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?

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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?

 

Read it all.

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