate is only 9% (it is actually higher than that) and then disregards the other 91% of the population, as if only smokers are ever offered illicit tobacco. 

This will be news to a friend of mine who was recently telling me that he is offered pouches of tobacco every time he goes into a certain convenience store despite repeatedly telling them that he doesn't smoke.

 

This is nothing new. In their response to the latest national illicit tobacco estimates, JTI claimed that 42% of cigarettes consumed in the UK were illicit. If this is correct it would be the highest level off illicit cigarette consumption ever recorded. However, official data published by HMRC estimates that around 12% of cigarettes smoked in the UK are illicit, down from 20% in 2000 when the black market was at its peak...

 

Blah, blah, blah... The HMRC estimates are ASH's only life raft on this issue. I have explained at length why those estimates are worthless and have responded to ASH's cope as well. You only need to look at the collapse in the legal market to see that the illegal market has exploded in scale.

 

There are two possibilities. Either, JTI has identified a problem that every independent data source has somehow missed. Or this is another case of a tobacco company using dodgy stats or misleading reporting to cry wolf about the black market. 

 

FRESH is no more an independent data source than JTI. Like ASH, it is a tax-sponging prohibitionist outfit that will not take responsibility for the mess it has helped create. JTI and PMI both carry out empty pack surveys, both of which find that the illicit market share is much higher than HMRC's estimates suggest. HMRC itself admits that it has "low confidence" in its findings. The Irish government also uses empty pack surveys - the gold standard method of sizing up the black market - and these show that 26% of cigarette packs in Ireland were illegal in 2024 and a further 11% were legal but bought abroad via duty-free/EU. For rolling tobacco, the figures are 36% and 13% respectively. It is hard to see why the UK would be doing much better.

 

Moreover, ASH don't mention the study published last month, funded by Cancer Research UK, which found that the number of smokers buying tobacco from the black market doubled from 12.2% to 23.1% between mid-2023 and 2025. Given the illegal nature of this activity, we can assume that these are both underestimates. 

 

And then we have the halving of legal sales in three years and rapidly declining tobacco duty revenue. Alongside the obvious proliferation of illegal tobacco on the high street and the 1.2 billion illegal cigarettes seized last year, it is the HMRC estimate that looks like an outlier.

 

Meanwhile in Australia, the birthplace of plain packaging, child-friendly cigarettes are being sold by organised crime to anyone for a relative pittance...

 

Honestly, cigarette prohibition in Australia is probably the most innovative happening within any domestic market in 40 years.

Can you imagine a pack of whatever these are for under $15 even two decades ago?

Absolutely not. pic.twitter.com/92H5VpKCee

— 𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐚'𝐬 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐛𝐨𝐲 (@SardineTruther) August 9, 2026

Anti-smoking groups were sanguine about the illicit trade in Australia before the problem became too big (and violent) to ignore. Fool me once, etc.

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