I was on NTD this week doing a long form interview about coercive paternalism with Lee Hall. I enjoyed it and hope you will too.
Friday 18 October 2024
Tuesday 15 October 2024
Looting for 'public health'
There is a budget on its way and the 'public health' vultures are circling.
"Campaigners" - i.e. ASH and some of their pals - are still calling for a levy on tobacco companies, partly because tobacco duty revenues of £10 billion a year are not enough for them and partly because the industry supposedly earns "absolutely obscene profits". According to the Guardian...
Reeves should also legislate to introduce a recurring annual levy on the profits tobacco firms make, they say, which in the case of Imperial Tobacco is a £66.50 margin on every £100 of sales.
This is such obvious nonsense that I never bothered to look up what the actual profit margin is, but the excellent Tim Worstall has...
A recent set of accounts from Imperial Brands, which owns Imperial Tobacco. Now, the question is, can you see a 66% net profit in there? Can you see 66% of anything that could in fact be taxed away?
The company's post-tax profits were £2.3 billion from £32.5 billion of revenue. Not too shabby (regulation has turned the industry into an oligopoly, after all), but hardly extraordinary.
Who is really profiteering from tobacco? Step forward, the government. While Imperial gets less than £2.5 billion for making the product, governments around the world are creaming off more than £15 billion.
Where does the 66% claim come from? It comes from this study published in 2015. The estimates are based on the "author’s calculation" but since the author is the economically illiterate prohibitionist clown Anna Gilmore, they are very wrong.
Her estimates are based on UK sales whereas the figures above are global but that makes no difference to the overall picture. Indeed, tobacco duty is well above average in the UK so the government's share is even higher.
Meanwhile, the government expects to make £3.6 billion from gambling duty this year, but that isn't enough for Derek Webb's mates at the Social Market Foundation who have just released a report calling for Remote Gaming Duty to be doubled from 21% to 42% - because arbitrary and capricious tax hikes on one of Britain's few world-leading British industries are just what we need to attract inward investment.
Incidentally, some activist-academics have their concerns about a tax raid on gambling companies...
https://t.co/IyuOGONi0m
— Heather Wardle (@shwardle) October 12, 2024
If this happens, would increased funding for treatment, prevention etc come from these generalised funds or would the levy still be on the table?
Don't worry, Heather. I'm sure you'll get your money one way or the other.
Friday 11 October 2024
Twilight of the pubs
Am I alone in thinking that modern politicians do not much care for pubs? They are happy to be photographed pulling a pint during an election campaign and have no problem drinking subsidised pints in the House of Commons bars, but there is something about the spontaneity, earthiness and insobriety of the traditional British boozer that sits uneasily with their vision of a regimented society. If the political class are not deliberately trying to undermine the pub trade, they are doing a good job of doing it accidentally.
In the first six months of 2024, pubs were closing at the rate of fifty a month. The total number of pubs in Britain has fallen by 14 per cent since the start of the pandemic. Pubs find themselves in a vicious downward spiral. To compensate for having fewer customers, they have raise the price of a pint, but higher prices mean that even fewer people walk through the door and so prices rise again. Drinking in a pub has for centuries been a great leveller. Everyone could afford to do it. It has increasingly become a luxury leisure activity.
After the exodus of daytime drinkers following the 2007 smoking ban, many pubs cut costs by reducing their opening hours. With the triple whammy of higher energy costs, higher food prices and above-inflation hikes of the minimum wage, some of them have now reduced the number of days they trade and many are closing long before 11.20pm. A survey by industry analysts CGA recently found that third of operators have reduced their trading hours due to cost pressures in the last year.
Read the rest at the Telegraph.
Wednesday 9 October 2024
Child obesity stats
As you may know, I have a long-running obsession with the fact that Britain's child obesity stats are a complete fiction. This came up in Radio 4's More or Less today in which I featured. The hook was the silly story in The Times claiming that child obesity is in decline (thanks to the sugar tax, of course). This is not true (as I discussed on my Substack).
You can listen here or, better still, subscribe to the podcast.
Tuesday 8 October 2024
Who wins out of minimum pricing?
Last week saw the minimum price of alcohol in Scotland rise from 50p per unit to 65p per unit. Thanks to inflation, 65p today is the same as 50p in 2017, but it won’t feel like that to shoppers who have seen their incomes fall in real terms.
Those who lobbied for the price hike employed two arguments. The first was that minimum pricing has been a tremendously effective public health policy that saved hundreds of lives and the Scottish government should “build on the success”. The second was that deaths from alcohol are at a fifteen year high in Scotland and that “a radical step change” is required to tackle this “public health emergency”. Fans of George Orwell will recognise this as doublethink, but it worked. Booze prices have now shot up.
The question that is often asked about minimum pricing is “where does the money go?” It is not a tax so it doesn’t go to the government. Does it go to the retailer? Does it go to the manufacturer? Who is making money out of it?
The answer is that it depends, but there is no reason to assume that anyone is reaping big profits.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Monday 7 October 2024
An ultra-processed experiment
An interesting new study was published last week about 'ultra-processed food' (UPFs). The researchers tried to recreate the typical Western (or at least American) diet using 'less-processed food' rather than UPFs. It turned out to be a lot of hassle for no benefit.
Selecting less-processed foods according to the Nova classification system does not guarantee a high-quality diet. In this study, we used the Nova classification system to design a Western diet with less processed foods to match the meals of a Western diet with more processed foods. Using less processed foods did not improve the nutritional value of the diet and resulted in projected greater costs and a shorter shelf life than the comparable menu with more-processed foods.
Cue Chris van Tulleken accusing all the authors of being in the pocket of Big Food in 3, 2, 1...
Thursday 3 October 2024
The three card philanthropist
The recent decision by the British media to portray all gifts to parliamentarians as scandalous, even when they are declared in the proper way, has been a boon to journalists. Up against a deadline and need a story? Simply look up the Register of Member’s Financial Interests and click on the name of any MP. Bridget Phillipson? Taylor Swift tickets from the Football Association. Peter Kyle? Madonna tickets from Sky TV. If the MP’s political stance can be loosely connected to the donor’s interests, so much the better. No one would be surprised that Kemi Badenoch is opposed to having a football regulator, but tell them that she once accepted free tickets from the Premier League and it becomes a story.
The implication is that money buys influence and it cannot be denied that having a word in a politician’s ear — or at least having them think well of you — must be the intention of those who make the donations. The latest of these scoops comes from The Times who today revealed that “Labour received gifts worth £1m from betting firms”. Regular readers of Britain’s newspaper of record know that The Times takes a dim view of betting firms and is therefore appalled that the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, accepted tickets from Entain to see England play Denmark in 2021 and the transport secretary, Louise Haigh, watched Barnsley play Sheffield Wednesday on the same company’s shilling. Wes Streeting even had a dinner paid for him by Allwyn, the company that currently runs the (state-owned) National Lottery! Pass the smelling salts.
Rachel Reeves has done particularly well out of the gambling industry, having received “£20,000 in donations from wealthy gambling bosses to fund her private office”, but this is all chicken feed compared to the cash donations to the Labour Party of one man:
In total, the Labour Party has accepted £1.08 million from those who made their money in the gambling sector. Most of this came from the little-known casino entrepreneur Derek Webb, who donated £750,000 this year and £300,000 in 2023.
Webb, a former international poker player and table game designer, has thrown his financial weight behind gambling reform efforts, including legal support for Gambling with Lives, which represents families bereaved by suicide, the successful campaign to curb fixed-odds betting terminals and Clean Up Gambling, a campaign group.
Webb is also the founder of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, Stop the FOBTs [fixed-odds betting terminals] and the Coalition to End Gambling Ads. He bankrolls the All Party Parliamentary Group on Gambling Related Harm and the “informal” pressure group Peers for Gambling Reform, as well as commissioning numerous reports from economic consultancy firms (one of which I discussed last month). I suspect that he will not be pleased to be grouped in with “betting firms” in The Times article (his company Prime Table Games is no longer operational and I understand that he is no longer actively involved in the sector), but it is nevertheless useful to know that most of the money swishing around in this policy comes from people who want more regulation, not less.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Friday 27 September 2024
The Lucy Letby case
I've been writing a bit about the Lucy Letby case recently. Some people think she's innocent. One of those people is Peter Hitchens, with whom I had a debate recently. You can watch it below.
Thursday 26 September 2024
Christopher Snowdon on the Drinks Insider podcast
I was interviewed for the latest episode of the Drinks Insider podcast talking about the anti-alcohol lobby. You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Wednesday 25 September 2024
A glimmer of hope for British healthcare
I've written for the Express about how public opinion is slowly changing with regards the NHS:
The NHS model is something of an outlier in not only paying for everyone’s healthcare but in owning the infrastructure, employing all the medics and being run by the government. In mainland Europe, it is more normal for people to take out health insurance with a provider of their choice and for hospitals to be running privately.
Governments ensure that everybody is covered, either by paying for everyone’s health insurance or by paying for those who cannot afford it, but none of them has an enormous state-run leviathan like the NHS. This introduces an element of choice and competition that raises standards and promotes efficiency.
Moreover, the NHS is not under-funded by any reasonable definition. According to the latest data, only five OECD countries spend more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than the UK. NHS spending was ring-fenced in the ‘austerity’ years and there were never any cuts to its budget.
On the contrary, its budget has rocketed since 2018. The good news is that public opinion has started to change. As recently as May 2021, a YouGov survey found that 39 percent of British adults believed that the NHS provided better healthcare than other European countries while only 10 percent thought the opposite.
When the same survey was carried out last month, 33 percent said that European systems deliver better healthcare than the NHS and only 17 percent thought the NHS was superior (the rest said that they either didn’t know or that both systems delivered similar results).
Perhaps more surprisingly, when another poll published this month asked people what the biggest problem with NHS funding is, only 33 percent said it was that "the NHS does not receive enough funding" whereas 55 percent said that "the funding the NHS does receive is not spent as effectively as it should be".
And read Kristian Niemietz's new report in which he shows how we can move the NHS towards a social insurance system and end the misery.
Tuesday 24 September 2024
The dark arts of Chris Whitty
There was a period during the pandemic in 2020 when the pubs were open but you could only go to one if you sat on your own and had a meal. You were allowed to buy an alcoholic drink but once you had finished your meal you could not buy another one. There was also a 10 p.m. curfew when the pub had to close and everyone had to go straight home.
Whether this did much to stop the spread of Covid is debatable (there were reports of a lot of house parties starting just after 10 p.m.), but it allowed the ‘public health’ establishment to turn pubs into what it thought they should always have been: functional, sterile restaurants where fun is discouraged if not outright illegal. At the top of that establishment sits the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Sir Chris Whitty. Since the pandemic, Whitty has been busy lobbying successive prime ministers for a series of fanatical nanny state measures. He persuaded Rishi Sunak to announce the gradual prohibition of all tobacco sales and, according to the Times, has been ‘leading the push for an outdoor smoking ban’.
An outdoor ban would be a shattering blow for the pub trade, but Whitty is not done yet. According to the Telegraph, the public health minister Andrew Gwynne is considering ‘tightening up the hours of operation’ of pubs and bars. 10 p.m. curfew anyone?
Once again we see the hand of Chris Whitty at work. Speaking at a fringe meeting at the Labour conference, Gwynne explained that Whitty had met him on his first day in the job and shown him a series of slides (of course!). The first slide showed that 40 per cent of NHS spending is on preventable health conditions and that this is projected to rise to 60 per cent in the next 15 years. For Gwynne, the conclusion was obvious. Never mind reforming the NHS, we must reform the public.
Read the rest at the Spectator.
Orwell chat
I was on the Unlicensed Philosophy podcast recently talking about Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four. You can watch it below if you so wish.
Tuesday 17 September 2024
Taxes. Is there anything they can't solve?
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has published what it calls “the most ambitious blueprint for the nation’s health since Beveridge”. I wouldn’t get too excited. Their previous contributions to the debate about the nation’s health include demanding plain packaging for crisps and sweets. Surprisingly, that doesn’t get a mention this time around but the report does include 20 recommendations, many of which don’t have much to do with health but are things that left-wing think tanks always want, including “a full restart of Sure Start”, a legal “Right to Disconnect” at work, abolition of the two child benefit cap, more spending on research, more work for quangos, even more “free” school meals, etc.
But the IPPR also wants a “healthy industrial strategy” based on the “polluter pays principle”. Their thinking is rooted in two absurd beliefs that have become the orthodoxy in ‘public health’ through repetition. The first is that if you drink yourself to death, it has nothing to do with you and is instead the fault of Heineken or the French wine industry or some other commercial entity. The second is that the greatest public health win of the last ten years was Lucozade putting more artificial sweeteners in their drinks. Despite the sugar tax having no effect on childhood obesity, the IPPR reckons it was “among the most successful government policies of the last decade” (to be fair, it hasn’t been a great decade for government policies) and wants it to be “expanded’, not just to food and drink but to a bunch of products and services that are already heavily taxed.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Meanwhile, EU countries have got their own problems...
European Union countries should consider extending smoking bans to cover children’s play areas, outdoor pools, amusement parks, and terraces, the European Commission will recommend Tuesday, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.
The EU executive will also recommend stricter rules on e-cigarettes “whether containing nicotine or nicotine-free” as it looks to tackle the “uptake and appeal” of vapes among children and young people.
The fun police are out of control.
Saturday 14 September 2024
The runaway train of the nany state
There was never any doubt that the government would introduce its so-called “junk food” advertising ban next October. After all, that was the date set by Rishi Sunak last year and Keir Starmer is even keener on big government than he was. The only interesting thing about yesterday’s “announcement” is that it came on the same day as Starmer’s big speech about reforming the NHS. As I mentioned last week, the Prime Minister genuinely believes that the slovenly public are to blame for Britain’s dismal health service. I very much doubt that he is going to reform the NHS. It is beyond reform. Instead, he is going to try to reform us.
For the next five years, the UK will be the playground of every “public health” blowhard and nanny state crank. The slippery slope of lifestyle regulation will become a runaway train. If resistance is futile, we should at least demand accountability. The advertising ban, for example, is supposed to reduce child obesity. If it fails to do so, we should repeal it and strip the academics who promoted it of their government grants. It’s only fair.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Wednesday 11 September 2024
Economically illiterate nonsense about online gambling
Online gambling is holding the economy back, according to the economic consultancy firm National Economic Research Associates (Nera). In a report commissioned by the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, a lobby group set up by the former casino entrepreneur Derek Webb, Nera claim that the economy would have grown by £1.3 billion a year between 2015-16 and 2022-23 if it weren’t for people gambling online. This news inspired Will Prochaska of the Coalition Against Gambling Ads — another of Mr Webb’s pressure groups — to call on the government to “consider taxing gambling like cigarettes” in order to “reduce consumption”, although how that would work in a business where customers choose how much to spend is unclear.
The general idea is that if people didn’t spend their money on online gambling, they would spend it on things that the authors of the Nera report claim have more “overall economic value”. This, they say, means that “online gambling is detrimental to the British economy”, and from this tendentious conclusion the Campaign for Fairer Gambling suggests that the government should deter people from doing it, which, by a happy coincidence, is what they already wanted.
This is wrong-headed from the start. The point of the economy is to allow individuals to access the goods and services they most want to use. If the government intervenes to make their first preference too expensive, too inconvenient or too illegal, he or she will have to settle for second best. In so doing, the government is imposing an economic cost on that person. The idea of using state coercion to make people spend money on things they don’t really want for the good of the economy (“Buy British!”) is silly.
Claims about certain industries having bigger multiplier effects than others are usually dubious and self-serving, but they are particularly suspect in the Nera report because the authors define an economically productive industry as one that is “labour intensive”, which is to say that it has to employ more people to generate the same amount of revenue.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Tuesday 10 September 2024
Hell is too cold for these joyless gimps
I was on Radio 4 for a whole hour on Friday discussing smoking and the nanny state with ASH's Deborah Arnott on the show AntiSocial. You can listen back here or download the AntiSocial podcast.
It's always nice to get a decent amount of time to talk about any issue, although it is a little frustrating when you have to spend most of your time correcting the other person's lies. Amongst other things, Arnott claimed that an outdoor smoking ban won't hurt pubs, that there were more pubs after the 2007 smoking ban than before and that smoking imposes a net economic cost on nonsmokers. Tiresome stuff.
David Mitchell wrote an excellent article about the proposed ban at the weekend...
The indoor smoking ban was bad enough. I know it’s been successful at reducing smoking and, on balance, I wouldn’t go back on it now. Nevertheless it is my belief that that is not the sort of law governments should make. Smoking is a stupid thing to do but, in a free society, we should be allowed to do stupid things unless they impinge on the freedom of others. But the advocates of the ban tried to claim that it was not an assault on liberty, by citing the health impact of passive smoking.
Are they really going to make the same claim when it’s being done outdoors? That smoking in pub gardens significantly shortens the lives of significant numbers of non-smokers? More than driving non-electric vehicles or smelting steel or lighting bonfires on 5 November, activities the government is not proposing to ban?
Feeble though that argument would be, it is troubling to me that it is not how Keir Starmer proposes to justify the ban. His reasoning is more radical. He thinks it should happen in order “to reduce the burden on the NHS and reduce the burden on the taxpayer”. So he proposes to place legal restrictions on unhealthy behaviour in order to cut down what it costs the state to provide medical care. “That’s why I spoke before the election about moving to a preventative model when it comes to health,” he explained.
This is chilling. I assumed the “preventative model” meant things like offering regular checkups, screening for cancers and encouraging healthy lifestyles, not placing legal barriers in the way of unhealthy ones. That sets quite the precedent: the state will stop you doing things that are bad for you in order to mitigate its hospital spending. With that principle established, what liberty might not be curtailed: fatty foods, contact sports, sexual promiscuity, motorbikes, stressful jobs? All this stuff could place a burden on the NHS and the taxpayer. In Starmer’s vision, is a welfare state only affordable if the populace is compelled to be prudent?
Indeed. As I said in The Critic, an outdoor ban would be extraordinarily spiteful and vindictive and yet somehow the justification for it is even worse.
Madeline Grant also wrote a great article about this for the Telegraph...
There is a real absence of “live and let live”. Grumbling over a slither of cigarette smoke several yards away in a beer garden, demanding that already hard-pressed publicans lose custom or even their livelihoods to suit your whims isn’t kindness, but the height of entitlement. It recalls those people who choose to live in Soho yet spend their time bombarding the council with noise complaints, or those who move to the countryside only to bemoan the sound of church bells. Part of being an adult is the capacity to endure mild inconvenience, to witness habits you dislike, without screeching for them to be banned. We’re being turned into children – and worse still, applauding the Government for it.
As Madeline said on Twitter, "Hell is too cold for these joyless gimps".
Monday 9 September 2024
Christopher Snowdon on the Fire at Will podcast
I did the Spectator's Fire at Will podcast recently talking about (you guessed it) the nanny state. You can listen to it in the YouTube vid below.
Friday 6 September 2024
Banned for your own good
With smoking, the Rubicon is now in the rear view mirror. It is less than a year since Rishi Sunak announced his plan to gradually prohibit the sale of tobacco. His successor, Keir Starmer, recently admitted that his government is considering some form of outdoor smoking ban. These developments are remarkable not just because they are illiberal but because they do not even pretend to respect freedom of choice. Until last year, anti-smoking campaigners would swear on a stack of Bibles that they were not prohibitionists. Their policies might have a negative impact on adults who choose to smoke but that was not, supposedly, the intention. For most of their campaigns it was children who were weaponised. Tobacco advertising had to be banned because it seduced children. Branding and shop displays had to be banned for the same reason. Taxes had to rise to make cigarettes unaffordable to children. Occasionally, they would claim to be acting on behalf of other groups of people — slim cigarettes had to be banned because they appealed to women, and smoking in pubs had to be banned to “protect” bar staff — but the activists still insisted that they were not infringing on adults’ right to smoke. Your cigarettes might be covered in disgusting photos but you could still buy them. You might not be able to smoke in a pub, but you could always nip outside.
To put it in economic terms, they appealed to market failure and negative externalities. The arguments were disingenuous, but if you squinted enough you could squeeze them into a framework that was just about consistent with British liberalism.
Not any more. The justification for the latest diktats is distinctly more Iranian and can be summarised as “Smoking is bad for you, we don’t like it and we’re going to stop you doing it.”
Read the rest at The Critic.
Thursday 5 September 2024
Why minimum pricing is bad news for pubs
Excited by the thought of an outdoor smoking ban, Prof Ian Gilmore of the Alcohol Health Alliance has written to the Telegraph. Pretending to be a friend of the pub trade despite supporting everything that has hampered it and opposing everything that could help it, he says they needn't worry about all their smoking customers disappearing and should embrace minimum pricing.
Cheap alcohol from supermarkets has turned us into a nation of home-drinkers, reducing foot traffic to local pubs and bars and threatening the closure of important social spaces. By setting a minimum price, the Government can level the playing field, making pubs a more attractive option for those who might otherwise choose to drink cheaply at home.
... MUP has saved lives in Scotland without damaging the hospitality trade. By aligning the price of alcohol more closely across different outlets, MUP offers a rare dual benefit, supporting both the survival of pubs and the health of the public.
Lying comes as naturally to these people as breathing. MUP did not save lives in Scotland and pubs in Scotland "are closing at twice the rate as those in England". A study in BMJ Open found that men under 45 reacted to MUP by buying less alcohol in pubs and more alcohol in shops.
This shouldn't be too surprising. Higher off-trade prices means drinkers have less money to spend in pubs. I predicted this would happen in 2017. The Spectator Health article is no longer available online, except via the Wayback Machine, so here it is again....
There was a reminder last week that politics produces strange
bed-fellows when the Institute of Alcohol Studies (formerly known as
the UK Temperance Alliance) promoted the pub industry’s view of alcohol policy.
Pubs have traditionally been the temperance lobby’s greatest foe. The American prohibition movement was not spearheaded by the Anti-Alcohol League or the Anti-Drunkenness League but by the Anti-Saloon League. Concerns about people drinking at home are a more recent, British phenomenon. For decades, the temperance lobby preferred people to be drinking at home than in bars, but years of excessive regulation and high taxes have led to thousands of pub closures and they are no longer seen as such a threat. People are now buying most of their drink in the off-trade and so, like Willie Sutton who robbed banks because ‘that’s where the money is’, the temperance lobby targets the off-trade because that’s where the drink is.
In a classic example of Bootleggers and Baptists behaviour, the hospitality industry has found common cause with anti-alcohol campaigners in going after supermarkets. The survey found that most publicans want higher taxes on alcohol in supermarkets and lower taxes on alcohol in pubs. Rent-seeking doesn’t get more blatant than this, but the Institute of Alcohol Studies half-agrees. It never wants lower taxes anywhere – so it ignored the issue of pub prices in its press release – but it is firmly behind the call for higher off-trade prices.
The IAS was even more excited by the pub trade’s support for minimum pricing. Putting a minimum price on a unit of alcohol had the backing of 41 per cent of the publicans surveyed, against only 22 per cent against. Partial support from the drinks industry for this temperance policy is nothing new. When David Cameron was weighing up the policy in 2013, the chief executives of several pub chains publicly urged him to go ahead with it.
A minimum unit price of around 60p will raise the price of most of the alcohol sold in supermarkets but will have virtually no effect on pubs. It is easy to see why this appeals to publicans. They are, however, being short-sighted. Once the government starts setting prices for one part of the market, it is likely to extend its reach into others. In Canada, where a form of minimum pricing exists in several provinces, campaigners want a minimum price in bars and they want it to be twice as high as the minimum price in off-licences. In Alberta and Manitoba, bars have been subject to minimum pricing laws for years.
Appeasement is always a risky strategy and it is doubtful whether the pub trade’s support of minimum pricing would pay off even in the short-term. They are assuming that people are forsaking pubs because of the gulf between pub prices and supermarket prices. They are further assuming that people would visit pubs more if this gap were narrowed, even if pub prices did not fall.
This logic is appealing because a drink bought in a supermarket is a substitute for a drink bought in a pub, but there are good reasons to think that minimum pricing could have quite the opposite effect on pubs. To see why, we need to consider the counter-intuitive finding of the economists Jensen and Miller who noticed that low income consumers in China buy more rice when the price of rice goes up. The same phenomenon is said to have taken place when the price of potatoes rose in nineteenth century Ireland: people bought more of them. The law of demand predicts that a rise in price should lead to fewer sales, so how do we explain this Giffen behaviour?
Like most economic issues, it comes down to limited resources. If your budget for food is tightly constrained, you need to get the most calories for your dollar. Carbohydrates such as rice and potatoes are the cheapest sources of energy in many countries. When times are relatively good, the poor can afford to buy meat, but if the price of carbohydrates rises, they have a choice between eating less meat or eating less food.
Let’s say that 50 cents buys you rice containing 2,000 calories or meat containing 500 calories. If you have a food budget of one dollar a day, you can buy both, but if the price of rice suddenly rises by 50 per cent, what do you do?
2,000 calories of rice now costs you 75 cents. If you keep buying your 50 cents of meat, you will have to buy a third less rice and go hungry. It makes more sense to sacrifice the relative luxury of meat and buy more rice.
This may seem an extreme example that has little to do with the pub trade in wealthy countries, but it is really just a question of budgeting. If you have a set budget and fixed preferences, a rise in prices is likely to push you towards the cheapest option.
Now let’s say you want to drink ten beers a week and have £20 to spend. You have one beer a day from the supermarket at £1 each but on Saturday you go to the pub and have four beers at £3.50 each. The effect of minimum pricing will be to raise the price of your supermarket beer to £1.50. If you want to keep drinking ten beers a week, you will have to cut down to three bottles in the pub and buy an extra bottle from the supermarket.
In practice, that is only one option reflecting one set of preferences. A consumer might instead decide to increase their beer budget or to do without a couple of beers in mid-week. But of all the options available, surely the least tempting is to cut down to five or six beers a week and buy them all in The Dog and Duck – and yet that is what the consumer would have to do for minimum pricing to benefit pubs.
If the price of food in supermarkets rose by 50 per cent, no one would predict a surge in demand for expensive restaurants. On the contrary, higher supermarket prices would make consumers eat out less to save money for groceries. So it is with alcohol. Consumers are well aware that pub prices are higher than supermarket prices. If pubs were no more than an alternative location in which to buy alcohol, everybody would go to the supermarket and the pubs would be empty.
Pubgoers are buying much more than a drink. They are buying an experience, with ambience, company, service and entertainment. There is no doubt that some consumers would prefer to drink at home less and visit the pub more, but they are unable to do so because of high prices in the off-trade. But minimum pricing is not going to make a pint in a pub cheaper. It is just going to leave people who buy alcohol in supermarkets with less disposable income. Unless these people have a highly inelastic demand for pubs and a highly elastic demand for alcohol – a strange combination of preferences – they will need to cut expenditure elsewhere to maintain their alcohol intake. Buying fewer drinks in the on-trade is one way of doing this.
I am not saying that alcohol is a Giffen good (ie. a product that sells more when the price goes up) but if you look at on-trade and off-trade drinks as rival products it is easy to see how raising the price of the latter could lead to Giffen behaviour. For consumers who have a particular desired consumption level and are quite indifferent as to where they drink it, buying more of the cheapest option and less of the pricier option is a rational response, even though the cheapest option is more expensive than it used to be. Supermarket beer should be seen as the equivalent of rice and potatoes, and pubs as the equivalent of meat. When budgets are tight, we cut down on the luxuries first.
Originally published 5 September 2017.
Friday 23 August 2024
The war on physician associates
Ever since interest rates soared to historic norms, many doctors have been struggling to afford the payments on their second yacht. With Rachel Reeves dishing out a 22 per cent pay rise to junior doctors, it was unsurprising when GPs recently voted for industrial action for the first time in 60 years. Not only is the average GP having to sit around chatting to people for a measly £88,000 a year, but — as they never tire of telling us — their surgeries are overstretched and they have to see too many patients.
I’m being facetious, of course (or am I?) but everyone agrees that GPs spend too much time doing work below their pay grade — repeat prescriptions, dishing out paracetamol, dealing with cuts and bruises, malingerers, lonely old people, etc. — and yet the medical establishment is curiously resistant to any attempt to lighten their load. This week’s proposal from the Tony Blair Institute to replace some GP consultations with artificial intelligence was not met with rapturous applause from our medical overlords. In fact, they hated it. And yet if you speak to any family doctor privately, they will tell you that they spend too much time talking to people who have such trivial or routine ailments that a chimpanzee could diagnose and treat them. Patients, meanwhile, often see GPs as unnecessary gatekeepers to specialists and antibiotics. The solution is obvious: triage patients and send the low level cases to more junior personnel.
Read on at The Critic...
Tuesday 20 August 2024
Mindless ultra-processed waffle
A chef turned novelist by the name of Simon Wroe has written an article about ultra-processed food (UPF) for the Financial Times. It is abysmal but since it is typical of a mainstream newspaper op-ed on this topic, let’s take a look.
Head over to my (free) Substack...
Thursday 15 August 2024
Tim Stockwell in the Sunday Telegraph
The Sunday Telegraph ran a good article at the weekend about Tim Stockwell's obsessive crusade against the health benefits of moderate drinking. It includes some quotes from me. Here's a taster...
But many of Dr Stockwell’s respected peers say it is far from settled science and have cast doubt on his research. They question his motives and accuse him of being a front for a worldwide temperance lobby that is secretly attempting to ban alcohol.
Dr Stockwell denies this. Speaking to The Telegraph, he in turn accused his detractors of being funded by the alcohol lobby and said his links to temperance societies were fleeting. He was the president of the Kettil Bruun Society (a think tank born out of what was the international temperance congresses) and he has been reimbursed for addressing temperance movements and admits attending their meetings, but, he says, not as a member.
... “I have attended a meeting funded by the Swedish Temperance Organisation and I’ve written material that they have published,” he said. “I’ve had connections with the International Order of Good Templars. I’ve attended some of their meetings, but I’m not a member.”
On a practical level, drinkers will almost certainly be unaware of the explosive row Dr Stockwell’s research has generated in academia. But there is a very high chance they will have read one of the many stories his work has generated, and potentially modified their behaviour, reluctantly popping the cork back into the wine bottle or leaving the beer unbought on the supermarket shelf.
Now experts warn that the anti-drinking lobby – a “neo-temperance movement” – has the US and UK’s drinking guidelines in its sights.
“Dr Stockwell has never conducted any primary research into this as far as I’m aware,” Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, told The Telegraph. “He just keeps creating systematic reviews with the aim of trying to obscure the J-curve and the benefits of drinking.
“You have what I think you can fairly describe as a neo-temperance movement operating quite effectively in Britain and around the world.
"A lot of these academics take the view that everybody needs to drink less. They’re very keen on being able to say there’s no safe level because then they could treat alcohol very similar to tobacco."
It's good to see the media digging a bit deeper into this.
Wednesday 14 August 2024
Alcohol, nicotine and dementia
The Lancet recently published a study looking at the risk factors for dementia. Based on observational epidemiology it included excessive alcohol consumption as a risk factor, but when it came to the protective effect of moderate drinking, observational epidemiology was suddenly not enough. We have been here before, of course, and I have written about this for The Critic...
They have no such quibbles about evidence that suggests heavy drinking causes dementia, of course. That evidence is actually much flakier — the aforementioned meta-analysis found “no consistent evidence to suggest that the amount of alcohol consumed in later life is associated with dementia risk” — but the Lancet authors conclude that drinking more than 21 units a week is a risk factor for dementia based on a study which found that people who drink until they pass out are twice as likely to suffer from dementia than moderate drinkers!
Heavy drinking probably does cause dementia, although you’d have to drink a lot more than 21 units a week, but the refusal to acknowledge that teetotallers are greater risk than most drinkers is pig-headed. Doctors are never going to recommend that non-drinkers start drinking. A medical journal that portrayed alcohol as in any way beneficial would be considered ideologically unsound in the current year. And so we are left with a soft Lysenkoism in which objective facts must be denied for the greater good.
The same is even more true of nicotine, which is not mentioned at all in the Lancet study. The authors are keen to stress that epidemiological studies show that smokers are at greater risk of dementia (and, therefore, that smoking must cause dementia), but there is substantial evidence that nicotine confers all sorts of cognitive benefits that could be harnessed to tackle the disease. Research is occasionally commissioned to investigate this further, but there has been a distinct lack of urgency and any positive findings would be resisted by anti-vaping activists who portray nicotine as a “brain poison”.
Sunday 28 July 2024
Tim Stockwell's cherry-picking goes into overdrive
He started with 3,248 relevant studies of which 3,125 were immediately discarded. This left 123 cohort studies to which he added 87 relatively recent cohort studies. By the time he had finished, he had whittled them down to just five - and then he had the nerve to published an article titled 'Why Do Only Some Cohort Studies Find Health Benefits From Low-Volume Alcohol Use?' The media lapped it up, as usual.
Yes, it's Tim Stockwell. Read all about it on my Substack.
Friday 26 July 2024
The fix is in
I wrote last year about some ‘experimental statistics’ from the Gambling Commission that suggested that there are far more problem gamblers in Britain than we thought there were. They appeared to show that 2.5 per cent of the UK population have a gambling problem whereas every official survey in the last 25 years has found the rate to be around 0.5 per cent. The experimental statistics are now official statistics and anti-gambling campaigners are claiming that they prove that “the harms caused by gambling have been massively underestimated”.
But do they? To save money, the government is switching from face-to-face surveys and telephone surveys to online surveys despite it being well established that “online surveys over-estimate gambling harm”. Until recently, people’s gambling habits were tracked as part of the Health Survey for England. People were randomly selected to take part in the survey and those who accepted were interviewed in their home. Since people feel it is their civic duty to take part in a national health survey, its participation rate was a respectable 50 per cent.
The new Gambling Survey for Great Britain is very different. Letters were randomly sent to 37,554 addresses asking the residents if they would like to take part in an online survey about gambling. If they didn’t respond, they were sent another letter telling them that they could do the survey by post if they preferred. Despite the inducement of a £10 fee, most people did not respond. Only 19 per cent of those who were sent the letter ended up taking part in the survey, mostly online.
When four out of five people refuse to take part in your survey, you no longer have a random sample of the population. Unlike the Health Survey for England, the Gambling Survey for Great Britain is explicitly badged as being about gambling. Who is this most likely to appeal to? People who gamble a lot. And people who gamble a lot are more likely to problem gamblers than people who don’t.
Can the Gambling Commission really convince the public that rates of problem gambling are eight times higher than they are? Probably.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Friday 19 July 2024
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill returns
Be afraid.
Labour wants to regulate flavours and branding, and may even be planning to tax vapes (another Sunak ruse). We know from other countries that such policies lead to more smoking and more cigarettes being sold. As mentioned above, the government also intends to include a wide range of reduced-risk tobacco products, including heated tobacco, in the generational ban.
The two parts of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill are therefore pulling in opposite directions. From one side, you have the clumsy hand of the state using a weird and sluggish version of prohibition to coerce people away from all tobacco products. From the other side, you have restrictions on vapes, pouches and other reduced-risk products which, if allowed to flourish, would make smoking obsolete long before 2080. It is possible that the government might still get the balance right — the King’s speech was short on detail — but until it does, I’m backing Sweden.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Wednesday 17 July 2024
Inside the mind of George Monbiot
I reviewed George Monbiot's latest book for The Critic last month. It's online here. It's supposed to be about 'neoliberalism', Hayek and free market think tanks although he doesn't seem to know much about any of them.
This is a thin book, physically and intellectually. The authors show no interest in understanding why Keynesianism “ran into trouble in the 1970s” or why politicians (and voters) were looking for a different way of doing things. They garble Hayek’s work until it becomes a ludicrous caricature and then project an extraordinary amount of bad faith onto his adherents.
Between 1945 and 1960, they claim, with a characteristic lack of evidence, that the Hayekian movement went from being “an honest if extreme philosophy” to “a sophisticated con” and “a self-serving racket”. After complaining that free-market think tanks do not dox their donors, Monbiot and Hutchison assert that there must be “oligarchs and corporations” paying them to promote their “unreasonable demands”.
In a peculiar twist, they suggest that the “oligarchs” do this not so much to enrich themselves as to get a kick out of making the poor poorer (in fact, the incomes of those in the bottom 20 per cent have doubled in real terms since 1979).
This sounds so conspiratorial that when the authors write a chapter about conspiracy theories they coin the term “conspiracy fictions” to distinguish other people’s conspiracy theories from their own “genuine conspiracies” involving Cambridge Analytica and the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers inevitably get their own chapter in which the authors propose two “likely reasons” for their donating to libertarian causes. The first is “immediate self-interest”; the second is “power”. The possibility that libertarians want to give money to libertarian organisations never seems to cross their minds.
The authors use the word “oligarch” freely, presumably because it brings Russia to mind, but it is only ever applied to the “rich backers” of “neoliberal ideologues”. They have nothing to say about the likes of Bill Gates, George Soros or Michael Bloomberg, let alone the heiress Aileen Getty who funds Just Stop Oil.
Sunday 14 July 2024
Sugar tax claims jump the shark
The Guardian is trying to find out how gullible its readers are. How else can you explain a headline like ‘Children’s daily sugar consumption halved just a year after tax, study finds’? It can only be deliberate. The alternative explanation is that Guardian journalists cannot read a simple study and are highly credulous, but since that is unthinkable we must assume that such headlines are designed to be idiot tests.
Thursday 11 July 2024
Smoking-related cancers at an all time high?
Do people in “public health” have little meetings where they dare each other to tell the media the most outrageous nonsense they can think of? Is it a competition? Do they put money in a pot which they only lose if a journalist laughs at their press release and refuses to publish it?
If so, that day never seems to come. I stopped giving money to Cancer Research UK (CRUK) years ago when it became obvious that they were prepared to abuse people’s trust in their brand by using dodgy claims to lobby for stupid policies. I suppose you have to expect activists to gild the lily somewhat, but there’s gilding and there’s gaslighting.
Rishi Sunak’s plan to very gradually prohibit the sale of tobacco had to be put on hold when he pulled off the political masterstroke of holding a general election in July for no reason. It is extremely unlikely that the Labour Party will not revive it — they were keener on the idea than the Tories — but the anti-smoking lobby are not taking any chances and are lobbying hard for it to be made a priority. The only snag is that a mere six per cent of the general public share their belief that it is a priority. And so, to inject some urgency into the proceedings, CRUK announced on Tuesday that “the number of cancer cases caused by smoking in the UK has reached an all-time high”.
Does anybody in their right mind find this remotely believable? Smoking rates in the UK peaked at around 60 per cent in the 1950s. By 1990, they had halved to 30 per cent. They have since more than halved again, to 13 per cent. It takes a while to develop cancer, of course, but it doesn’t take 70 years. If it did, you might as well smoke.
Read the rest at The Critic...
Thursday 4 July 2024
Last Orders with Tim Black
We recorded put out the Last Orders podcast a bit earlier than usual this week so it didn't arrive after the election. It's a good one with Spiked's Tim Black discussing the political betting 'scandal', what a Starmer government will look like and responding to an angry nutritionist.
Friday 28 June 2024
Who is behind the betting "scandal"?
The political betting "scandal" has dominated the British news cycle for two weeks. Very few people are asking the obvious question: who is behind all the leaks and why are they doing it?
It seems to me to be very much like election interference, as I wrote in Spiked yesterday...
A more interesting question is who is pushing this story? As experienced bookmaker Geoff Banks says, the Gambling Commission has ‘studiously maintained for the past two decades that it neither discusses the details of investigations that it undertakes nor does it discuss the fact that an investigation may or may not be in play’. And yet, through a series of leaks to the press, we know that there is not only a series of investigations underway, but also the names of many of the people under investigation. A pattern is becoming familiar. A journalist is tipped off about a gambling investigation into a political figure. The journalist writes a story in which he says that he ‘understands’ that the person is being investigated. The person is contacted by the journalist, admits that an investigation is underway, and is then suspended.
Who is behind all this? The Met Police are involved in some of these cases, but they have firmly denied leaking any of the names. If it isn’t them, someone at the Gambling Commission would seem to be the most likely suspect. The Commission has been tight-lipped in its few official pronouncements, confirming only that certain investigations are underway, but somebody somewhere has been keeping the media up to speed with its every move.
Thursday 27 June 2024
The WHO's 'banish industry' ruse
David Zaruk has written a very nice five part blog post about the bonkers WHO proposal to treat all industries as 'health-harming' and banish them from policy-making. You can start with Part One. The following quote is taken from Part Five....
It is one thing though for an academic or NGO activist to demand that all industries be excluded from the policy process, and quite another for a UN agency responsible for global health policies to follow them down that rabbit hole. Given how beneficial the public-private partnerships have been for the WHO and global health promotion, publishing such a strategy report to try to break up all corporate engagement was both stupid and dangerous.
Perhaps the fact that this report was released via the WHO Europe office and not via the WHO international office is an indication of dissent at the highest management levels toward such a radical strategy. But until the WHO can seriously speak with a single voice, such folly will continue to destroy its trust and reputation. A new leadership needs to clean up the militant factions and ensure a responsible management of global health policy.
The first step is quite easy: remove their terrible strategy publication, commit to stakeholder dialogue and issue an apology.
I recorded a Swift Half with David in 2022 which is worth 30 minutes of your time.
Tuesday 25 June 2024
The minimum pricing lies get bigger
The Toronto Star is looking to Scotland to teach it how to reduce alcohol-related deaths. In an article titled ‘How Scotland started to kick its alcohol problem — and what Ontario could learn from it’, it pushes back on plans to liberalise Ontario’s state monopoly on alcohol retail, saying:
Ontario officials say they are fulfilling a 2018 election promise to increase “choice and convenience for shoppers and support Ontario retailers, domestic producers and workers in the alcohol industry.”
But Scotland has cut alcohol-related hospital admissions by 40 per cent and deaths by almost half. While in Ontario, alcohol-related admissions have risen by a third and deaths by almost half, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.
How did Scotland supposedly achieve this public health miracle?
The key part of Scotland’s landmark policy was aimed at reducing drinking by introducing minimum unit prices to make drinking more expensive.
Ontario
already has minimum pricing and Scotland doesn’t have a state alcohol
monopoly, so it is not obvious what lessons Ontarians are supposed to be
learning, but put that to one side for a moment and consider the main
claim.
Read the rest on my Substack.
The squelchy, grey, self-serving, leftish puddle of inanity
Nesta came out with more anti-obesity bollocks at the weekend. I wrote about this pointless organisation for The Critic.
This is an organisation whose core purpose is supposed to be innovation and yet it failed to see a new generation of weight-loss drugs coming and when it finally acknowledged the arrival of semaglutide, it expressed concerns that it could “deepen the emphasis in the popular discourse on a “personal responsibility” narrative”. As Andrew Orlowski has recounted, Nesta got the opportunity to develop a touchscreen smartphone before Apple did, but cocked it up at every turn. In their early years, they funded “a man who is building a radio-controlled Harrier jump jet, a team preparing to travel to the Arctic to film the Northern Lights in 3D and an internet project offering psychological advice online.” These days they dish out grants to the likes of Tortoise Media and Open Democracy.
Everything the state touches dissolves into the same squelchy, grey, self-serving, leftish puddle of inanity. Whatever your view of heat pumps and food taxes, they are not the products of blue sky thinking. A quarter of a century after being set up as a Dragons Den for Britain’s most brilliant minds, Nesta has become essentially a May-ite think tank.
Friday 21 June 2024
The drink-driving limit
At some point over the years, the term 'drink-driving' replaced 'drunk-driving'. It is very much illegal for anyone who is even slightly drunk to drive - and rightly so - but as in so many other areas of life, the 'public health' lobby wants to reduce the limit to zero. The BMA this week called for the limit to be nearly halved and I wrote about it for The Critic.
On Tuesday, the British Medical Association (BMA) called on the next government to slash the drink-driving limit from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg per 100ml. Reducing the limit would bring the UK in line with most of Europe, but it would be lower than most of North America and plenty of other countries.
It goes without saying that driving drunk is an incredibly stupid and dangerous activity that kills around 260 people a year in Britain. Those who do it should be punished to the full extent of the law. Most countries accept that motorists can drink a small amount of alcohol and still be fit to drive. The only question is how much? In 1967, the UK erred on the side of caution by introducing a limit of 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood which amounts to roughly a pint and a half of beer, although that will vary depending on a person’s gender and weight, and on how quickly you drink it. Few people would argue that a motorist will be incapacitated by drinking such a modest amount of alcohol, but would there be benefits from lowering the limit?
Fortunately, this is a question that can be answered with empirical evidence. In 2014, Scotland lowered the limit to 50mg of alcohol. What happened next has been evaluated in three peer-reviewed studies, one written by public health academics and two written by economists.
Find out what they concluded here.
Wednesday 12 June 2024
The hard left WHO
The WHO European Region published a new report, written mostly by British 'public health' academics. It is quite revealing. For example...
This requires, at a minimum, that governments recognize that the primary interest of all major corporations is profit and, hence, regardless of the product they sell, their interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest. Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy. Similarly, governments must also recognize the now overwhelming evidence (see also chapters 4, 6 and 7) that HHIs ['health-harming industries'] engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies (69) and that voluntary or multistakeholder partnership approaches do not work where conflicts of interest exist (27, 70). Instead, they must regulate other HHIs ['health-harming industries'], their products and practices, as they do tobacco.
That's just one paragraph, but there's a lot it in.
Firstly, they are clearly not just opposed to 'health-harming industries' but to private industry in general.
Secondly, they want to exclude all industries from the policy-making process, as already happens with the tobacco industry.
Thirdly, they want to regulate all 'health-harming industries' in the same way as they regulate tobacco.
This is all there in black and white. It is not scaremongering or the slippery slope fallacy. It is now in an official WHO document.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
I have written about this for The Critic.
Monday 10 June 2024
The George Orwell motherlode
As promised, there was a lot of Orwell-related activity over the weekend from the IEA.
You Do Not Exist, my book about Nineteen Eighty-Four is available to download (free) here.
You can download the whole novel plus my introduction here.
I wrote about it for the Spectator and Quillette.
And I made this little video about Orwell's London...
Friday 7 June 2024
Orwell's pessimism
It's the 75th anniversary of the UK publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four tomorrow and there is a whole load of Orwell-related stuff coming from me and the IEA. Stay tuned, but for now here's an article I've written about him for Quillette...
Orwell may have been pleasantly surprised had he lived to see the real 1984. It is often said that his dystopian novel is a warning rather than a prophecy and Orwell himself was keen to remind people that it was “after all a parody,” but he was also quite explicit that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a conditional prophecy. Shortly after the book was published, he put out a statement saying that “something like NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR could happen. This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time.” But it didn’t and it wasn’t. By the time he died in January 1950, Europe had put the worst of the twentieth century behind it. Orwell was too pessimistic and it is worth considering why.
The central assumption at the heart of Orwell’s political writing from the mid-1930s was that capitalism was doomed and would most likely be replaced by totalitarian socialism of the sort satirised in Nineteen-Eighty Four. Despite his contempt for capitalism, Orwell saw the world caught between a rock and hard place. “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war,” he wrote in 1944. “Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.” The only alternative, to his mind, was a planned economy that retained democracy and allowed freedom of the individual, but he became increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for his libertarian brand of what he called democratic socialism as the 1940s wore on. Indeed, he saw “no practicable way of bringing it about.”
This explains why he was so despondent about the world’s prospects in the last years of his life and why he decided to write Nineteen Eighty-Four. But he was wrong. Capitalism did survive, subsequent communist revolutions went the same way as the USSR’s, and Orwell’s version of democratic socialism was not required to prevent totalitarianism sweeping the globe. It turned out that it was not a straight choice between democratic socialism and communist (or fascist) totalitarianism. There was a third way.
It's free so do read it all.
Tuesday 4 June 2024
Nicotine pouches: there may be trouble ahead
I sense the start of a moral panic about nicotine pouches. The government has made this more likely by completely ignoring them since they appeared five years ago, as I explain in The Critic.
The greater, unspoken concern is that widespread use of nicotine pouches among professional footballers could inspire children to emulate their idols. It is easy to imagine a moral panic erupting around nicotine pouches in schools much like the panic about disposable vapes. There was a harbinger of this last week with a sensationalist Channel Four documentary titled “Snus: Hooked on Nicotine”. The government has done nothing to head this off at the pass. These products have been around for five years and no attempt has been made to regulate them. So far, the industry has been successfully self-regulating by instructing retailers not to sell them to minors, adding health warnings and capping nicotine levels, but none of these are legal requirements and there is nothing to stop less scrupulous companies entering the market with extra-strong pouches, child-friendly packaging and deceptive marketing.
I hesitate to write this in case it gives professional busybodies and Wes Streeting ideas, but there is a danger of this turning into Elf Bar II in which a failure of governance leads to a political overreaction and the rights of adults to consume a very low risk product are curtailed. Given the political class’s penchant for banning things first and asking questions later, this is a threat that users of nicotine pouches need to be alive to.
Also, if you don't subscribe to my Substack then (a) you should, it's free, and (b) read my latest post about Action on Sugar.
Thursday 30 May 2024
Australia's tobacco fiasco
As two more tobacconists go up in flames in Melbourne, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) can no longer deny the illicit tobacco crisis Down Under. This article is worth reading.
Rohan Pike is a former Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Border Force (ABF) officer who helped establish the original tobacco strike team, when the black market was, as he describes it, a “modest problem”.
“The number one driver of the problem is the enormous price of tobacco,” Pike says bluntly.
When the taskforce was established in 2018, more than 400 million cigarette sticks were detected and seized at the border.
Last year, it was 1.7 billion.
Even Simon Chapman's half-witted protégé has accepted reality.
Becky Freeman, an associate professor of public health at the University of Sydney, acknowledges the only reason people buy black market cigarettes is because “cigarettes are expensive”.
Naturally, being an imbecile, her answer is to ban vapes harder.
All of this was completely avoidable. All they had to do was allow affordable cigarettes and vapes to be sold to consenting adults. Instead, they allowed clowns and fanatics to call the shots and Australia became an object lesson in what not to do. The UK is not far behind. Are you watching, Mr Streeting?
PS. Speaking of clowns, this guy is in charge of the Australian Medical Association and apparently believes that every smoker in the country costs the economy $70,000 a year.
But he suddenly becomes sceptical when modelling suggests that taxing something that is currently illegal will raise tax revenue.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation but no society endure quite so many charlatans and fantasists without paying a price.
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