Monday, 4 August 2025

No smokes without fire in Australia

Australia saw another two murders in its ongoing nicotine wars last week and the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) has finally had enough.
 

Australia's illegal tobacco problem has made the proverbial transition from tragedy to farce.

Illicit, excise-evading cigarettes now comprise half of the cancer-inducing products sold to Australia's 2.7 million smokers.

... In the past couple of years, there have been 125 firebombings of tobacco shops in Victoria, and another 50 or so in other states — the most recent last week in Corrimal, NSW.

... Violent robberies in Victoria have grown by more than 150 per cent since February 2024 due to tobacco-related crime.

This is much worse than an unintended consequence of the effort to reduce smoking; it is a complete stuff-up.

... The CEO of the Australian Association of Convenience Stores, Theo Foukkares, says the tipping point happened in 2019 when the excise increased 55 per cent over three years to $1.10 per cigarette stick.

As a direct result, illicit smoking took off and tobacco excise revenue to the government collapsed, from a peak of $16 billion in 2019 to this year's $7.4 billion.

 
All in all, it is a dramatic and resounding condemnation of Australia's 'public health' establishment who assured us that this kind of thing would never happen.
 
The ABC even implicates plain packaging - for which Australia was a 'world leader' - in this mess.
 

And it's not just the price that's driving people towards the much cheaper illegal alternatives, although that's the main thing, especially in a cost-of-living crisis.

For a start, the packs look nicer without pictures of horrible mouth tumours.

 
There is probably no way back for Australia now. Shopkeepers are sick of getting robbed and firebombed and are increasingly not stocking cigarettes at all, thereby leaving the tobacco market to the gangsters. The dolts in 'tobacco control' who should be held accountable for this fiasco will never get their comeuppance (Simon Chapman's blog posts reveal a man deep in denial). The only thing Australia can do is be a warning to the rest of the world.  
 

 

 



Thursday, 31 July 2025

Endless battle with illicit tobacco market - BBC

The BBC has been waking up to the scale of Britain's illicit tobacco market. Packs of illicit whites sold for a fiver are one of the more visible symptoms of a country in which rules and regulations are treated as optional. We free marketeers have been warning that this would happen for years but were given short shrift. The BBC isn't ready to admit that we were right, but the problem is too big to be ignored completely.
 
The latest BBC story ignores the demand side and focuses on the supply, which appears to be endless. Indeed, the article is titled 'Endless battle': Fighting the crime gangs taking over the high street.
 

Swansea has become a hub for counterfeit rolling tobacco, says Harries. He says the trade is controlled by Chinese gangs in the city who are making "phenomenal" amounts of cash this way.

Chinese migrants, brought in on student visas, are forced to work illegally and stuff hundreds of pouches of tobacco every week, he says.

"The amount of money [the gangs] they can make selling tobacco is greater than if they were selling drugs," he explains.

The counterfeit tobacco is supplied to predominantly Kurdish gangs, who then sell it under the counter in mini-marts, according to Harries.

 
Having attended the scene of the fire, the BBC asks the arsonist for her opinion.
 

The chief executive of the anti-smoking charity Ash, Hazel Cheeseman, says that although the illicit tobacco market has declined over the last few decades, it remains a concern. 

 
The illicit tobacco market has quite obviously grown over the last few decades, which is why it is a news story. It has grown incredibly quickly in the last four years. HMRC's estimates don't reflect that because they based on untenable assumptions. It is a mathematical impossibility for only 10% of the cigarette market to be illicit. The true figure is around 25-30% and the figure for rolling tobacco is considerably higher. 
 
The BBC doesn't challenge Cheeseman's claim despite reporting in the same article that "Illegal cigarettes, tobacco and vape products were seized from 3,624 shops across England, Scotland and Wales in 2024-25". How many were seized decades ago, one wonders? 
 
The recent surge in black market sales has been driven by some exceptionally large tax hikes pushing smokers to breaking point. So what does the fool Cheeseman suggest?
 

She urges the government to pass legislation to toughen licensing rules for the sale of tobacco, and gradually phase it out altogether.

 
Phasing it out is a euphemism for prohibition which would make all sales illicit but, as history repeatedly tells us, would not eliminate the sales. 
 
The article doesn't mention the all-important tax issue, although it did get a passing mention in another BBC article a few weeks ago: 
 

Professor Georgios Antonopoulos, criminologist at Northumbria University Newcastle, believes money is at the heart of it. "Legal tobacco products in the UK are subject to some of the highest excise taxes in the world," he says.

 
Having followed events in Australia, we can see how this will play out. We have just reached the point where fears about the illicit trade can no longer be dismissed as tobacco industry scaremongering. That is a start. The next stage will involve more money being spent on enforcement, which will fail to make more than a dent in the problem. Politicians will then make a big deal about increasing fines and prison sentences for smugglers. That won't make much difference either. We may then see some pointless legislation, such as Cheeseman's suggestion of 'tougher licensing rules'. That will only inconvenience legitimate traders. 
 
The preposterous Tobacco and Vapes Bill will be portrayed as somehow offering the solution even though it will obviously make things worse. Tobacco duty revenues will continue to plummet. The black market may or may not turn dramatically violent, as it has in Australia - it's too early to tell - but a time will come when the BBC and a few MPs start to admit that the root of the problem is the unaffordability of legal tobacco. In Australia, the ABC and the Guardian have been hugely supportive of 'tobacco control' but even they have had to admit that its excesses have led to disaster and that taxes are simply too high.
 
We will only reach that point when the scale of the problem is understood by the general public - a process sped along in Australia by more than 200 firebombings and several murders. That time is not far enough and when it comes, the denialists in 'public health' will have switched from claiming that there is no problem to claiming that the problem is now so big that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle and therefore can't be solved by lowering taxes. Mainstream politicians will agree, saying that lowering taxes would 'send the wrong signal'.
 
And so nothing will change, but the truth will at last be acknowledged. 



Wednesday, 30 July 2025

Semi-criminalisation

I've written about the Online Safety Act and the broader issue of semi-criminalisation in Britain for The Critic.
 

Downloading random VPNs comes with risks of its own and opens up a whole new world of illicit online activity from free Premier League football to the Dark Web. But there is a deeper reason to feel uneasy about this unintended, albeit predictable, consequence of paternalistic regulation. By driving another wedge between the state and the individual, it further normalises rule-breaking in a country where casual lawlessness is becoming part of daily life. A law-abiding society cannot long endure if the median citizen thinks that the law is an ass.  

The breakdown of trust can be seen most clearly when the ordinary man or woman does not share the moral certainties of the governing class. Among smokers, a collapse in tax morale — the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes — has led to a huge rise in the consumption of illegal tobacco in recent years. Smokers no longer feel any obligation to pay taxes that are designed to impoverish them to a government that vilifies them. Cannabis smokers learn from an early age to be suspicious of a police force that they might otherwise respect. Motorists who are faced with 20mph speed limits that were introduced by people who hate private transport have no scruples about flouting the law.  

Closely analogous to the new age verification law are the affordability checks that punters are expected to undergo when they spend more than the state thinks is good for them on a gambling website. These have never been put into law and instead rely on a Kafkaesque system in which operators are expected to second guess what spending threshold the Gambling Commission thinks is appropriate. Faced with the threat of multi-million pound fines if they fail to spot a problem gambler, the companies err on the side of caution and request bank statements and other documents from any high-rolling customer. Unsurprisingly, many of these people do not want to share this private information and close their account. But they do not stop gambling. Instead, they switch to offshore gambling websites that are not regulated by the Gambling Commission. All they need to do that is — you guessed it — a VPN.

This all happens without any meaningful protest from the individuals involved. There are enough viewers of “adult content” to swing an election if they mobilised in their self-interest, but no group of consumers is less likely to stand up and be counted. Instead, like millions of other ordinary souls who find themselves semi-criminalised by an over-bearing state, they roll their eyes and find a workaround.

 



Minimum pricing - a warning from 2017

Writing about gambling on my Substack yesterday, I had cause to mention an article I wrote for Spectator Health in 2017 which has long since disappeared (along with the rest of the Spectator Health website). I reprint it below as a reminder that I warned that minimum alcohol pricing would not help pubs and would likely damage them.

 

It’s the economy, stupid – why minimum pricing won’t work

5th September 2017 

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.

 

Postscript

Pubs in Scotland closed at twice the rate of pubs in England once minimum pricing was introduced

 



Tuesday, 22 July 2025

HMRC has its head in the sand about illicit tobacco

study published last week estimated that 26.8 billion cigarettes are smoked each year in the UK. The state-funded pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) described this as a “staggering figure” and claimed that it was a “stark reminder of the deadly toll of inaction”. Seizing the opportunity to remind people about the ludicrous Tobacco and Vapes Bill, they said: “Everyday that passes without this legislation is a day lost in protecting our children from addiction and improving public health.”

It is ASH’s job to say things like this, of course, but it is nevertheless perverse to claim that smoking has been the subject of political inaction. It would be truer to say that “tobacco control” is one of the few things that pygmy politicians have been obsessed with in this era of displacement politics. And since the generational tobacco sales ban will not have any effect on anyone until its first victims turn 18 in January 2027, there is no need for parliamentarians to make haste. 

Whether 26.8 billion is a “staggering figure” depends on how you look at it. It seems a big number but it is simply a function of 7.5 million smokers consuming an average of 10.4 cigarettes a day. Both of these figures are the lowest on record, no doubt as a result of all that government “inaction”. The study also found that only 5.5 per cent of smokers consume more than 20 cigarettes a day. When it comes to snouts, Britain has become a nation of lightweights.

The more interesting thing about 26.8 billion cigarettes being smoked each year is that only 14 billion cigarettes were sold legally in the UK last year. On top of that, legal sales of hand-rolling tobacco account for between 4.5 billion and 6.3 billion cigarettes (depending on how many fags you think can be made from a kilogram of loose baccy), but that still leaves between a quarter and a third of all the cigarettes smoked unaccounted for. 

 
Read the rest at The Critic



Thursday, 17 July 2025

Just rejoice at this news

Some good news for consumers and taxpayers in the Politico newsletter...
 
EU funding cuts force health NGOs to slash staff

Health NGOs are making staff redundant and leaving Brussels after the European Commission failed to pay out expected grants, leaving some without most of their funding for the rest of the year.

Get in!

The European Public Health Association (EUPHA), based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, said it would file a complaint to the European ombudsman over the missing grants, which forced it to close its Brussels office and make its head of advocacy in the Belgian capital redundant in June.

“It’s a huge issue when the Commission agrees to fund us, sign [agreements] with us, but withholds it without explanation. Not only it betrays trust, it also probably breaches its own legal obligations,” said Charlotte Marchandise, executive director of EUPHA. 

In the unlikely event that you are feeling sorry for the EUPHA, bear in mind that the appalling Martin McKee used to be its president and it has long had a reprehensible anti-vaping stance.

EUPHA is one of 30 health NGOs that signed agreements with the European Commission outlining their planned activities last year, in anticipation of operating grants for the following financial year. Operating grants go toward daily overhead costs like staff salaries and without which many NGOs say they cannot survive. 

They're not really NGOs then, are they?

The call to apply for those grants never arrived, however, while Commission officials have informally told NGOs to expect no funding.
 
Based. 

Other health NGOs have had to take similarly dramatic cost-cutting measures after learning no grants from the Commission would arrive this year. Last week, the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA), one of the biggest health NGO networks in Brussels, confirmed it would cut five of its 13 staff. 

Haha! YES!!

Incredibly, it gets even better...
 
The European Alcohol Policy Alliance (Eurocare) is also in danger of losing two of its four staff, Anamaria Suciu, policy and advocacy manager, told POLITICO. The Commission’s operating grant typically accounts for 60 percent of Eurocare’s funding in a given year, she said. 
 
Why on earth is the EU giving fat sums of money to a temperance group? And yes, it is a temperance group. Even if you believe the specious reasoning that the EU needs to fund 'civil society' lobbying as a counterweight to industry lobbying, why have they picked a bunch of teetotal Methodists to represent civil society? Make it make sense.
 
Politico is firmly on the side of the Brussels blob for some reason...
 

Brussels is an increasingly inhospitable environment for NGOs since the European election last year.

 
Cry me a river.
 

Under a right-wing majority led by the European People’s Party, lawmakers such as the European People’s Party’s Dirk Gotink — appointed to head a probe into NGO funding on Wednesday — claim NGOs have used European money to “shadow lobby” for green policies. A POLITICO fact-check found little evidence for shadowy lobbying, however. EU funding is publicly disclosed and allows NGOs to counter the lobbying activities of better-resourced private interests.

 
This is what the self-serving activists of the sockpuppet state claim. In fact, these NGOs usually either have a vast amount of money from big foundations or are heavily reliant on the EU. If they have foundation money, they don't need more and if they can't raise money from the public then why should anyone care what they think?
 
There's a good interview with Dirk Gotink in which you can see what he actually means by 'shadow lobbying'. Keep up the good work, sir!
 

 


High taxes fuel illicit trade - shocker!

It's almost surreal to hear people insist that the black market in tobacco is (a) negligible, and (b) unrelated to tobacco taxes. In places like Australia and the UK, this not only contradicts our "lived experience" but also basic economics. 

And yet the UK government is so sanguine about the illicit trade that it didn't bother modelling the impact of the generational tobacco ban on it, and the recently leaked tobacco tax report from the European Commission confidently proclaimed that...
 

“while price levels may act to incentivise the illicit trade of tobacco products (ITTP) the main driver is not the relative levels of price or taxation, instead other drivers are at play such as the permeability of borders; the severity of sanctions for offenders; the geographic proximity to illegal production and/or distribution sites…  In other words, there is no direct proportionality between tax levels and the level of illicit trade” 

 
I've been doing some work on this using the most up-to-date cigarette tax/price/affordability figures and looking at their relationship with illicit cigarette sales. The results shouldn't surprise anyone. There is a very strong relationship. For example...
 

 
Epicenter published my findings yesterday. You can read the report here

 

 



Wednesday, 16 July 2025

The crack cocaine of amusement arcades

You probably know them as amusement arcades but the Gambling Commission knows them as Adult Gaming Centres. The pressure group Gambling With Lives claims that they offer “the most addictive gambling products out there”. The Association of Directors of Public Health has complained about their “proliferation”. The Local Government Association wants more powers to “curb their “spread”. GB News found a “gambling survivor” who dubbed them the “crack cocaine of gambling”. And, inevitably, the Guardian has been writing a series of pearl-clutching articles about them, bemoaning the fact that they are “disproportionately concentrated in Britain’s most-deprived areas” (i.e. seaside towns and city centres). 

If this all sounds familiar it is because it is a carbon copy of the campaign against betting shops and fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) a decade ago. The anti-gambling lobby are mostly focused on suppressing online gambling these days, but they have found time to relive past glories and go after slot machines again. FOBTs were de facto banned in 2019 when the stake limit was lowered to an unplayable £2. The number of FOBTs in Britain fell from a peak of 34,949 in 2015 to zero in 2021. As anyone could have predicted, players switched to low-stake machines in betting shops and amusement arcades or went online. 

 
Read the rest at The Critic


Monday, 14 July 2025

Tobacco and Vapes Bill - live!

The video of the IEA's recent panel discussion about the generational tobacco sales ban (AKA Prohibition 2.0) is now available. It includes some legal knowledge from Sir Robert Buckland, some strong words from Clive Bates, and a few thoughts from my good self.



Friday, 11 July 2025

HMRC greatly underestimates the black market in tobacco

Since writing about HMRC's implausible claim that only 6.9% of cigarettes in the UK were 'non-duty paid' in 2022/23, they have produced new figures claiming that the figure for 2023/24 was 10.5% (oddly, the previous year's number has been upgraded to 9.1%). I have been trying to think of any scenario in which this could be true. It is not just that the estimate doesn't not match what I'm seeing on the street, but that it is mathematically impossible under any reasonable set of assumptions.
 
Put simply, HMRC estimates the amount of non-duty paid tobacco being sold by estimating the total consumption of tobacco (number of smokers x average annual cigarette consumption per smoker) and subtracting the amount of legal tobacco sold (via tax receipts). 

HMRC's tobacco bulletin shows that the number of cigarettes sold legally fell from 23.6 billion in 2021 to 13.2 billion in 2024, a decline of 44.4%

The ONS's Annual Population Survey says that the number of smokers in the UK fell from 6.6 million in 2021 to 6 million in 2023, a decline of 9%. ONS figures are not yet available for 2024, but the Smoking Toolkit Study reports that smoking prevalence in England fell from 14.7% in 2021 to 14.2% in 2024, a decline of less than 4% (accounting for population growth the decline in the number of smokers is even smaller). Quite clearly, there has not been a 44.4% decline in the number of smokers since 2021, nor anything close to it. 

Are smokers consuming fewer cigarettes? Apparently not. On the contrary, the ONS's Adult Smoking Habits in Great Britain survey finds that average daily cigarette consumption per smoker rose from 9.8 in 2021 to 11.3 in 2023. (The figure for 2021 is a modelled predicted estimate, but the 2023 is nonetheless higher than in any year since 2016.) An academic study published last year found that the decline in average cigarette consumption per smoker has plateaued since 2019. 

Have smokers switched to hand-rolling tobacco? Perhaps, but the tobacco bulletin also shows a decline in the legal sale of rolling tobacco, from 8.6 million kilograms in 2021 to 4.5 million kilograms in 2024, a fall of 47.6%. Overall, using the conventional estimate of how many cigarettes are made from a kilogram of loose tobacco, the number of cigarettes bought on the legal market in the UK fell by 45.5% between 2021 and 2024. 

HMRC also produces a tax gap estimate for hand-rolling tobacco. It is higher than the cigarette tax gap estimate at 22.9% but, implausibly, the figure for 2023/24 is the lowest estimate on record. Its estimate for the tobacco tax gap overall is 13.8%, fractionally higher than in 2022/23 but still one of the lowest on record. 

None of this stands up to basic arithmetic. We have a 45.5% decline in the quantity of duty-paid cigarettes sold (including hand-rolled cigarettes), but no decline in the number of cigarettes consumed per smoker and an overall decline in the number of smokers that is vastly smaller than 45.5%. 

It is a mathematical impossibility than only 10.5% of cigarettes consumed in the UK are non-duty paid. Even if there was no black market for tobacco in 2021 - an impossible proposition - it would now be much bigger than that now. 

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the next ONS smoking prevalence survey shows a 15% reduction in the number of smokers between 2021 and 2024 (although there is no reason to think that the decline is that large). Given what we know about daily cigarette consumption, this should translate into a 15% reduction in duty-paid tobacco sales if the non-duty paid market stays the same. This would mean legal sales of manufactured cigarettes fell from 23.6 billion in 2021 to 20.1 billion in 2024. In reality, only 13.6 billion cigarettes were sold in 2024, a shortfall of 6.5 billion cigarettes that can only have come from the non-duty paid sector. 6.5 billion equates to 32% of the total and that is with the profoundly unrealistic assumption that no non-duty paid cigarettes were sold in 2021. 

In other words, if there was no non-duty paid market in 2021, non-duty paid cigarettes would make up 32% of the market in 2024. If we assume, as HMRC does, that 8.8% of the market was non-duty paid in 2021, total cigarette sales (including non-duty paid) would have been 25.9 billion. If cigarette consumption then fell by 15%, the total market would be 22 billion in 2024, but we know that legal sales were 13.2 billion in 2024 so the non-duty paid market must therefore be 40% of the total.  A similar calculation can be done with hand-rolling tobacco and will produce a similar finding (since the decline in legal sales is almost identical). 

One can play around with these figures as much as one likes using different assumptions, but in no reasonable scenario do non-duty paid cigarettes make up 10.5% of the market, nor does non-duty paid tobacco overall make up 13.8%. It seems to me that HMRC's model is broken.



Wednesday, 9 July 2025

Following Australia down the road to ruin

I've written about the Tobacco and Vapes Bill for the Telegraph. We must never forget how stupid and reckless this legislation is.
 

Illicit vapes and counterfeit cigarettes are being sold more or less openly on high streets up and down the country.  We have the second highest cigarette taxes in Europe (after Ireland) and the government is on the cusp of introducing the Tobacco and Vapes Bill which will ban a growing number of adults from buying tobacco products from 1 January 2027. Even the Australians haven’t been daft enough to dabble with this form of prohibition. 

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill will also allow the government to restrict the flavours of legal vapes, thereby giving the black market a lucrative new niche. Not content with banning disposable vapes last month, the government is going to double the cost of using refillable e-cigarettes by imposing a tax of £2.20 (plus VAT) per bottle next year.

If you wanted to make a bad situation worse, you could hardly design a better set of policies than this. Sales of legal cigarettes nearly halved between 2021 and 2024 despite the number of smokers only falling by 5 per cent. It is obvious that the illicit market picked up the slack and yet HMRC claims that only one in ten cigarettes smoked in Britain is illegal. Reassured by such Panglossian factoids, virtue-signalling politicians have given the Tobacco and Vapes Bill minimal scrutiny and are patting themselves on the back for creating a “smoke-free Britain”. It is a fantasy bordering on madness. 

They have picked the worst time to be complacent. The police are too busy to play whack-a-mole with Britain’s countless illicit tobacco retailers. A £2 billion drop in tobacco duty revenue has already been added to Rachel Reeves’ black hole. For the time being, the violence associated with Britain’s booming black market tobacco trade is less visible than Australia’s but it will only take a bit more prodding from guileless politicians for it to come out of the shadows.

 

 

 



Monday, 7 July 2025

The commercial determinants of health?

I've written a two-parter on my Substack about an issue of a journal, guest edited by Chris van Tulleken, dedicated to the "commercial determinants of health" and - his main obsession - "conflicts of interest".

In part one I look at van Tulleken's contribution.

In part two, I look at articles by Lord Bethell, Anna Gilmore, May van Schalkwyk, and others.



Friday, 27 June 2025

Alcohol advertising ban on the way?

The government is reportedly looking at a ban on alcohol advertising, although on current trends it will probably do a U-turn on that too.

I wrote about it for The Critic and discussed the evidence for alcohol ad bans (there isn't much of it) with Reem at the IEA. I wrote about the evidence based two years ago in this report
 

It took Keir Starmer less than a year to dash what few hopes we had of him. There was talk of the Labour Party having more room to manoeuvre on public sector reform than the tentative Tories. It was assumed that the state of the public finances would leave the government with no choice but to tighten its belt. Withdrawing the Winter Fuel Allowance from wealthier pensioners was largely symbolic, but it showed that Sir Keir was prepared to take tough decisions. 

All that fell apart upon contact with the first set of local elections. What we have instead is yet more borrowing, much more spending, and the hope that the economy will somehow grow. It is Sunakism with a dash of socialist spite directed at farmers and private schools. 

Rishi Sunak left a bunch of displacement policies behind him and the new government has been dutifully pushing them through Parliament, but Starmer can’t rely on this stockpile for much longer. The Pet Abduction Act is already law. The Football Governance Bill has had its third reading. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill is in the House of Lords. There is a danger that the well of headline-grabbing policies that are cheap to implement but ultimately futile runs dry. 

And so Labour’s policy wonks have had a pow-wow and come up with the idea of banning alcohol advertising. What could be more Sunakian? According to the Telegraph, health officials are “exploring options for partial restrictions to bring [alcohol promotion] closer in line with advertising of unhealthy food”. It is rumoured that a ban of some sort will be part of Wes Streeting’s optimistically titled Ten Year Plan for the NHS next week. 

  




Thursday, 12 June 2025

European Commission comes after vapers again

A leaked document reveals that the European Commission has some dramatic plans for EU-wide taxes on vapes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches. It predicts that its proposed vape tax of €3.60 per bottle will wipe out 40% of the market. They say that like it's a good thing. It's time to fight again.

I've written about it for The Critic... 
 

The idea that the Commission is driven by health concerns goes for a Burton when the report moves on to vapes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches. It wants to tax all these too, even though various member states do not. The case for leaving them alone is simple: they are much less dangerous than cigarettes and if you tax them, fewer people will use them to give up smoking. 

On the other hand, governments lose tobacco duty revenue when people quit smoking and that is what really worries the European Commission. The leaked report openly states that one of its “specific objectives” is to “discourage tax induced substitution between different tobacco products and their substitutes”. This is an extraordinary admission. They know that price is one of the factors that leads people to switch from smoking to vaping and they think that this is a bad thing

The report proposes a minimum tax on vape juice of €3.60 per 10ml bottle. To put this in context, a bottle of e-cigarette fluid in the UK typically costs £2 or £3 and can sometimes be as cheap as £1. The Commission is proposing that the cost of vaping should at least double. It expects a €3.60 tax to reduce sales by 40 per cent which would be the ruin of many independent vape shops but a boon to the cigarette business.

 



Monday, 9 June 2025

We're doctors, we say what we want

Ian Gilmore has been mouthing off in the letters section of the Financial Times. I have written about it for The Critic...
 

Prof Ian Gilmore, who runs the neo-temperance pressure group the Alcohol Health Alliance, is cheesed off with the chief executive of the brewer Asahi for saying that while he is “absolutely not denying that there are risks” associated with drinking, there is also “lots of evidence” that moderate alcohol consumption can have health and wellbeing benefits. For this measured and inarguable contribution to an article about how the alcohol industry could be facing its “tobacco moment”, Prof Gilmore has accused him — not unpredictably — of using a “tactic” from Big Tobacco’s “playbook”:

As a biomedical scientist and liver specialist, I know of no credible, independent expert in the field who would support these statements of disinformation.

Really?! Not a single one? What about the countless epidemiologists who have identified clear reductions in heart disease, stroke and diabetes risk among moderate drinkers for decades in every corner of the world? What about the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine which confirmed last year, for the umpteenth time, that moderate drinking reduces the risk of premature mortality? What about Professor Sir Richard Doll, one of the legends of public health, who concluded in 2002 that “the inverse relationship between ischemic heart disease and the consumption of small or moderate amounts of alcohol is, for the most part, causal” and should “now be regarded as proved”? Hell, even the Chief Medical Officer’s cherry-picked panel of anti-alcohol academics who lowered the drinking guidelines in 2016 had to admit that there were some health benefits from moderate alcohol consumption. 

 



Friday, 6 June 2025

Snowdon on Fire at Will

I returned to the Spectator's Fire at Will podcast this week with Will Kingston, talking the nanny state. And you can hear more from Will on next week's episode of Last Orders if all goes to plan.

 



Monday, 2 June 2025

YouGov and outdoor smoking bans

Because of course they do. 

I've written about it for The Critic...
 

One of the worst things about campaign groups being funded by the government is that the campaigning never ends. Grassroots pressure groups eventually get tired or run out of money or decide that enough is enough. There comes a time when voluntary activists want to get back to their day job. For the state-funded lobbyist, however, activism is their day job and they must always find new dragons to slay. Combine this with the mentality of what C. S. Lewis called the omnipotent moral busybody and you have someone who will “torment us without end”.

The hateful and vindictive pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), which has relieved taxpayers of millions of pounds since its inception in 1971, is staffed by such people. At their request, the government is currently legislating for the gradual prohibition of tobacco, but ASH are not the types to let the grass grow under their feet. No sooner had politicians capitulated to their last unreasonable demand before they were back for more. 

When the French government announced a ban on outdoor smoking “where there are children” on Friday, ASH immediately commissioned a poll from YouGov to test the water in Britain. People who do YouGov polls seem to be a particularly joyless and intolerant bunch. In November 2022, when COVID-19 was a fading memory and Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister, 61 per cent of respondents to a YouGov poll wanted the government to force people to wear face masks on public transport and 20 per cent wanted to bring back the “rule of six”. Two-thirds of respondents to another YouGov poll said they preferred staying in to going out. Half of them want to ban vapes completely and a third of them are teetotallers, as compared to a fifth of the general public

 

 



Monday, 26 May 2025

'Junk food' advertising ban delayed, nanny state fat cat responds

The government pushed back the 'junk food' advertising ban last week. It was meant to start in October but has been postponed for a few months while the government sorts the legislation out. 
 
Greg Fell from the Association of Directors of Public Health is not happy. Regular readers will recall that Mr Fell is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he has the say-anything, do-anything attitude that gets you the top jobs in 'public health'. Let's see what he had to say...
 

89% of deaths in England are caused by illnesses and disease which are linked to the consumption of unhealthy food and drink. The simple fact is that these deaths, including from many cancers, respiratory, heart and liver disease, are preventable.

 
Boom! How's that for a lie to kick things off? Go big or go home.  

It is obviously not true that 89% of deaths are caused by the consumption of 'unhealthy food and drink'. If you click on the link that he provides you will find that: "In 2019, 88.8% of deaths in England were attributable to NCDs." NCDs are non-communicable diseases. That is what you die from if you don't die from an infectious disease, suicide, murder or an accident. In a perfect world, the figure would be 100%. Are some of those NCDs related to diet? Yes. Is 89% the correct figure? No. Nowhere near.
 
The second sentence is almost as misleading. NCDs can be prevented, but only through the spread of infectious disease and violence.
 

“The consumption of unhealthy food and drink is not the result of personal choice. The reality is that with healthy alternatives around three times as expensive as unhealthy options, and our consumption habits heavily influenced by clever advertising and marketing campaigns that are backed by multi-million pound budgets, we simply don’t have the freedom to choose.

 
People choose what they eat so the first sentence is untrue and the size of advertising budgets does not make that choice any less free. The second sentence is also untrue. Fell is just repeating some nonsense from the Food Foundation that I have written about before.
 

“There is no quick fix, but we know from our experience of tackling tobacco harm, that one of the key ways to reduce illness and death caused by harmful products is to introduce tighter restrictions on advertising those products.

 
Fell is using the anti-tobacco playbook because he has no credible evidence that the upcoming ban will work.
 

“There is a wealth of evidence to say that this will work and yet a comprehensive ban has been repeatedly delayed.

 
The evidence provided by campaigners for this ban is, in fact, piss poor. The evidence for banning ads for 'less healthy' food on TV is atrocious and the evidence for banning it online is non-existent.
 

“Again, we just need to look back at how the tobacco industry lobbied to retain their influence to see that the industry giants behind harmful food and drink are using the same tactics. To reduce the numbers of people dying from avoidable disease – something this Government has promised to do – industry voices must be taken out of the equation and the advertising ban should be introduced as planned.”

 
Accusing industries of using the tobacco playbook is a core part of the anti-tobacco playbook. The reason the ban has been delayed is that the legislation was botched because the government spent too much time listening to the likes of Greg Fell and too little time speaking to people who do something useful for a living.
 
In any case, advertisers and broadcasters have agreed not to show adverts for 'less healthy' food from October as part of a voluntary agreement. What page of the tobacco playbook is that on?


Thursday, 22 May 2025

Shroud-waving as a basis for public policy

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

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

 

Read the rest at The Critic.



Tuesday, 20 May 2025

Last Orders - now in colour

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

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

 



Thursday, 15 May 2025

Nanny State Index 2025 - the downward spiral

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



Wednesday, 14 May 2025

Mounjaro and Wegovy

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

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

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

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

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

 




Saturday, 10 May 2025

Remote Gaming Duty and the online betting industry

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

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

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

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

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


Read the rest.



Friday, 9 May 2025

These people are insane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
Finally, some hope for this benighted region! 

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

 
I'm sure that will one of the top priorities of the government run by *checks notes* Hamas.
 
What this place needs is some graphic warnings and some above-inflation hikes in tobacco duty!
 

 


Wednesday, 7 May 2025

IARC gets taken over by anti-alcohol activists

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


Read the rest at The Critic.


Friday, 2 May 2025

The Skeleton Army

I've written about grassroots resistance to the temperance lobby in Victorian Britain. It got quite violent.
 

It was in Worthing that I first heard of the Skeleton Army. Could it really be true that there were organised mobs beating up temperance activists in Victorian Britain? It seemed too good to be true. Yet true it was. The Salvation Army invited trouble from the start. Founded in 1878 by the self-styled “General” William Booth, they would pitch up in town, find themselves a “barracks” to live in and march through the streets saving drunks for Jesus.

Most of the drunks did not want to be saved. They mostly just wanted to drink. Even those who did not drink disapproved of a bunch of do-gooders with military pretensions parading around with a brass band.

The Skeleton Army, formed in Exeter in October 1881, was only the latest incarnation of violent opposition to the Salvationists. They had been attacked by “roughs” calling themselves the “2nd Squad of The Salvation Army” in Coventry two years earlier.

In Whitechapel, the “Unconverted Salvation Army” had been making its presence felt. There had already been two anti-Salvationist riots in Basingstoke at the hands of the puzzlingly named “Massagainians”.

Gangs of mostly young men hurled stones, flour, beer, paint, dead rats and mud at the Sally Army wherever they found them. Blood was shed. Bones were broken. The windows of the Army’s “barracks” were smashed. This happened all over the country, often night after night.

Some incidents were less serious than others, but as Nigel Bovey says in his history of the Skeleton Army, Blood and Flag, “in today’s Britain even a single incident of the type endured 150 years ago would be considered a major outrage”.


I can't say I condone all their behaviour but we could do with a bit of their spirit now.

Read the rest.



Friday, 25 April 2025

The fatuous rhetoric of the "tobacco playbook"

I've been studying policy-making a lot recently, contrasting the economist's public choice approach with the activist-academics' 'public health' approach. I have a study in the pipeline for later this year and have published two reports with the IEA this year - People vs Paternalism and The Corporate Playbook. The latter came out yesterday and looks at the idea that there is some distinctive playbook, sometimes known as the 'tobacco playbook', that various 'unhealthy commodity industries' work from. 

It's a fatuous, self-serving myth. The supposed playbook is defined so broadly that every industry that engages in the policy-making process is bound to follow large parts of it, as is any other interest group, including all the 'public health' lobby groups. It's meaningless rhetoric designed to stigmatise anyone who opposes state paternalism.

A nice example of the 'playbook' phrase being thrown around appeared in the BMJ last week. I have written about it for The Critic and mentioned it in this video.
 

These studies contribute nothing to the field of political science, but they do serve several purposes. The first is to make political pygmies feel as if they are taking on Big Tobacco when they ban adverts for ice cream. The second is to discourage policy-makers from engaging with business; these studies often conclude with an appeal for certain industries to be excluded from the policy-making process. The third is to divert attention from the people who are really following a playbook. HFSS food advertising will be banned online and on TV before 9pm in October. The BMJ article makes the case for banning it everywhere else. This is what happened with tobacco and is what the “public health” lobby hopes will happen with alcohol and gambling in due course. 

There is an anti-tobacco blueprint that is being inexorably applied to other products: ban advertising, raise taxes, apply warning labels, demonise industry, stigmatise consumers, put it in plain packaging and then go for full prohibition. It is all so predictable because we’ve seen it rolled out before. That is the real playbook. Everything else is projection.




Saturday, 19 April 2025

Drinking guidelines and cancer warnings

I've written about the push towards 'no safe level' for alcohol for Spectator USA.
 

In December, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a rigorous 230 page report titled Review on Evidence of Alcohol and Health which confirmed what has been apparent for fifty years. It concluded that those who drink alcohol in moderation have a 16 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who have never drunk alcohol. They also have a 22 percent lower risk of having a heart attack, an 11 per cent lower risk of having a stroke and an 18 percent lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

A few weeks after the National Academies report was published, the Surgeon-General effectively spiked it by publishing his own report calling for cancer warnings to be put on bottles of booze. Heavy drinking can certainly cause some forms of cancer, although the only form of the disease that the National Academies report associated with moderate alcohol consumption was breast cancer, with a relatively modest risk increase of 10 percent. Crucially, overall mortality was lower among moderate drinkers of both sexes. Would you rather be 10 percent more likely to develop breast cancer or 16 percent less likely to die prematurely?

By ignoring the big picture and focusing on cancer, the Surgeon-General was deliberately muddying the water and changing the subject. Liver disease is by far the biggest health problem associated with drinking, so why warn people specifically about cancer? He was taking a page straight out of the anti-tobacco playbook. The modern crusade against smoking started with mandatory cancer warnings.

This explains the concerted effort to downplay the health benefits of moderate drinking. The claim that there is “no safe level” of drinking (a choice of words borrowed from the anti-smoking lobby) rings hollow when teetotallers are significantly more likely to die prematurely from some of humanity’s most serious diseases.  

 
Do read it all. If you're not a subscriber, you can get three articles free each month just by registering.


Wednesday, 2 April 2025

Banning filters?

ASH want to ban cigarette filters and various other things. They're completely out of control. They even want a consultation on banning vaping in 'public places'.

They also call cigarette filters a fraud. I have written about this for The Critic.
 

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill hasn’t become law yet, but Action on Smoking and Health have already announced their next set of demands. Via the All-Party Parliamentary Group that ASH set up and run, they are calling for a ban on smoking in the tiny handful of cigar lounges that are still allowed to permit it, a £700 million a year levy on the tobacco industry, health warnings on individual cigarettes, and a ban on cigarette filters. 

These are the last desperate squeals of an organisation that has made itself obsolete. The idea of a tobacco industry levy has been repeatedly rejected by HMRC because the tax will ultimately be paid by consumers and we already have tobacco duty for that. Banning smoking in luxury cigar lounges is just petty, and health warnings on cigarettes, as recently introduced in the anti-tobacco basket case that is Australia, are preposterous. 

The only interesting proposal is the ban on cigarette filters — and not in a good way. ASH will have half an eye on the House of Lords, where the Tobacco and Vapes Bill will arrive later this month. Since the average peer is even more intolerant and puritanical than the average MP, ASH will be hoping that they add yet more bells and whistles to this appalling piece of prohibitionist legislation. In the reading in the Commons last month, an amendment to ban cigarette filters (proposed by one of those freedom-loving Conservatives, natch) got more than 100 votes. The amendment referred to “plastic cigarette filters” so Caroline Dinenage — for it was she — may have thought that this was a minor piece of environmental regulation. Perhaps she didn’t know that all cigarette filters are made of plastic; cellulose acetate to be precise. A ban on plastic filters would be a ban on all filters and, unless the UK is going to repeal EU laws on tar and nicotine yields, possibly a ban on all cigarettes.