An
interesting article
in the Economist tells us a lot about e-cigarettes. In China, the
world's biggest cigarette market, smokers are increasingly switching to
e-cigarettes. The state-owned tobacco monopoly is not happy about it.
Investor optimism derives in large part from the prospect of rapid growth
in China, where just 10m people were regular users of e-cigarettes at the
end of last year. But dig a little deeper and the outlook darkens. A
powerful state-owned cigarette monopoly, China Tobacco, will not cede
ground to a rival product without a fight.
Regulators have already intervened on behalf of China Tobacco, which paid
1.2trn yuan in taxes last year, accounting for 6% of government revenues.
In November the authorities banned online sales of e-cigarettes
(ostensibly to prevent minors from buying them). Now they can be bought
only at physical outlets like convenience stores and karaoke bars. In
recent months editorials in state-owned newspapers have claimed (falsely)
that vaping is more harmful than conventional cigarettes. A spokesman for
the Electronic Cigarette Industry Committee of China, a trade body, blames
the online ban for a wave of bankruptcies among smaller firms.
It is obvious what China Tobacco's motivation is. They fear missing out on
cigarette sales if people switch to vaping. The Chinese government, insofar
as it can be distinguished from the tobacco monopoly, doesn't want to miss
out on tax revenue. More vapers means fewer smokers, hence the online sales
ban and scare stories.
Does this sound familiar? The United States has been awash with scare
stories about e-cigarettes for several years, culminating in
the 'EVALI' panic last year.
A ban on online sales (disingenuously titled the Preventing Online Sales of
E-Cigarettes to Children Act) passed the Senate earlier this month and
will be voted on in the House any day now.
The only difference is that China Tobacco doesn't have the 'public health'
lobby cheering it on.
American 'public health' campaigners argue that e-cigarettes don't help
smokers quit and act as a gateway to tobacco for young people. China Tobacco
obviously doesn't agree.
Who is most likely to be right - a bunch of moral entrepreneurs who have
never seen a ban they didn't like, or some hard-nosed businessman who have
skin the game?
Americans are smoking more during the coronavirus pandemic because they are
spending less on travel and entertainment and have more opportunities to
light up. They are also switching back to traditional cigarettes from vaping
devices in the wake of federal restrictions on e-cigarette flavors.
Malice, corruption or unbelievable incompetence? You decide.
I'm chairing an online panel discussion today at 6pm to discuss risk, wellbeing, health and wealth. The trade-off between life and liberty has been brought into stark relief by the pandemic. What lessons have we learned?
With the government set to introduce all the Theresa May (previously David Cameron) nanny state policies on food, no one in government seems able to predict what success looks like. How much will obesity fall back as a result of these costly interventions? Will the government repeal the laws if obesity hasn't dropped by 2025?
You won't get any answers from MPs or 'public health'. They know and we know that the policies won't make any difference and there will be no desire to seriously evaluate them in the future. As I have said many times, 'public health' is not a results-driven business.
Take plain packaging, for example. The battle for this stupid policy involved years of screeching and millions of pounds of taxpayers money spent on self-lobbying. What happened? Where is the audit?
Australia has had plain packaging since December 2012. Anti-smoking clown Simon Chapman said it was "almost like finding a vaccine that works very well against lung cancer." But what really happened?
National smoking figures are only published every three years Down Under and this month saw the latest set of figures. Over three years, the smoking rate had fallen by just one percentage point. Since 2012, the smoking rate has fallen at half the longterm average, as Jo Furnival explains:
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) released the 2019 National Drug Strategy Household Survey
(NDSHS) this week. This survey has become a vital indicator of the
performance of government health policies, including tobacco control.
Previous surveys were carried out in 2010 before plain packaging for
tobacco products was introduced, in 2013, the year following its
introduction (along with other measures, including tax increases), and
again in 2016.
The data shows that, prior to 2012, the per centage of daily smokers
in Australia was in long-term, steady decline (a rate of 0.46 per cent
annually for 20+ years). After plain packaging was introduced, this
annual rate of decline slowed by almost a half to just 0.26 per cent
between 2013 and 2019.
Moreover, the proportion of smokers planning to quit has not changed
since plain packaging was introduced. Three in 10 smokers have no
interest in quitting, the same percentage (30 per cent) as in 2010.
Rather than this costly eight-year experiment, the Australian government
would have been better off doing nothing at all.
Trebles all round! And it gets better...
The proportion of smokers using illicit, unbranded loose tobacco has
increased by 37 per cent (10.5 per cent in 2010 to 14.4 per cent in
2019). Meanwhile, overall consumption of illegal tobacco products
(including unbranded loose tobacco, along with contraband and
counterfeit items) has risen by a whopping 80 per cent (from 11.5 per
cent in 2012 to 20.7 per cent in 2019) and is now at a record level,
according to a recent KPMG study.
Tremendous work, and all as predicted by those who opposed the policy.
Australia shows what happens when nanny state fanatics run the show. Ban e-cigarettes, introduce plain packaging and set taxes so high that buying from the black market is almost a moral duty. What could go wrong?
The UK is facing a tobacco tariff timebomb. Britain’s black
market in cigarettes is set to boom if trade talks with the European
Union fail to bear fruit by the end of the year.
The damage can be easily avoided easily if the department
of international trade makes some minor changes to its post-transition
period tariff regime. But so far, there is no sign that politicians are
aware of the problem.
The issue stems from the UK Global Tariff
– our post-Brexit replacement for the EU’s Common External Tariff. In
the absence of a trade agreement, the UKGT will apply to all imported
goods from 1 January 2021. At present, cigarettes imported from the EU
for sale in the UK (which make up the overwhelming majority of our
market) are liable for tobacco duty and VAT but are not subject to any
tariff.
Presumably, though, in an unfortunate oversight (since
there’s virtually no domestic tobacco industry to “protect”) the UKGT in
its current form will slap an eye-watering 50 per cent tariff on cigarettes and a 70 per cent
tariff on roll-your-own tobacco. That’s on top of existing charges.
Even with an EU-UK trade deal, if we get our rules of origin
requirements wrong, the tariff could still end up applying.
The government could adjust tobacco duty downwards so that prices remain unchanged (it would get the same amount of revenue), but the anti-smokers would doubtless scream blue murder.
Rumours abound that Boris Johnson will be making an announcement about the government's obesity strategy on Monday and that it's going to be a case of 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss'.
I tried to take a positive view of things in this article for the Spectator...
Despite
my libertarian disposition, I take a perverse satisfaction in some of
this. The television companies that spent years hyping the childhood
obesity ‘epidemic’ and demanding tough action from government are now
set to lose £200 million a year in advertising fees. Channel 4 might
finally reflect on the wisdom of employing Jamie Oliver to make
one-sided agitprop.
Similarly,
the food industry might finally realise that the 'public health' lobby
is serious in its rhetoric about ‘Big Food’ being the new Big Tobacco.
Food companies went along with Public Health England’s ludicrous
reformulation scheme
because of the thinly veiled threat of more draconian laws if they
didn’t comply. Now that the government is going to pass the laws anyway,
they might awake from their slumber and stand up for themselves.
Anti-smoking legislation started with a ban on television commercials
before 9 p.m. – they must see which way the wind is blowing.
There
is also a strange comfort in being able to abandon hope in Boris
Johnson so soon into his premiership. It saves time in the long run. To
be honest, his libertarianism was already in doubt when he put us all
under house arrest for three months but, to be fair, that was under
exceptional circumstances. However, if a Conservative government with an
80 seat majority, a liberal leader and an anti-establishment chief
advisor is going to impose the kind of purse-lipped, micro-managing,
finger-wagging, lemon-sucking, nanny-knows-best, censorious,
anti-business, killjoy policies that even Gordon Brown never seriously
entertained, then we have to conclude that nothing short of revolution
is going to put the paternalistic political class out of its stride. It
doesn’t matter who you vote for, Public Health England always gets in.
I've also written about it for the Telegraph. In this article, I argue that an advertising ban will set a runaway train of prohibitions in motion, just as it did with tobacco.
The advertising ban won’t work. How do we know? Partly because the
economic evidence consistently shows that advertising affects brand
preference, not aggregate demand. In other words, a Colgate advert might
make people buy more Colgate toothpaste, but it doesn’t make them buy
more toothpaste.
But we also have real world evidence from Britain showing that it
doesn’t work. In 2008, the Labour government banned HFSS adverts during
programmes which had a large proportion of viewers under 16 years old.
This, along with the fact that children watch less live television than
they used to, led to children’s "exposure" to HFSS ads falling by 70 per
cent. The rate of childhood obesity, however, remained the same.
Paradoxically, the failure of such policies makes further
restrictions inevitable. When the watershed ban fails to reduce obesity,
there will be demands for a total advertising ban. Practitioners of
"public health", unlike practitioners of medicine, can get away with
carrying out useless and harmful interventions ad infinitum.
It is time to demand results. When Johnson announces the latest set
of bans next week, he should tell us how much rates of obesity are going
to fall by and over what period of time. There should be a sunset
clause. If the anti-obesity policies haven’t reduced obesity after, say,
five years, they should be repealed. This is a modest request to ask of
policies that claim to be evidence-based, but it will never happen
because everybody involved knows, deep down, that they are nothing of
the sort.
Some dog-bites-man news from Britain's least liberal Sunday newspaper, the Observer...
‘Junk food is the new tobacco’: experts call for restrictions to tackle obesity
Ministers should regulate processed food as heavily as tobacco to
tackle the “massive national challenge” of the UK’s obesity crisis,
health experts have warned.
They have urged severe restrictions on supermarket promotions of
processed foods, and bans on fast food outlets near schools, and TV
adverts for pizzas, burgers and similar foods before 9pm. One campaign
group even urged the government to consider plain packaging for
processed food.
No slippery slope there then, eh?
The paper also carries an editorial calling for more heavy regulation from government.
The government is expected to set out a new strategy this week, aimed at
reducing obesity levels both in the next few months – ahead of a
possible second wave of infections – and the longer term.
Anyone who thinks a government strategy released next week is going to reduce obesity levels in three months is away with the fairies.
There is robust evidence about what is needed to cut obesity and in recent years report after report, including from Public Health England and the former chief medical officer, have called for urgent action.
There is no credible evidence to support any of the proposals in the Childhood Obesity Strategy. The impact assessment is based on nothing but guesswork. The claims about the efficacy of banning so-called 'junk food' advertisements are based on extremely weak evidence. There is essentially no evidence for the idea of banning retailers from displaying certain food in certain parts of their shop. And the evidence on calorie labelling and restricting fast food outlets suggests that neither policy has any impact.
Yet these calls were ignored by Conservative ministers who have
seemingly prioritised the food and drink industry’s financial interests
over the health of the nation.
This is not only a false dichotomy, it is untrue. It was a Conservative government that gave us the sugar tax and a Conservative government that put forward all the proposals that the Observer supports. A public consultation on them was held last year, although a genuine public health crisis has understandably taken priority since then.
The continuing failure to act is consigning a generation of children
to a lifetime of health problems. One in three leaves primary school
overweight or obese, putting them at significantly greater risk of
cardiovascular disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes later in life.
To 700,000 a year, according to the Observer's source. Which amounts to 3.4% of all admissions.
Increasing obesity levels are not the result of the nation becoming more
wilfully irresponsible about its nutrition choices or parents
deliberately choosing to load their children’s diets with unhealthy
foods. They are primarily the result of an industry that stands to gain
from packing processed foods with increasing amounts of cheap and
addictive fat, sugar and salt, in a way that has reduced consumer choice
by conditioning our palates to crave more over time.
Its efforts are working: children are consuming, on average, more than twice the recommended amount of sugar each year and tooth decay is the most common reason for those aged five to nine to be admitted to hospital.
The one area where the government has taken proper action has been the
introduction of a sugar levy on fizzy drinks, eventually brought in in
2018 after years of delay. This has been highly successful on its own
terms – the amount of sugar in fizzy drinks
has fallen by almost 30% without a corresponding fall in soft drink
sales – but it is far too limited in scope to make a big enough
difference on obesity.
It hasn't made any difference to obesity, so it hasn't been a success, has it?
Before 2010, the UK was a leader in nutrition policy and
was the first country to successfully reduce population-level salt
intakes by forcing manufacturers to gradually reduce salt levels in
food, an approach that has been copied around the world with other
countries applying it to sugar and fat as well as salt with great
success.
This is incorrect. The salt reduction scheme was voluntary.
However, Conservative governments have ripped up this approach.
Quite the reverse. Via Public Health England, Conservative governments have presided over a massive expansion of the reformulation programme which now encompasses sugar, fat and calories. Why can't the Observer get these basic facts straight?
We need to see the compulsory reformulation of processed and convenience foods to reduce sugar and fat as well as salt levels...
Really? I'd love to see how that legislation would be worded.
...and, as the King’s Fund argues in today’s Observer,
we need a comprehensive ban on junk food advertising, regulation to
eliminate unhealthy food being sold as a loss leader by supermarkets and
beefed-up powers to enable local authorities to maintain the area
around schools as fast food-free zones.
So far, government briefings suggest that the new strategy, like the
ones that went before, will be focused on weak measures such as public
education campaigns and “nudges” such as the repositioning of unhealthy food in different parts of supermarket aisles.
A ban on positioning 'unhealthy food' at the entrance and exit of shops would not be a 'nudge' (bans are not nudges). 'Public health' campaigners have spent years screeching about the horrors of chocolate bars at the check out. They are the ones who have been demanding a ban.
The real test for an overweight prime minister said to be shaken by his
own experience of Covid is whether he is prepared to take on an industry
seemingly determined to extract as much profit as it can, regardless of
the cost in premature deaths.
Is the industry selling at a loss or extracting as much profit as it can? On this, as with so much else, the Observer seems confused. It doesn't even have a superficial understanding of the facts. It mentions industry no fewer than seven times, but never mentions physical activity. From a misdiagnosis of the problem, it comes up with the wrong prescription.
The Observer is always going to take a nanny state line on such issues. It is a paternalistic newspaper read by a small number of people who take a dim view of the public. The question for Boris Johnson is whether he is going to capitulate to the left-wing press, as Cameron and May did, or chart a different path.
The list of charges against Public Health England since the pandemic began is long. I am sure I have forgotten some, but off the top of my head, there is... Rejecting the South Korean model of mass testing
The most recent PHE cock up to be revealed is not going to kill as many people, but it is perhaps the most remarkable in its cretinous stupidity.
As Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan (from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine) explained in a blog post on Thursday, PHE collects information on who tests positive for COVID-19, but they do not keep a record of who recovers. When that person dies - of any cause - it is automatically counted as a COVID-19 death.
By this PHE definition, no one with COVID in England is allowed to
ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but
successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted
as a COVID death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a
bus three months later.
... In summary, PHE’s definition of the daily death figures means that
everyone who has ever had COVID at any time must die with COVID too. So,
the COVID death toll in Britain up to July 2020 will eventually exceed
290k, if the follow-up of every test-positive patient is of long enough
duration.
This helps explain why deaths from COVID-19 in hospital have been falling so much faster than overall COVID-19 deaths. It also helps explain why COVID-19 deaths in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been petering out so much quicker than they have in England. The rest of the UK counts these deaths in a sane and reasonable way.
Here's how PHE's figures differ from the Office for National Statistics. Notice to long tail on the right.
PHE vs. ONS
comparison based on today's ONS week 27 report and latest
PHE/DHSC all-settings date-of-death data. Numbers by positive test still
seem to be tracking above death cert mentions. pic.twitter.com/rnxVxLGRQD
Under PHE's methodology, COVID-19 could be wiped out next week but people would still be dying from it decades from now. It's such a rudimentary error that it destroys whatever faith you may still have in the agency's competence.
Here's
more detail from PHE Incident Director, Dr Susan Hopkins, on our method
for counting #COVID19
deaths. As we learn more, it's right that we
review how #coronavirus
deaths are calculated. pic.twitter.com/BJNojRGHiK
In other words: 'Sorry, but this is as new to us as it is to you. You live and learn.'
The fact that COVID-19 is a 'new and emerging infection' is neither here nor there. From PHE's statement, you would think that keeping count of patients who recover was a radical new idea. Note also how they conflate miscounting and over-counting with having 'complete' data.
I have said many times over the years that these people are clowns, but I honestly didn't think they were this incompetent. In his Friday message, PHE boss Duncan Selbie sounded like a beaten man. Reading between the lines, it looks like he is expecting the chop.
The world will never be the same again following the COVID-19 pandemic
but this now presents a genuine opportunity to achieve a better balance
between risk and investment in the public’s health. PHE is rightly
recognised for its science capability, public health expertise and
national to local connectivity [no it isn't - CJS] , but resilience also requires flexibility
and ability to adapt to a changing context. No public health agency has
entered this pandemic thinking it will look the same afterwards. The
public’s health is what matters most and whatever future decisions are
to follow, the organising principle will be how we as a nation more
effectively close the health gap between the rich and the poor and be
better ready in capability and at scale for a future pandemic. Meantime
we remain fully focused on fighting the virus.
It's telling that Selbie mentions reducing health inequalities ahead of protecting people from infectious disease as PHE's 'organising principle'. The health inequalities agenda is fundamentally political and largely amounts to trying to force everybody to adopt the lifestyles of the upper-middle class.
Cadbury to shrink all multipack chocolate bars by 2021 - but prices will stay the same
One of the world's biggest chocolate manufacturers has announced
plans to shrink all of its products to cut back on calories - but prices
will stay the same when the changes come into effect.
Cadbury
is shrinking the size of Double Decker and Wispa Gold bars sold in
multipacks so they contain less than 200 calories in an attempt to help
tackle obesity, but the smaller bars will cost the same.
This is Public Health England's so-called reformulation scheme in action. This is the stuff that Public Health England is really interested in. This is what it was doing when it should have been preparing for a pandemic. Never forget that.
I've got an article in the Spectator this week about working class white males and why they are falling behind in school.
...nearly
half the children eligible for free school meals in inner London go on
to higher education, but in the country outside London as a whole it is
just 26 per cent.
Black
African British children outperform white children, whereas black
Caribbean children tend to do worse. Poor Chinese girls (that is to say,
those who qualify for free school meals) do better than rich white
children. But, interestingly, the ethnic group least likely to get into
university are whites. With the sole exception of Gypsy/Roma, every
ethnic group attends university at a higher rate than the white British
and, of the white British who do attend, most are middle class and 57
per cent are female. The least likely group to go on to higher
education are poor white boys. Just 13 per cent of them go on to higher
education, less than any black or Asian group.
This
is a trend that can also be seen in the GCSE data; only 17 per cent of
white British pupils eligible for free school meals achieve a strong
pass in English and maths. Students categorised as Bangladeshi, Black
African and Indian are more than twice as likely to do so. In 2007, the
state sector saw 23 per cent of black students go on to higher
education; this was true for 22 per cent of whites. So about the same.
But at the last count, in 2018, the gap had widened to 11 points (41 per
cent for black students, 30 per cent for whites). The children of the
white working class are falling away from their peers, in danger of
becoming lost.
Have a read. I'm also one the Spectator podcast with former UCAS head Mary Curnock Cook talking about the same issue.
They have now raised that to over a million. Do they think we were born yesterday?
The BBC fell for it, naturally. As I explain in the thread below, there is no credible evidence for it whatsoever. Will there be a comeuppance for ASH when the figure is comprehensively debunked in time? Almost certainly not.
A notoriously
unreliable pressure group has made the barely believable claim that 1 in
7 smokers have quit since March. Let's take a look at it. 1/
https://t.co/R3JkbLiNGt
ASH have had the begging bowl out since the pandemic began, hoping to get £350,000 from the Department of Health for their lame Quit for Covid campaign. They seem to have got it.
Ash is launching a stop-smoking campaign funded by the Department of
Health and Social Care, targeting people in areas of the country with
the highest rates of smoking.
I guess the government doesn't have anything better to spend the health budget on at the moment.
We haven't heard much about plain packaging for a while. I assumed that ASH et al. were happy to let everybody forget about this damp squib while they moved onto the next thing. A study published John Britton and his team of anti-smoking zealots in 2018 had to concede that the policy hadn't had the promised effect on tobacco sales:
Conclusions
The implementation of standardized packaging
legislation in the United Kingdom, which included minimum pack sizes of
20, was associated with significant increases overall in the price of
manufactured cigarettes, but no clear deviation in the ongoing downward
trend in total volume of cigarette sales.
That must have stuck in the craw, but it could hardly be denied. HMRC's tobacco bulletin keeps track of tobacco sales. It shows a steep decline in (legal) cigarette sales until 2016/17, no doubt largely thanks to the emergence of e-cigarettes, after which the downward trend slowed appreciably.
For roll-you-own tobacco, sales bottomed out in 2016/17 and have since risen by 20 per cent.
It's nigh on impossible for a credible academic to turn this pig's ear into a silk purse. And so the job was left to Anna Gilmore of Bath University's Tobacco Control Research Group, which is now awash with Bloomberg cash. You may remember Gilmore as the activist-academic who claimed, falsely, that the smoking ban led to a 10 per cent fall in heart attacks.
In a study published in the risible Tobacco Control journal, she once again claims that black is white. Rob Davies at the Guardian is one of the journalists to have fallen for it.
UK tobacco sales fell faster after plain packaging rules came into force
Cigarette sales have decreased by about 20m a month after plain packaging rules and tougher taxes were introduced three years ago, researchers have found.
Prof Anna Gilmore, director of the Tobacco Control Research Group
(TCRG), said: “The underlying rate of decline in tobacco sales almost
doubled after these policies were implemented.”
It then says:
Monthly sales were almost 3.29bn individual cigarettes in May 2015, but fell to 3.16bn in April 2018.
That is nowhere near a decline of 20 million a month. Why is May 2015 being used as the starting point anyway? Plain packs weren't in circulation until early 2017 and were not mandatory until May 2017. The study itself claims that....
Postimplementation, the average monthly decline in stick sales was 6.4 million (95%CI 0.1million to 12.7 million) sticks faster than prelegislation, almost doubling the speed of decline.
None of this bears any relation to the truth, but the truth is whatever the 'public health' lobby wants it to be. That the study can be debunked in five minutes by anybody who is familiar with the data is besides the point. It has generated a few headlines in Britain and can be cited as evidence by campaigners abroad. And that's all that matters.
When the COVID-19 outbreak began, I expressed cautious optimism that a genuine public health epidemic would put the nanny state crusade that masquerades as a 'public health' movement back in its box for a while.
That seems less and less likely. In Britain, the government has been only too happy to blame obesity for the relatively high death toll and its preparation for the second wave amounts to telling people to lose weight. The Childhood Obesity Strategy has been dusted down for laws to make us do this.
In South Africa, tobacco and alcohol were banned at the start of lockdown in March. Alcohol was eventually relegalised, but tobacco never was. Unsurprisingly, tobacco prohibition is not an effective anti-Covid measure and South Africa has now had a resurgence of cases. The government's response? Banning alcohol again.
“As a result of the pandemic, more and more people are spending time
with friends, family and loved ones outside. We must ensure these new
pavement areas can be enjoyed by all.”
Unless you smoke.
Regular readers will not be surprised to hear that Northover is a 'Liberal' Democrat, nor that she has been getting assistance from ASH.
Deborah Arnott, the chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health,
said: “Making smoke-free status a condition for all pavement licences
sets a level playing field for business and the public, and has strong
public support, which will make it easy to enforce.”
Ah, the old 'level playing field' argument that levelled the pub industry last time it was used. I swear there are some politicians who won't be happy until the last pub closes.
PS. On the South African prohibitions, it's worth watching this interview with Willie Aucamp, a South African MP.
I was on The Moral Maze last night talking about gambling. It wasn't a bad discussion. I was on at round 24 minutes in.
I've also written a review of Jacob Grier's book The Rediscovery of Tobacco for Spiked.
Jacob Grier doesn’t like cigarettes.
He doesn’t smoke cigarettes. He advises people against smoking
cigarettes. And yet he believes that adults should be allowed to smoke
cigarettes without being harassed, demonised, over-taxed and thrown out
of every building in America, including, in some cases, their own home.
This view, which was once so uncontroversial as to go without saying,
makes him virtually a libertarian provocateur today. In The Rediscovery of Tobacco, Grier explains how this cultural revolution happened.
Brits were encouraged to clap for the NHS on Sunday in what the government hopes will become an annual show of devotion to a below-par health system. I hope it doesn't become a Thing. It would be embarrassing if foreigners found out about it, as I explain in The Critic today...
As the years roll on, it is possible that somebody might notice that
the British are paying more than average for a below-average health
service, but it is more likely that new excuses and scapegoats will be
found. The public are already being primed to blame themselves for the
NHS’s failings. If only we weren’t so fat and lazy, goes the message,
the system would work. This is the logical conclusion to the thinking –
made explicit during lockdown – that it is the public’s duty to protect
the NHS rather than the other way round.
In the meantime, we will continue to applaud the idea of the
NHS, worshipping a caterpillar that, for some reason, never quite
became a butterfly. We will continue to view basic healthcare as a
miracle of this island race, as if being born in a hospital or having
one’s life saved by medicine could only happen when the state owns the
infrastructure. We will continue to accept waiting four hours for
emergency treatment and six months for an operation as if it would be
unreasonable to expect anything better. After all, it’s free!
To the rest of the world, Britain’s infatuation with its own
healthcare system is a baffling eccentricity, like those Pacific
Islanders who worship the Duke of Edinburgh. But we don’t care. When it
comes to healthcare, we are used to ignoring the rest of the world
(except the USA). The NHS makes self-described internationalists become
peculiarly parochial and narrow-minded, almost jingoistic. Insofar as we
give other countries’ health systems a thought, we assume that they
have either copied the NHS (may peace be upon It) or have no healthcare
at all.
The Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance & Australian Libertarian Society
have put together a wonderfully ambitious 24 hour digital liberty conference which will be held this weekend.
I'll be on a panel at 11 am (UK time) and there are plenty of other speakers you will have heard of. They include Dave Rubin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bryan Caplan, Dan Hannan, Eric Crampton, Kate Andrews, Nick Gillespie, Eamonn Butler and Brendan O'Neill.
Check out the schedule and sign up here. For twenty Australian dollars, it's a bargain.
UPDATE
There's an access code that gives you the conference for free! Use FRIEDMANFREE
As you might have guessed if you've read Killjoys, one of my heroes is John Stuart Mill. In the IEA's School of Thought series, I talked to Syed Kamal about why his philosophy is important and urgently needs to be revived.
I've written about Boris Johnson's alleged death bed conversion to nanny statism for Spiked, with some background about the 'anti-obesity' policies that have been hanging around Whitehall for five years.
According to the Telegraph,
Johnson has a range of measures in mind, including ‘wider use of
bariatric surgery’ and ‘increasing access to exercise and healthy eating
schemes’. More worryingly, there is talk of ‘banning price promotions
such as “buy one, get one free” offers’. Advertising could be restricted
and there is talk of a new law to ‘force restaurants, cafés and
takeaways to label the calorie content of their food’.
If some of these ideas seem familiar, it’s because they have been
hanging around Whitehall like a bad smell for years. In his efforts to
tackle the non-existent childhood obesity epidemic, David Cameron
approved a raft of nanny-state measures in 2016, including a ban on
so-called ‘junk food’ advertising on television before 9pm, but he left
office before a public consultation could be launched.
Most of his proposals were ditched under Theresa May, reputedly at
the insistence of her adviser Fiona Hill. When a slimmed down ‘Childhood
Obesity Plan’ was published in the summer of 2016, the likes of Action
on Sugar screamed blue murder about the lack of bans, taxes and
regulations. Cameron’s original draft was soon leaked to Channel 4,
whose Dispatches programme described it as ‘the secret plan to save fat Britain’.
In the wake of the disastrous General Election campaign of 2017,
Fiona Hill left government and Theresa May capitulated to the ‘public
health’ lobby by resurrecting the Cameron policies in Chapter Two of the
Childhood Obesity Plan, published in June 2018. A long public
consultation was announced and the whole thing was forgotten about while
the government grappled with Brexit.
It became Boris Johnson’s problem when he replaced Theresa May in July
2019 and it has been lingering in the in-tray ever since, like the Ghost
of Christmas Past.
There is a good reason why these policies have been passed from
pillar to post for five years. They are terrible. It is not so much that
they will annoy the Tory party’s negligible libertarian wing, but that
they are ill-conceived, costly, largely unworkable and will almost
certainly be ineffective. Chapter Two of the Childhood Obesity Plan is a
wish-list of bone-headed ideas devised by ‘public health’ mid-wits who
know nothing about business and next-to-nothing about food. They see
added costs and inconvenience to consumers as a feature rather than a
bug, and regard disruption to the food supply as a sign of success.
Thanks to exorbitant taxes, a pack of twenty cigarettes costs around $35 (£18) in New Zealand. Not quite as ludicrously expensive as in Australia, but enough to have caused an epidemic of robberies from shops.
A PhD student at New Zealand's University of Canterbury, Ben Wamamili, has proposed hiking the price to $50. I assume he has his heart set on getting into the 'public health' racket and thought this would be a good way of making his mark.
Student smokers would be more likely to quit the habit if the price for a pack topped $50, a study has shown.
His research, such as it is, involved asking students whether they would give up smoking if cigarettes cost a certain amount. Stated preferences of this sort as worthless (my grandmother insisted that she would quit when cigarettes cost £1 a pack but never did). Apparently, 39 per cent of them said they would stop smoking if the price was hiked by another $15.
Nothing surprising about any of this. Demanding higher taxes is what anti-smoking campaigners do. The surprising thing is that New Zealand's premier anti-smoking group is against it.
Deborah Hart, director of smoke-free action group ASH NZ, said she
welcomed the research but New Zealand already has the world’s highest
priced cigarettes, in relation to income.
“The people we are most interested in getting to be smoke-free are
people who have the highest rates of smoking, and they tend to be in a
low-socioeconomic group," she said.
"Putting up the price any further for people who are already in poverty
and have a real dependence on smoking is counterproductive.
"If price was going to be the only thing that worked for that group of people, it would have worked already.”
All true, of course, but this has to be a first, no?
By the time the pubs reopen on July 4th, Britain will have been under various forms of lockdown for fifteen weeks. In his address to the nation on March 23rd - now more than three months ago - Boris Johnson’s sole justification for locking down was to ‘protect the NHS’. There can be no doubt that this has been achieved, albeit at enormous cost to our economy, children and sanity.
Covid-related deaths in English hospitals have fallen from a peak of over 800 a day on 8th April to less than sixty a day in recent weeks. A third of English hospitals reported no Covid-related deaths last week. The number of ‘excess deaths’ in England and Wales is now below average for this time of year.
The rest of the UK is doing even better. On Sunday, there were no deaths from COVID-19 in Northern Ireland for the first time in months. Scotland went six days without a death from COVID-19 recently, and its Covid-related hospital admissions are now in the single figures.
The documents from the SAGE meetings make it clear that the idea of a full lockdown came very late in the day. One of SAGE’s objections to banning mass gatherings was that people would simply congregate in pubs instead. It seems obvious now that this would only be a problem if the pubs were open, but the idea of the government shutting them was unthinkable, even to SAGE, until the eleventh hour.
We have done more than was reasonably expected of us for longer than we could have imagined. The original objective of the lockdown was achieved many moons ago. The NHS was never overwhelmed. The five tests that were introduced in April to justify the extension of the lockdown have now been met, including the worryingly subjective requirement that the government be ‘confident that any adjustments will not risk a second peak that would overwhelm the NHS’. Social distancing has become normalised. Scientists have discovered that Dexamethasone significantly reduces mortality. Parts of the country have achieved a measure of herd immunity. Diagnostic testing has been successfully ramped up. Fewer patients require ventilators than was originally thought. Medics have the necessary PPE. At the risk of leaving a massive hostage to fortune, there is no reason to expect a second wave to overwhelm the health service.
But that does not mean a second wave will not occur. From the outset, scientists warned that a second wave was bound to take place in the autumn and winter. Moreover, they always said that the more that is done to suppress the first wave, the greater the second wave will be. Neil Ferguson, the darling of lockdown aficionados, made this clear in his infamous report for Imperial College in mid-March, saying:
‘Introducing such interventions too early risks allowing transmission to return once they are lifted (if insufficient herd immunity has developed); it is therefore necessary to balance the timing of introduction with the scale of disruption imposed and the likely period over which the interventions can be maintained. In this scenario, interventions can limit transmission to the extent that little herd immunity is acquired – leading to the possibility that a second wave of infection is seen once interventions are lifted.’
In light of Ferguson’s subsequent reputation as a maverick scientist speaking truth to power, it is worth noting how similar this message is to curve-flattening, sombrero-squashing rhetoric of the government at the time. Six months after COVID-19 reached our shores, we appear to be a long way from achieving herd immunity. The chances of a vaccine being developed this year are extremely remote. If the scientists are correct, we must learn to live with COVID-19. We must expect a second wave.
But we must also return to some kind of normality. Staying at home until a vaccine is developed - which may never happen - is not an option. The lockdown has already done catastrophic damage. We are likely to see four or five million people unemployed once the furlough scheme is lifted. Countless businesses will never recover. Children are having their education interrupted for six months, with those from low income households most vulnerable to being left behind.
Flattening the curve to allow the NHS to give every COVID-19 patient the care they need if one thing. Suppressing the curve indefinitely in a futile attempt to prevent anyone dying from a disease that kills people, on average, at the age of 85, is quite another.
Those who predict that the July 4th relaxations will lead to a second wave are unlikely to see their reputations tarnished. If they are right, they will look like (independent) sages. If they are wrong, nobody will remember. The people who wrongly prophesied that a second wave would result from the VE Day celebrations, or the Dominic Cummings affair, or the Black Lives Matter protests, or people going to the beach, or the partial reopening of primary schools, have not been held accountable by the media. Insofar as we remember these predictions at all, we are simply relieved, and rather encouraged, that they were wrong.
Independent SAGE, Sir David King’s assortment of political malcontents, seem to oppose every relaxation of lockdown on principle. Like Groucho Marx, whatever it is, they’re against it. They were against the full reopening of primary schools and got their way. Many health professionals, not to mention parents, now recognise that keeping schools closed until September, when almost every other country has reopened theirs, was an historic error.
Independent SAGE now opposes relaxing the two metre rule, despite most countries - and the World Health Organisation - endorsing a shorter and more practical distance. We must be thankful that the government has not capitulated on this occasion. The cultural life of the nation depends on it being dropped.
The latest excuse for putting our lives on hold is that that the UK’s system of tracking and tracing has not been perfected. It is true that the mobile phone app has been a classic government IT fiasco, but we have 25,000 people by the phone ready to do contact tracing (many of them are stood idle because there are, thankfully, not enough infections to track).
Local public health directors have repeatedly claimed that contact tracing is the job they were born to do. You may lack faith in Public Health England and their local representatives, and I can hardly blame you, but they have had years to get their pandemic planning in place and have had months to calibrate them for this disease. If they are not ready now, they never will be. If we’re going to stay locked down while we wait for these people to attain a minimum level of competence, we’ll be waiting a very long time. Frankly, we might as well wait for a vaccine.
And, to repeat, waiting for a vaccine is not an option. Doing nothing is not a plan. Being cautious with the virus is being reckless with our education, jobs and mental health. Our existence since mid-March has not been life. COVID-19 is not going away. Wash your hands, keep your distance and don’t do anything stupid. Life is returning.
[This article appeared on the Telegraph website last week]
WHO praises Scotland's 'promising' minimum alcohol pricing
The World Health
Organisation has praised "robust evidence" for minimum unit pricing on
alcohol, but said it must be tied to inflation for the benefits to last.
In a report analysing the links between alcohol pricing and health,
the agency said MUP is reduces health inequalities because it
"effectively targets the cheap, high-strength products that drive these
inequalities"
Nice of the WHO to take time out flattering the Chinese Communist Party to evaluate minimum pricing.
Except it isn't really the WHO.
Dr Peter Rice, chair of Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems
(SHAAP) and a contributor to the WHO report, said: "We were satisfied
with 50 pence as a starting point...."
SHAAP is a government-funded temperance sockpuppet that has been campaigning for minimum pricing since 2007. Why was such an obviously partisan organisation involved with an evaluation?
The WHO often doesn't name the authors of its policy-based literature, but on this occasion it has. And guess who got the gig to write this one...
The WHO Regional Office for Europe would like to thank Mr Colin Angus, who prepared this report with the assistance of Ms Naomi Gibbs, both of the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. The WHO Regional Office for Europe would also like to thank Mr Aveek Bhattacharya, Senior Policy Analyst at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, United Kingdom, for his specific contributions and very helpful comments on the report.
Regular readers will be familiar with Colin Angus and the Sheffield University team that has been pushing minimum pricing since 2009. Angus, in particular, is a passionate proponent of the policy, although he has been known to appear in the media without his activist hat on. The whole Sheffield team is deeply invested in minimum pricing. Having produced so many models predicting that it will work, their reputation depends on it being seen to be a success. It is impossible to think of someone less impartial than Angus.
He was assisted by Aveek Bhattacharya of the Institute of Alcohol Studies, previously known as the UK Temperance Alliance, which has been the primary lobbyist for minimum pricing in England. Several other career temperance campaigners are thanked in the acknowledgements.
It goes without saying that a report authored by such people will be pro-tax and pro-minimum pricing. Sure enough, it concludes that...
There is a robust evidence base supporting its effectiveness at reducing alcohol consumption and harm, particularly in the heaviest drinkers.
This is simply untrue, and Angus has to resort to citing his own modelling studies to claim otherwise. But true or not, it is what the Dutch government - which is under illiberal new management - wants to hear. It paid for the report.
The headline from the Herald should really have said...
The WHO were always going to support minimum pricing and higher alcohol taxes. They have done so before. It is the sheer audacity of employing one of the most obviously biased and well known advocates of these policies to write a report about them that should worry those who think the WHO can be reformed.
There are plenty of clean skin academics who would have held their nose and written the report if the WHO had offered them enough cash. Getting "Mr Angus" to do it shows that the WHO can't even bothered to pretend. We know the WHO is corrupt and the WHO knows that we know. They just don't care.
As we have seen with the sugar tax, marking your own homework is what 'public health' does. It is a racket that has become increasingly shameless and the WHO is at the very top of it.
