Farewell, 2024

I'm not going to do a review of the year. I'm sure you can remember what happened as well as I can. But as 2024 draws to a close I'd like to thank all the people who read my stuff here and elsewhere. As I was saying to Paul 'Guido' Staines on the Last Orders podcast recently, blogging ain't what it used to be, but I should give a shout out to Michael Siegel who is back at The Rest of the Story after a few years absence and to the Angry Chef who fired up his blog yesterday to write about why 'ultra-processed food' is dumb (a must read).

If you don't follow David Zaruk's Firebreak blog, you should. In his wish list for 2025, he hopes that governments will stop funding NGOs. Amen to that and a happy new year to you.

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Defanging the nanny state

AI generated

 

I have a new IEA report out today. It's called Defanging the Nanny State and it looks at what politicians would have to do to get the UK to the bottom of the Nanny State Index. I suggest the following steps:

1. Alcohol taxes: set them at 13p per unit for all drinks to cover the external costs. This would be a significant reduction for most products. Wine duty would still be higher than in most EU countries.

2. Tobacco taxes: halve them to bring them in line with places like Italy and Cyprus. This wouldn't even cost HMRC much money because so much tobacco is sold illegally in the UK at the moment.  

3. The sugar tax: get rid of it. It hasn't worked and most European countries don't have one.

4. E-cigarette and heated tobacco advertising: legalise it on all platforms with appropriate regulation of content. The e-cig ad ban is a hangover from EU membership. Ditto all other silly EU regs, e.g. banning vape juices bottles larger than 10ml.

5. Legalise snus. Another hangover from the EU.

6. Maintain the smoking ban in all state-owned buildings open to the public and have no-smoking as the legal default in privately owned buildings unless the owner explicitly permits it.

7. Abolish minimum pricing in Scotland and Wales. Ireland is the only other country that has it. The policy hasn't worked and has cost drinkers a fortune.

8. Abolish restrictions on where tasty food can be positioned in shops and cancel the forthcoming advertising ban.

9. Abolish licensing hours. Of the 30 countries in the 2023 Nanny State Index, 18 have no national legislation dictating when licensed premises have to close. Restaurants and bars should close when their owners wants them to.

Doing all this would get the UK below Germany in the Nanny State Index - but only just. Is it going to happen? No. More nanny state legislation is on its way. But this wish list shows two things. 

Firstly, we have a hell of a lot of nanny state regulation and our sin taxes are sky high.

Secondly, it is politically feasible insofar as other countries have a much smaller nanny state and their governments don't get kicked out for not being paternalistic enough. 

Some people might consider the proposals above to be dramatic but they would leave us in a very similar position to the likes of Luxembourg and the Czech Republic. I could have gone much further. I haven't touched daft policies like plain packaging (which only a small handful of European countries have) and I have kept the cigarette advertising ban in place. That doesn't mean I agree with them, but the task I set myself was to do the minimum required to get the UK to the bottom of the index.

Read the full report here. 

  

 

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Black market, here we come

In my end-of-year article for Spiked I take a glimpse at Christmas future by looking at the black market.

 

As I write this, there have been 198 arson attacks on Australian tobacconists and vape retailers since its ‘tobacco turf wars’ began last year. By the time this article is published, there will probably have been 200. The root causes are so obvious that even the ABC, Australia’s left-wing state broadcaster, no longer denies them: Australia has the highest tobacco taxes in the world and has banned e-cigarettes in every form. The consequences have been worse than any opponent of the nanny state could have predicted: criminal gangs are firebombing retailers on an almost daily basis and people have been murdered in broad daylight.

This could all be stopped by legalising vapes and making cigarettes affordable for any adult who wants to buy them. The sky is hardly going to fall in if Australia starts taxing and regulating these products like a normal country. Yet there are almost no mainstream politicians in Australia making that case. Meanwhile, the British health secretary, Wes Streeting, has seen what’s going on Down Under and has decided that he would like a slice of it. Last year, Conservative MP Neil O’Brien, who was then the public-health minister, proudly announced that his government had not run an impact assessment to look at the effect of generational prohibition on the black market because he didn’t think it would be a problem.

 

After two firebombings in Melbourne overnight, Australia's tally has moved up to 202.

 

It is possible that things will have to get worse before they get better, but it is equally likely that things will get worse and stay worse. In any case, it is out of our hands. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill passed its second reading by 415 votes to 47 in November, a thumping victory for the prohibitionists. The political class has decided to let the black market rip. The rest of us will just have to adapt.

 

Merry Christmas!

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Moderate drinking continues to be good for you

Ongoing attempts to erase the health benefits of moderate drinking have suffered a setback in the USA. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has published a 230 page report to feed into the latest deliberations around the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025.

As (Bloomberg-funded) Stat News reports:

 

A major report on alcohol’s health effects — which will inform the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans — found moderate drinkers had lower all-cause mortality, and a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, than those who never drank. The findings are sure to cause a stir, especially once a separate panel of experts releases its own alcohol report in coming weeks.

 

We can expect the anti-alcohol academics on that panel to come out swinging with the usual cherry-picked studies (hello, Tim Stockwell!) and merchant of doubt rhetoric. But for now, we have the actual evidence...

 

According to its meta-analysis, the committee found those who consumed moderate levels of alcohol had a 16% lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who never drank. This conclusion was graded as being of moderate certainty, meaning there was enough evidence to determine the health effects, but there are limitations due to the quality of the evidence. Future data could change the conclusion.

Meta-analyses the committee reviewed found moderate drinking was associated with a lower risk of heart attack, stroke and cardiovascular disease mortality as compared to never drinking.

 

This much we have known for decades. These associations have had everything thrown at them. There is probably no finding in epidemiology that has been subjected to so much rigorous examination. The reason for that is obvious: a lot of people in 'public health' don't want it to be true. 

And yet here we are.

You can read the full report here.

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The unflushable Chris Whitty

Why won’t Chris Whitty go away? If he had any decency, the Chief Medical Officer would have resigned in 2021 after he told fibs about Omicron in an attempt to bounce Boris Johnson into yet another lockdown. (In case you’ve forgotten, he said that “all the things we do know are bad” about the manifestly less dangerous Covid variant.) Every other player in the nightmare of 2020-21 has shuffled off the stage, but Whitty lingers on, a slap-headed Rasputin whispering terrible ideas into the ears of our leaders.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.

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Food advertising - the next set of demands

On the face of it, the first line of this BBC article is stupefyingly obvious.

 

Brands that make unhealthy foods will be able to get round the government's junk food advertising ban if their adverts do not show products that break the rules.

 

Yes, that's how rules work. If you comply with them you 'get round' them. 

 

There is, of course, an agenda here. After a brief period of celebration following the government's introduction of new advertising regulations on Tuesday, the 'public health' lobby is teeing itself up for its next set of demands.

 

It means that adverts from fast food chains, for example, will not face restrictions as long as they do not feature products such as burgers or fries.

 

You can see where this is going, I'm sure.

 

Katharine Jenner, director of the Obesity Health Alliance, an umbrella group for health campaigners, had argued for brands to be included in the ban, and said she would like to see firms respond by making their products healthier.

"That would be the ideal thing, but they can get round it by just showing the brand and it's unclear what effect that would have, above and beyond what we've already got," she added.

"We are very supportive of [the restrictions] coming in as planned, but in future I think we'd like to see where loopholes could be closed".

 

So it's not about the food. It's about the companies. Or, as these cranks call them, the "unhealthy commodity industries".

But hang on. Didn't these very same people say that one of the 'benefits' of the ban on 'less healthy' food advertising was that it would encourage companies to reformulate their products with less sugar, fat and salt? Even in the quote above we are told that Jenner has "argued for brands to be included in the ban, and said she would like to see firms respond by making their products healthier." But if companies can't advertise at all - not even their own brand logo - what would be the point of reformulating their products?

It's a revealing quote because it shows her in mid-air, jumping from one horse to another. Her new line is that food companies she dislikes shouldn't be able to advertise at all, but she can't help parroting her old line about reformulation. It's a glitch, but I'm sure she'll smooth it out with practice and the old argument about reformulation will be erased from history. 

The BBC also says of the ban... 

But details of the restrictions, unveiled earlier this week, also showed that sugary breakfast cereals, crumpets and certain types of porridge would also fall on the ban - prompting criticism from some business owners.

 

Criticism has gone well beyond business owners, but the BBC can't admit this. The scope of the ban has been roundly mocked as the public have finally realised they've been sold a pig in a poke. I wish it would be criticised by business owners! How long are the broadcasters and food companies going to take this lying down? Where are they? I haven't heard a peep from the Food and Drink Federation this week, for example. Meanwhile, Chris van Tulleken and Greg Fell are in The Times claiming that the food industry is using "tobacco industry tactics". Maybe it's time to wake up, lads?

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Then they came for the croissants

Misleading the public until the bitter end, the Department of Health and Social Care issued a press release this morning confirming that “junk food adverts” will be banned on TV before 9pm and online 24/7 from next October. It used the legally meaningless phrase “junk food” five times. 

Junk food is in the eye of the beholder, but is obviously pejorative. That is why politicians and “public health” lobbyists use it. If they abandoned the weasel words and told us what is actually being prohibited, even natural allies of the nanny state might conclude that the advertising ban — which goes far beyond anything introduced elsewhere in the world — is a bit excessive. 

Find out why at The Critic.

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