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!
Thursday, 15 May 2025
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.
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.
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.
Do read it all and download The Corporate Playbook.
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.
Wednesday, 26 March 2025
The smoking ban
The tobacco ban went through the House of Commons today. Barely anyone even noticed. It will take years for it to bite, by which time taxes will have turned most of the market illicit anyway and some health secretary will no doubt have taken the "brave and bold" step of taking the nicotine out of cigarettes or banning them for people of all ages.
I have said enough about this stupid prohibition for now, so here's someone speaking the truth about the 2007 smoking ban which some people naively believed represented the anti-smoking lobby's final demand. The account is called Britain's Lost & Living Pubs. Give them a follow.
Thursday, 20 March 2025
Is smoking making a comeback?
Smoking is on the up in the south of England, according to a study this week. Perhaps it is. We'll see. It wouldn't be surprising for three reasons I discuss at The Critic.
There have been four large increases in tobacco taxes since 2021 which have had the effect of lowering the de facto price of cigarettes for millions of people. Last October I wrote about how legal tobacco sales fell by 30 per cent in just two years despite a much smaller decline in the number of cigarettes smoked. The figures for 2024 were published recently and show that sales fell by 45 per cent between 2021 and 2024 despite the number of smokers falling by less than one per cent. For those with eyes to see, this is conclusive proof that the black market for tobacco has grown at an astonishing rate in recent years thanks to the government pricing smokers out of the legal market. The going rate for a pack of cigarettes is now effectively £5.
While it has become cheaper to smoke, the hysteria about vaping has grown. A mere 13 per cent of smokers in England know that vaping is less harmful than smoking. More than a third think it is worse than smoking and 37 per cent think it is equally harmful. This represents a staggering failure of public health messaging and should be borne in mind whenever you see an opinion poll showing support for anti-vaping legislation. Ignorance about the relative risks of smoking and vaping is endemic among both smokers and nonsmokers and gets worse every year. It would be hardly surprising if smokers are taking a “better the devil you know” approach.
Saturday, 15 March 2025
Not Invented Here syndrome
This week, the IEA published Not Invented Here, a short book looking at why single-issue pressure groups often object to practical solutions. It features nimbies, environmentalists and lots of 'public health' types. You can read it here. We also had a good event at the IEA on Wednesday. I'll upload the video when it goes live.
In the meantime, we've got a nice Substack now so do bookmark it and/or subscribe. We have a little exclusive coming out on Monday.
Friday, 14 March 2025
How slushy ice drinks became a health hazard
The UK sugar tax has had an unexpected consequence for health.
A study in Archives of Disease in Childhood identified 21 cases of children in the British Isles developing hypoglycaemia and suffering from what the authors describe as ‘an acute decrease in consciousness’ after drinking ‘slush ice drinks’ such as Slush Puppies. None of the children had a history of hypoglycaemia. None of them had an episode like this again, apart from one child who became ill after drinking another slushy ice drink.
The cause of their collapse was glycerol intoxication, and the finger of blame falls on the sugar tax.
Read all about it at the Spectator.
Wednesday, 5 March 2025
More obesity babble
I've returned to the topic of bad obesity predictions for The Critic.
What is the purpose of pointless projections that are so bad they make the Bank of England look like clairvoyants? The authors of the 2011 Lancet study admitted that their projections were “mere extrapolations from available data” and that “past trends do not always predict the future”. Indeed they do not. In Britain, the big rise in obesity ended twenty years ago and its causes are not fully understood. Rates of obesity have ticked up since 2006, but only gently and inconsistently while rates of overweight have not increased at all. There is no reason to base future projections on the assumption that obesity rates will suddenly start rising like they did in the 1990s.
Monday, 3 March 2025
Nanny state politicians in their own words
I've been reading the transcripts of various interviews with British politicians conducted by Henry Dimbleby and Dolly van Tulleken. They include Tony Blair, George Osborne, Boris Johnson and David Cameron, plus various health ministers going back to Virginia Bottomley and William Waldegrave. You can read them here. You might find them interesting.
Dimbleby and van Tulleken talk to them about obesity/food policy and want to find out why more nanny state policies have not been introduced over the years. Three things stood out to me.
Firstly, they nearly all said that they wished they had done more, acted sooner, been bolder, etc. None of them has any real doubts that people's diet and waistlines are something that the government can (or should) control. None of them questions the garbage they are told by 'public health' activists and dietary entrepreneurs, such as the fake child obesity figures or the demonic status of 'ultra-processed food' (Matt Hancock is particularly gullible in this regard).
Secondly, there is no difference between Labour and Conservative politicians. If you read these transcripts blind, you would not be able to guess which politicians were from the party that supposedly supports the free market and personal liberty. If anything, the likes of William Hague and Seema Kennedy are more statist and authoritarian than Alan Milburn and Tony Blair. It is a Uniparty and no matter you vote for, the coercive paternalists always get in.
Thirdly, despite Dimbleby and van Tulleken frequently prompting them to complain about lobbying from the food industry, most of them do not think this makes a lot of difference to policy-making. It is public opinion and the personal views of ministers that matter, not the paper tiger of Big Food.
Admittedly, the first two of these observations may have been influenced by the fact that they were being interviewed by people who are overtly in favour of greater state meddling. They may have given different answers to more liberal interviewers. They are politicians after all, even if some of them are retired. But I am strongly of the view that what they said to Dimbleby and van Tulleken is what they really think. I have heard a couple of these people make libertarian-ish speeches before doing exactly the opposite in office. Judge them by their deeds. These interviews make it clear that they would have been even less liberal if they had got the chance, but they nothing if not pragmatic.
Here is Jeremy Hunt, for example.
As a politician, one has to be mindful of how to lead on public opinion – you want to be slightly ahead of the curve, but not so far ahead that you lose credibility and are faced with too much opposition from newspapers and within the party. That is how we reduced smoking. Caroline Flint announced the ban on smoking in public places. I built on it with plain paper packaging and then Rishi introduced the full ban. Caroline would not have succeeded if she had gone straight for a ban so there is an element of bringing people with you.
Hang on. That sounds very much like the supposedly mythical slippery slope, the ratchet effect, the salami slicer.
Why yes. Yes, it is...
Work out what your 'next big thing' is and get on with it. Then after a few years, when people have got used to it, come back with another. Keep going step by step - it's the only way to change habits.
It's nice to have it from the horse's mouth that there is no point trying to appease these people. One thing will lead to another. Do not give them an inch.
Jeremy Hunt was also kind enough to confirm that shrinkflation is deliberate government policy.
But we are making real progress on portion sizes. I went on holiday to Croatia and bought a Magnum. 'Wow that's big' I thought. Then I remember that's how big they used to be in the UK. As the father of three young kids I am delighted they have got smaller!
A senior Conservative politician who can't say 'no' to his own children and who thinks it is a good thing when British consumers get ripped off? It turns out that there are many such cases.
Thursday, 27 February 2025
The People vs. Paternalism
Millions of consumers are routinely impoverished and have their freedoms taken away by tiny pressure groups. How does it happen and what can be done about it?
That is the question I try to answer in a new IEA report: The People vs Paternalism. Free download.
And I've written about it for The Spectator.
Wednesday, 19 February 2025
Quote of the week: minimum pricing
Two of the people paid by the Welsh government to justify evaluate minimum pricing have written a piece for The Conversation which contains a 'public health' quote for the ages.
Minimum pricing for alcohol is well supported by evidence. It is not without its critics, especially those citing continued trends in actual numbers of alcohol-related deaths.
This is the only mention of deaths in the article. As I mentioned recently, alcohol-specific deaths have gone up more in Wales than in any other part of the UK since the Welsh introduced minimum pricing.
There is a whiff of the hostage video about the article. The authors know the policy didn't work and anyone who reads their evaluation can see that. The quote above feels like a wink to the reader.
Nevertheless, they have a job to do...
Based on our findings, we recommend that the Welsh Government retains minimum alcohol pricing.
PS. Invoice attached.
Monday, 17 February 2025
What is the Marcela Trust?
Action on Sugar is back in the black. After receiving just £74 in voluntary donations in 2022/23, the pressure group - formally known as Consensus Action on Salt, Sugar and Health - raised £201,225 last year.
£200,000 of that came from the Marcela Trust. The Marcela Trust was set up by the late businessman Octav Botnar and is named after his (now also late) wife. Mr Botnar founded Datsun UK, which later became Nissan UK, and was a bit of a character.
In June 1991, the Inland Revenue raided Nissan UK's headquarters, as well as Mr Botnar's home and the homes of other company officials. The tax authority accused Botnar of evading more than £200 million in taxes. The scam involved using a third party shipping agent to deliberately overcharge Nissan UK for the shipment of vehicles from Japan so as to artificially depress its own profits thus reducing the company's exposure to corporation tax. Botnar left for Switzerland and lived for the rest of his life there in Villars-sur-Ollon.
I have long been intrigued by the Marcela Trust because I have never been able to work out what it is. It has a vast amount of money but it doesn't seem to give much of it away and its charitable objectives are hilariously vague...
THE CHARITY PROVIDES SUPPORT TO SELECTED CAUSES IN LINE WITH THE CHARITY'S OBJECTS.
In 2022/23 it had an income of £8.2 million but it spent £5.8 million on running costs, including £2.6 million on wages. It only handed out £353,000 in grants (which, as I understand it, is supposed to be the purpose of the trust) and most of that went to a fanatical anti-sugar lobby group.
Action on Sugar is not a grassroots organisation, to put it mildly. The £74 it raised in donations in 2022/23 was a big improvement on the £7 it raised the year before. It was rapidly running down its bank reserves when the Marcela Trust stepped up with 200 grand. And those reserves only existed because the Marcela Trust had given it fat wads of money back when it was plain old Consensus Action on Salt and Health, the last of which was a £140,000 grant in 2017/18.
Back in 2012, the blogger Hemiposterical tried to find out what this is all about, but despite following it up for years was never really able to. I don't particularly care where Action on Sugar gets its money from, but out of sheer curiosity I'm asking the question again in case anyone can help. What does the Marcela Trust do and what has it got against sugar and salt?
Friday, 14 February 2025
Gambling is still not a public health issue
I've said it before and I'll say it again: gambling is not a public health issue.
Gambling is not a public health issue. Never has been, never will be. Problem gambling is a mental health problem but not a public health problem. It is no more of a public health issue than depression, anxiety or standing on a piece of Lego in your bare feet. There may be things that the government could do to alleviate these problems, but that does not make them public health issues. For the term “public health” to be useful, it has to mean something more than the aggregated health conditions of a society. Pollution, contagious diseases and sewage are public health issues because they present risks that individuals cannot easily avoid through their own actions. The same cannot be said of putting a tenner on the 2.30 at Chepstow.
Obesity and smoking are routinely described as public health issues when they are nothing of the kind. The legal professor Richard E. Epstein pointed out twenty years ago that this misleading terminology is “designed to signal that state coercion is appropriate when it is not.” As I wrote last month, gospel temperance groups have reinvented themselves as ‘public health’ groups because that’s where the action is if you want something banned these days.
It is not a matter of semantics. Resources for genuine public health problems are limited and infectious diseases may flourish if money is diverted towards clamping down on the leisure pursuits of affluent westerners (yes, I’m looking at you, World Health Organisation). In any case, saying that something is a public health problem doesn’t make it any easier to solve. Indeed, it makes it more difficult to solve because it opens the door to a legion of clueless “public health professionals” and single-issue campaigners who bumble in waving their hammer and looking for another nail.
Wednesday, 12 February 2025
Minimum pricing ditched in Australia
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| AI generated |
Have you noticed all the countries lining up to introduce minimum pricing after it was such a world-leading success in Scotland? You haven't because there aren't any. Wales and Ireland were daft enough to follow suit and that's about it. Parts of Canada have had a version of it for years and Russia has experimented with it for vodka, but otherwise the rest of the world doesn't want to know, despite the WHO recommending it in a report written by Colin 'Nostradamus' Angus with the help of Aveek Bhattacharya, then of the "Institute of Alcohol Studies" and now - terrifying - working at the Treasury.
The neo-temperance lobby could boast that it still had Australia's Northern Territory, but no more. Last September, the NT government said that it would get rid of minimum pricing because - hold on to your hats! - it hadn't worked.
The Northern Territory Government has delivered on its election promise to remove the minimum floor price for alcohol.
The Liquor Legislation Amendment (Repeal of Minimum Pricing) Bill 2024 passed through Parliament yesterday.
The floor price, also known as the Minimum Unit Price (MUP), was introduced in 2018, with the current Country Liberal Party (CLP) Government saying it failed to achieve meaningful outcomes while imposing unnecessary burdens on responsible consumers and businesses.
Minister for Tourism and Hospitality Marie-Clare Boothby said: “Unlike the previous government, the CLP is focused on real reforms which deliver meaningful and fair results for all Territorians.
“The CLP Government has listened to the concerns of the community and industry, ensuring policy is rooted in evidence and effectiveness.
“We promised that 2025 would be a year of action, certainty and security for Territorians.
“We are committed to supporting a strong hospitality sector while ensuring alcohol policy is responsible, targeted, and evidence-based.”
Don't you love a vibe shift?
"We need solutions that address the complexities of alcohol-related harm, not blanket policies that punish the majority for the actions of a few.
"This is a line in the sand. Scrapping the floor price demonstrates our government’s commitment to real, meaningful change."
And so it does. Could we import some of this sanity to the UK please?
Friday, 7 February 2025
Ronald Mcdonald versus the clowns of 'public health'
The BMJ is upset that McDonald's has been winning legal battles against busybodies from local councils who want to stop it opening new restaurants. In an 'investigation' from the former health editor at the Daily Mail, we are told that...
The firm has used a playbook of arguments to win planning appeals against local authorities in some of England’s most deprived areas with the poorest public health outcomes. Its tactics include arguing that customers can order salad from its drive-through branches, that they could cycle or walk there, and that its sponsorship of local football teams promotes health and wellbeing.
McDonald’s has also deployed a specialist GP who claims that obesity is caused by “over 100” factors other than fast food and that its menu contains nutritious and low calorie options.
Put in less hysterical language, this can be rephrased as...
McDonald's said that customers can order salad from its drive-through branches, that they could cycle or walk there, and that its sponsorship of local football teams promotes health and wellbeing. A GP who specialises in weight management pointed out that obesity is caused by “over 100” factors other than fast food and that its menu contains nutritious and low calorie options.
As Tim Worstall says, all these things are true, but simple truths sound so much more sinister when they are presented as "tactics" or as a "playbook of arguments" and medical expertise sounds more dodgy when it is "deployed".
The real story is that political pygmies and overpaid 'public health' directors have been going beyond the law in their obsessive attempts to stop businesses making an honest living. We are told that:
In some cases McDonald’s threatened to force councils to repay its costs, saying that they had behaved "unreasonably."
These people have behaved unreasonably and McDonald's is entitled to be compensated for its legal costs, although it turns out that it was the planning inspector who said that these jobsworths were being unreasonable and should pay McDonald's the costs - which the company hasn't claimed.
McDonald’s successfully overturned the rejection at appeal in May 2021, claiming that there was “no evidence” for an adverse health impact. The company pointed out that the schools were “around” a 10 minute walk away, beyond the council’s five minute walk takeaway exclusion zone. The planning inspector then ordered the council to pay part of McDonald’s appeal costs, saying that it had shown “unreasonable behaviour” in rejecting the application in the first place.
McDonald’s also won a case to claim back “unreasonable behaviour” costs from Folkestone and Hythe District Council in December 2021 over a decision not directly related to health. In this instance the council had rejected the initial planning application over noise and light pollution disturbance, and a councillor and local residents later raised health concerns.
A McDonald’s spokesperson tells The BMJ it did not recover these awarded costs in either of these cases. They say, “We will always carefully review the Planning Inspectorate’s decision and consider the impact this might have on the local authority. In both Coventry and Folkestone, despite having been awarded costs by the inspectorate, we determined it would have been the wrong decision to recover costs at that time.”
McDonald's should be tougher on these fanatics pour encourager les autres. Look at the pathetic excuses they use to prevent consumers having access to a hamburger. Noise and light, for God's sake. What a feeble "playbook of arguments".
Read the whole BMJ article if you want a depressing sense of how many people are being funded by the taxpayer to stop economic activity in Britain today. Afuera!
Tuesday, 4 February 2025
Don't look at the deaths! Minimum pricing in Wales
Minimum pricing in Wales has been a failure. It was introduced in April 2020 and was therefore confounded by the pandemic, but the rise in alcohol-specific deaths in Wales during Covid was statistically indistinguishable from that of England (and smaller than that of Scotland, which has had minimum pricing since 2018). Anyone who reads the official evaluation in full will be left in no doubt that it failed to achieve its objective while creating negative consequences in a highly predictable way.
It takes a lot to put lipstick on this pig, but Colin Angus and colleagues have had a go with this new study. Colin Angus, you may fondly recall, is a long-standing member of the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group that has earned a small fortune in government grants to produce worthless modelling for this policy.
His new study is careful to ignore mortality. The only mention of death comes when he falsely claims that Scotland saw "a 13.4 % reduction in alcohol-specific deaths" after minimum pricing was introduced. Instead, he reckons there has been a decline in the sale of alcohol sales and that there have been "substantial effects amongst some drinkers, showcasing the policy's
effectiveness in discouraging purchases of cheap, high-strength
beverages".
The study concludes that the MUP in Wales has successfully reduced alcohol purchases and consumption of high-strength alcohol, in a way that is consistent with what we would expect, with the biggest impacts on products such as cider that are bought disproportionately by heavier drinkers.
So why did the number of deaths shoot up? Could it be that 'public health' dogma is wrong? The pandemic proved, in all sorts of ways, that it is.
In the abstract's conclusion (but, interestingly, not in the study itself) a further claim is made:
MUP in Wales changed purchasing behaviour, which should lead to public health benefits in the longer term.
Here we see the goalposts shifting. If the benefits are in the long-term then we shouldn't expect to see anything in the short-term. And yet we were very definitely and explicitly told to expect benefits almost immediately. That was the message of at least three modelling studies the Sheffield team conducted for the Welsh government. The most recent of these was published in 2018 and clearly showed a reduction in mortality in the first year which increases over time.
We know, unequivocally, that alcohol-related deaths did not fall. They rose. And yet we are told that alcohol consumption fell and that the sale of strong booze declined. We are even told that this shows that minimum pricing in Wales has been a success.
Pandemic or not, that is the elephant in the room. There are three possible explanations. Either Angus's data is wrong and sales didn't decline, or high-strength alcohol isn't linked to alcohol-specific deaths, or minimum pricing didn't reduce alcohol consumption amongst people who are prone to dying from alcohol abuse. I find the last of these by far the most persuasive, but 'public health' dogma insists that what matters is overall alcohol consumption and the overall consumption of high-strength products in particular. It is a false assumption and models based on false assumptions are bound to be wrong.
Speaking of models...
The findings suggest potential applicability of a similar policy for products with analogous issues, such as certain high-sugar foods.
Is that a fresh grift I see on the horizon?
UPDATE (5 February)
The ONS has just published the data for 2023 and alcohol-specific deaths in Wales are flying up.
Increase in the alcohol-specific death rate 2019-23:
Wales: 5.8 per 100,000
England: 4.2 per 100,000
Scotland: 4.1 per 100,000
N. I.: 0.2 per 100,000
What a cursed policy this is.
I've written about this for The Critic.
Saturday, 1 February 2025
Europuppets revisited
Back in 2013, I wrote a report titled Euro Puppets: The European Commission’s remaking of civil society which gave chapter and verse on the EU's epic funding of NGOs and pressure groups. The UK did this too but the EU's sockpuppetry was on another level. It struck me as a scandal but I didn't expect anything to be done about it and nothing was.
The issue has bubbled up again in recent months, as I explain at The Critic...
This looked like it would continue forever, but last November the European Commission told NGOs that LIFE, a €5.4 billion slush fund for environmental projects, could no longer be used to lobby the EU. LIFE grants could still be used for “policy briefs or other research papers” and for “workshops, conferences, trainings or awareness raising campaigns”, but if they wanted to hob-nob with policy-makers they would have to do so on their own time. Last week, the German MEP Monika Hohlmeier said that “EU funds must be spent on clearly defined objectives that are in line with EU legislation” and that “we must be able to track the transparency of how the money is spent.”
These are pretty modest requirements when large sums of public money is being given to third parties, but it is a big deal in Brussels where, incredibly, some NGOs have been required to sign an agreement promising to lobby MEPs in order to get their grant. According to an investigation by the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, the European Environmental Bureau, which received €1,955,910 in EU grants last year, “was explicitly tasked with providing at least 16 examples where the European Parliament made green legislation more ambitious thanks to their lobbying efforts.” That is the name of the game with sockpuppet funding. The whole point is to amplify the most extreme voices so that the government’s position looks moderate by comparison.
Needless to say, the prospect of having to use their own money to lobby politicians sent the environmental blob into a frenzy. BirdLife Europe, which received a €460,000 LIFE grant last year, called it “a dangerous challenge to democracy”. The aforementioned European Environmental Bureau yelped that it was an “orchestrated attempt to muzzle democracy” and “reminiscent of many authoritarians’ playbooks”. The director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) European Policy Programme, which relieved EU institutions of €957,121 last year, said that the handouts were “vital for the survival of a thriving democracy”.
They would, wouldn’t they?
Thursday, 30 January 2025
The Food Foundation's dodgy data
The Food Foundation has been claiming that healthy food is insanely expensive again. Their latest factoid is that it costs £8.80 per 1,000 calories!
I have written about this for The Critic...
There are two problems with this, or at least with the Food Foundation’s interpretation of it. The first is the use of averages. Aside from the questionable use of the median rather than the mean average, the average price of various foods has little practical relevance to people who go shopping. It is certainly possible to spend stupid money on sun-dried tomatoes, exotic fruit, bags of salad and anything with the word “organic” on it. Supermarkets provide many options for the health-conscious consumer who has more money than sense, and they all help to lift the average. But the existence of a wide range of expensive healthy food does not mean that “low-income families are being priced out of being able to afford to eat healthily”, as the BBC claims. You can get a thousand calories from apples for £4.40 and a thousand calories from bananas for £1.30. This is a far cry from the £10.10 average reported in the study. Admittedly, it will cost you £12.50 to get a thousand calories from curly kale, and if you want to get them from celery it will be almost impossible, physically and financially, but that is one reason why those vegetables are considered healthy — they won’t make you fat.
That brings us to the second problem with the calculation. There is a tautological aspect to it. Energy dense food is “less healthy” by definition. The Nutrient Profiling Model, which is what is being used here, gives a food a lower score if it has a certain number of calories, and the more calories it has, the lower the score. It loses points for having too much sugar, salt and fat as well, but calories themselves are part of the grading system. If you then define a food as cheap or expensive based on how much it costs to buy a certain number of calories, low-calorie food is always going to look cheaper than high-calorie food. Kale will seem cheaper than carrots and a big bag of Kettle Chips will seem cheaper than a kilo of broccoli.
Monday, 27 January 2025
Moderate drinking midwittery in the Economist
The Economist ran an article about moderate drinking a couple of weeks ago. Tediously and predictably, it revived the 'sick quitter' zombie argument and quoted Tim Stockwell as if he were the arbiter of this fake controversy. I sent a letter which has been published in the current issue. Bored of explaining the epidemiology, I thought I would mention some real science that the likes of Stockwell prefer not to discuss.
You suggested that moderate drinkers live longer than teetotallers because some teetotallers are “sick quitters” who wrecked their health with booze in the past (“Hard-liquor truths”, January 11th). This argument was first made in the 1980s and has been repeatedly disproved, most recently in a wide-ranging review from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that found moderate drinkers have a 16% lower rate of all-cause mortality than lifetime abstainers, which you mentioned in your leader.
One does not need to have blind faith in observational epidemiology to accept the truth of this. The review notes that randomised controlled trials have shown that “moderate drinking favourably affects HDL cholesterol, low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and apolipoprotein A-1”. It would be remarkable if this did not lead to lower heart disease and stroke risk, and it is this that explains most of the longevity gains enjoyed by moderate drinkers.
I've noticed the Economist descending into lower-midwittery recently. I can tolerate its relentless centrism and bed-wetting about 'populism' and Brexit, but I expect better from it than credulous reporting of Chris van Tulleken's claims about 'ultra-processed food' and the silly Texas sharpshooter theory about Lucy Letby. The magazine that identifies as a newspaper costs £9.99 now. Must try harder.
Thursday, 23 January 2025
Minimum pricing in Wales - another fail
Minimum pricing has failed to badly in Wales that even the BBC didn't buy the government's spin when the evaluation claimed it had been a success last week.
A change in alcohol pricing in Wales has pushed problem drinkers away from cheap cider and towards strong spirits, a study suggests.
A minimum price of 50p per unit was introduced in Wales in March 2020.
A survey of 138 people in Wales who had sought help for problem drinking found some had swapped to "buying litres of vodka".
The report, published on Wednesday by the Welsh government, also says that some problem drinkers are going without food or heating, begging, turning to sex work, or stealing to pay for drink.
That is largely what you take away from the various reports that made up the evaluation. The claim that "the implementation of the policy has been successful" in the final report bares no relation to the evidence presented and is a cope designed to get around the sunset clause that kicks in next year.
I've written all about it for The Critic.
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Ryanair's Baptists and Bootleggers booze ban
Ryanair has once again called for a two drink limit in European airports. I discuss the possible reasons for this in City AM today...
Now let us consider what it would take for somebody to become drunk and disorderly on a Ryanair flight. We must assume that they were not inebriated when the flight took off since Ryanair would not have allowed them to board. Something must have happened in mid-air to increase their blood alcohol level and yet passengers are not allowed to bring their own alcohol on board to drink, so it can’t be that. Maybe Ryanair makes alcohol available for passengers to buy during the flight, perhaps using some sort of trolley service?
It turns out that this is exactly what it does! Ryanair sells a range of beer, wine and spirits and has no intention of stopping. Nor does it plan to set a limit on how many drinks it sells to each passenger, regardless of the problems this may cause to airport staff and taxi drivers at the final destination. Fancy that!
The neo-temperance lobby are keen on the same policy but for different reasons...
An interesting proposal to limit the sale of alcohol in airports. Equally clear that harm from alcohol arises whether sold in airports, supermarkets or late night night bars. Hence restrictions on availability such as trading hours should not be relaxedhttps://t.co/dPEKlnJYSu.
— AlcoholActionIreland (@AlcoholIreland) January 13, 2025
Friday, 10 January 2025
A plan for freedom
I've written about my report, Defanging the Nanny State, which was released during the Christmas perineum, for Con Home.
It is in these first days of January that our minds turn to self-improvement. Good luck to you if you are starting a new diet or giving up smoking. The masochists among you may be abstaining from alcohol this month. Some of you may even have joined a gym.
For the killjoys in ‘public health’, this is the most wonderful time of the year. After weeks of over-indulgence, we are more susceptible to a bit of finger-wagging. In the past, the conversation would be about what we can do to make ourselves healthier. These days, it is about what the government should do to force us to be healthier.
The Alcohol Health Alliance was straight out of the blocks on New Year’s Day demanding a clampdown on booze advertising; the Obesity Health Alliance has been calling for “robust prevention measures” to protect us from “unhealthy [food] options”.
It is a bad time to propose liberalisation, but that is what I will do. With the help of European partners, I edit the Nanny State Index. It is a league table of 30 countries based on how much they over-regulate food, alcohol, soft drinks, tobacco and e-cigarettes. The UK is consistently at the wrong end of the table.
It is due to get worse thanks to the forthcoming ban on HFSS food advertising, the vape tax, incremental tobacco prohibition and other policies conceived by the last Conservative government and eagerly brought to fruition by the current Labour administration.
Another world is possible. Countries such as Germany and Luxembourg have relatively little paternalistic regulation and seem to do alright. Instead of trying to compete with Turkey and Norway to become Europe’s top nanny state, let’s try to beat Germany and be the best country for consumer freedom. What would that involve?
Thursday, 9 January 2025
Drinkers are on notice
The US 'public health' industry is preparing the ground for a renewed assault on alcohol. The Surgeon General called for cigarette-style warnings on booze last week in a report that he put out to take people's minds off the rather more rigorous report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in December which once more confirmed that moderate drinkers live longer than teetotallers.
The ICCPUD report (Interagency Coordination Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking) is expected to strike another blow for the neo-temperance lobby. Stuffed with anti-alcohol academics, don't be surprised if it goes beyond its remit and spouts 'no safe level' dogma.
This all serves to grease the slippery slope. Denormalisation, here we come. And they're not even hiding it.
Timothy Rebbeck, Vincent L. Gregory, Jr. Professor of Cancer Prevention, told USA Today that considering putting warning labels on alcohol is just a start. He noted that after the surgeon general first warned about the dangers of smoking in 1964, it still took decades to develop strategies to curb smoking, such as limiting ads for cigarette, banning them in public spaces, and taxing them.
“It took time for people’s mindset to change and it’s going to be the same for alcohol,” he said.
Drinkers, you have been warned.
Tuesday, 7 January 2025
Mum buys son cigarettes to get him off the vapes
Remember the doctor in Australia who bought his son cigarettes to get him off the vapes? An incredible story but not impossible to believe since Australia is a cesspool of disinformation about e-cigarettes.
Now the same thing has happened in the Netherlands. The Dutch appear to be up to their necks in a similar cesspool.
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