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.

 

Read it all.



Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Minimum pricing ditched in Australia

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?