Are problem gamblers four times more likely to attempt suicide?

As reported in the Independent... 

 

Problem gamblers four times more at risk of suicide attempt by age 24 – study

 

This is exactly how the press release that was e-mailed out yesterday was headlined although the online version has a slightly different wording...

 

Pioneering research reveals problem gambling quadruples the risk of suicide among young people four years later

 

Curiously, this claim does not appear in the study itself. Nor does the following claim from the press release...

 

Lead author Olly Bastiani, PhD researcher at the University of Bristol Translational and Applied Research Group, said: “This study tracked people from birth, meaning we could look at the long term impacts of problem gambling, and could rule out alternative explanations that hinder previous studies, such as that people might be drawn to problem gambling as a way of escaping pre-existing suicidal feelings.”

 

There is, in fact, no way for such a study to rule out other factors for an attempted suicide. 

 

So what does the study really show? It is based on 15,645 people born in the 1990s in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. "Tracked from birth" is an exaggeration, but it does include survey evidence about whether they had ever attempted suicide at the ages of 16, 24 and 25, and it has survey evidence showing their PGSI (problem gambling) scores at the age of 20 and 24. A PGSI score of 8 or more out of 27 is the conventional threshold for problem gambling.

 

The idea behind the study is to see whether suicide attempts are preceded by problem gambling, thereby strengthening the correlation and reducing the risk of erroneous reverse causation (i.e. that suicidal feelings lead to problem gambling). The researchers also control for other factors that could lead to suicide attempts, such as alcoholism.

 

To cut a long story short, they find associations. They find that people who are problem gamblers aged 24 are 15% more likely to have made a suicide attempt in the last twelve months at the age of 25. They also find that people who are problem gamblers aged 20 are 20% more likely to have made a suicide attempt in the last twelve months at the age of 24. The latter finding is a relative risk of 1.20 and is after controlling for other factors. 

 

Although it is not made clear in the study, the press release says that... 

 

The future suicidality link was most stark among 20-year-olds, where there was a 20% increase in suicide attempts for every increment on the PGSI meaning that those scoring eight and above experienced quadruple the rate of suicide attempts four years later. 

 

This seems to be saying that someone who scores 1 out of 27 in the PGSI test is 20% more likely to kill themselves. That sounds unlikely. To get 1 out of 27, all you have to have done is "bet more than you can really afford to lose" or "gone back to try to win back money you had lost" in the last twelve months. It is hard to see how this could drive anyone to suicide. The researchers have then multiplied 20% by something to get a figure of 400% for people who are actually problem gamblers (i.e. score 8 or more). That suggests 20% x 20, but it is unclear where the 20 comes from. 20% x 8 seems more logical, but that only produces 160%. I confess that I am rather baffled by how they came up with the claim that "problem gambling quadruples the risk of suicide".

 

None of this stuff is in the study, so we can only guess where it came from. Did the authors find an association between attempted suicide and low PGSI scores and draw a linear line upwards or did they find an association with high PGSI scores and draw a linear line backwards? One thing is for sure: there were not enough attempted suicides for them to confidently draw conclusions about people with low, moderate and high PGSI scores.

 

The study seems to be 95% maths and 5% data, and the most important data is not presented. A lot of data simply doesn't exist and had to be "imputed" (i.e. guesstimated). Of the 15,645 people born into the study, 10,528 did not answer any questions about suicide attempts. That is 67%. Of the 4,331 people who answered the suicide questions, 2,616 (60%) did not answer the gambling questions. There were only 729 people who answered all the relevant questions and only 11 of them had attempted suicide in the past year. These are very small numbers of self-selecting people to be drawing bald conclusions about.

 

Moreover, the authors chose not to control for several co-morbidities that seem relevant. They controlled for alcohol use disorders, socio-economic status and hyperactivity (all of which are strongly correlated with suicide attempts), but not illicit drug use or - surprisingly - mental health disorders. Although they give reasons for this, they acknowledge that it may be a weakness:

 

Our selection of covariates was parsimonious. Other studies with greater power should include additional covariates such as depression, anxiety and illicit drug use to investigate whether these influence the relationship between PGSI and suicidality.

 

The study itself is quite cautiously written and heavily caveated. At the end, the authors say:

 

In conclusion, the present study found evidence of positive associations between harmful gambling and current and future suicide attempts among young UK adults, which was unlikely to be confounded by pre-existing suicidality. 

 

That is a reasonable summary, as is the statement in the abstract that "this association may be more complex long-term, and increases in harmful gambling during adulthood may not be an important factor", but it is in contrast to the press release which claims the study was able to "rule out alternative explanations" (implying that all alternative explanations were ruled out, not just pre-existing suicidality). No such claim can be reasonably made. It is perfectly possible for someone who was neither a problem gambler nor suicidal at the age of 20 to have gone down a dark path by the age of 24 in which symptoms of problem gambling feature but are not terribly important. 

 

It is fairly obvious that suicidal people typically have a number of different problems in their lives. A study published a few weeks ago found that problem gamblers in a Swedish hospital had a wide range of co-morbidities and were more likely than the average person to kill themselves, but that problem gambling per se  was not a risk factor for suicide. Despite the grandiose claim that the people in the new study have been tracked since birth, the authors do not have enough knowledge about their circumstances to be able to claim a causal link between "harmful gambling" and attempted suicide and, to be fair, they do not make such a claim explicitly in the study.

 

The press release is a different beast, however. The press release seems designed to get the factoid that problem gamblers are four times more likely to attempt suicide into circulation. It also includes the red flag of a call to political action.... 

 

Dr Newall said: “Gambling is a part of the government’s suicide prevention strategy, and these results help underscore the need for additional population-wide measures to prevent gambling harms, such as meaningful restrictions on gambling advertising.”

 

The study has nothing to do with advertising or any other "population-wide measure". This is pure editorialising. 

 

Incidentally, if we want to know what effect an advertising ban would have, we can look at what the problem gambling prevalence was in the first major gambling survey in 1999 - 8 years before gambling ads were legalised. The figure was 0.6%, statistically indistinguishable from the 0.4% reported in the most recent survey of this kind. 

 

(Still more incidentally, the authors claim in the study that the "latest official Great Britain statistics have noted a significant increase in estimated prevalence rates for harmful gambling". This must be a reference to the new Gambling Commission online survey which gives a figure of 2.5%. The flaws of this survey are well understood, but even its supporters acknowledge that its figures can't be compared to figures from different surveys. The Gambling Commission has explicitly told people not to make such apples and oranges comparisons.)

 

The claim that problem gambling is a major cause of suicide is central to the argument that gambling is a "public health" issue. The aforementioned Swedish study should put an end to the zombie claim that "up to" 496 suicides are linked to gambling every year in Britain (since it was an earlier version of the Swedish study that Public Health England used to make its foolish extrapolation), but there is a palpable urge on the part of anti-gambling campaigners and 'public health' academics to quantify something that probably cannot be quantified. Now that the gambling research field is awash with cash, expect to see much more of this. 

Share

Tweet

RIP Graham "mad dog" MacGregor

I was sadder than you might expect to read that Graham MacGregor has died, aged 84. The Telegraph focuses on his anti-salt advocacy, but you probably know him better for setting up Action on Sugar.

We sparred on TV and radio many times and I was always happy to let him talk because he was so zealous in his campaigning and so extreme in his demands that it could only put the median voter off. He was a fanatic and he didn't try to hide it. I don't mind that. I prefer a sincere crank to a fanatic who pretends to be a moderate. You knew where you were with Graham. Most of what he said was deranged and he told some outright lies, but he was upfront about his longterm goals, such as plain packaging for chocolate and halving the amount of sugar in all foods.

He was also, I think, an eccentric, and at least eccentrics are colourful. He said something to me once that gave me the strong impression that he was right-wing, which would certainly make him an eccentric in 'public health' circles. His accent and appearance were more military than medical, but he was a proper medical doctor and, as far I can tell, he never profited personally from Action on Sugar. 

In 2014, we both appeared on 'Alan's Ding Dong', a Partridge-esque feature of the Alan Titchmarsh Show, to debate the merits of a sugar tax in front of an audience of pensioners who had been bussed in from middle England. It went to a public vote in which the audience were invited to hold up a yellow paddle if they were opposed to the idea. As you can see from the photo below, you should never get between OAPs and their sugar.

I also remember MacGregor and fellow nanny statist Susan Jebb shouting at each other at the 2015 Sugar Summit. I couldn't hear exactly what was being said but it started after Jebb accused him of using "loose words" and "factual inaccuracies" on stage.

I only had a private conversation with him a couple of times, but when we were chatting before doing the Spectator podcast in 2017, he told me with some reluctance that he had agreed with every word of an article I had recently written (unfortunately I can't remember which one). When I asked him about the departure of Aseem Malhotra from Action on Sugar, MacGregor called him "bonkers" and was just getting into his stride when he stopped himself said "Anyway, I'm not going to talk about Aseem - especially to you!"

I met him again at a small conference held by the sugar industry in a London hotel. MacGregor was only required for a panel on public health late in the afternoon but he turned up for the whole thing and ended up listening to industry folk talking about things like fertilisers, the climate and other issues that affect sugar farmers. After a dry and detailed discussion of the global sugar market from an American speaker via videolink, MacGregor raised his hand to talk about how sugar taxes and food reformulation were sweeping the world and asked how the industry was going to cope with the inevitable downturn in sales. The American looked rather baffled and said that he was not projecting any decline in sugar consumption.

His legacy was mostly malign and a lot of what he said was objectively wrong, but I could never bring myself to hate the old boy. At least he was a character. RIP.

Share

Tweet

Drink driving and the bootleggers

I've written for the Morning Advertiser about the drink-drive limit after receiving a press release from a company called AlcoSense. You'll never guess what they sell...

 

I received a press release the other day from an organisation called AlcoSense applauding the government for proposing a lower drink-drive limit. Labour will soon be consulting on whether to cut the limit from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg, bringing it in line with Scotland and the EU. AlcoSense says that this is “a welcome and overdue move”, although they would ideally like it to drop to the zero-tolerance level of just 20mg.

I had never heard of AlcoSense before. My first thought was that it must yet another neo-temperance lobby group funded by the government. In fact, it is a company that makes breathalysers. Its managing director, Hunter Abbott, says that “only” 37% of drivers are breathalysed after a collision. He thinks the figure should be 100%. He also thinks there should be more random breath testing. It is not hard to see why.  

 

Free to read. 

 

Share

Tweet

Mario Rizzo on behavioural economics

I was delighted to share a stage with Prof Mario Rizzo, co-author of Escaping Paternalism and other fine works, at the IEA earlier this year. I never got around to posting the video, but here it is. Mario is an articulate critique of behavioural economics and "nudge" policies. I also mentioned his work on the slippery slope in my introduction, in particular The Camel's Nose is in the Tent which is well worth a read.

 

Share

Tweet

Gambling disorder does not cause suicide - study

Gambling with lies

 

Loyal readers may recall that Public Health England misused a study of Swedish hospital patients to make the claim that 409 suicides a year are linked to problem gambling. The science was so shoddy that the claim was shelved by its successor, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, who then used the same study and made the same mistakes to claim that "up to 496" suicides are linked to gambling. Although government agencies have been careful to use terms like "linked to" and "associated with", campaigners and journalists have been less careful with their language.

 

But, as I mentioned last year, one of the authors of the Swedish study used the same dataset for her PhD thesis and concluded that gambling disorder was not an independent risk factor for suicide among the hospital patients. It turns out that people in hospital with a range of psychiatric problems suffer from a lot of issues associated with premature mortality and that you can't use an inherently high-risk group to extrapolate across the entire population of a different country. Who knew?

Along with the co-author of the original study, she has now published a new study which comes to the same conclusion: people with gambling disorder are more likely to commit suicide but this is because of various co-morbidities, not gambling disorder.  

 

Individuals with gambling disorder had an increase in levels of mortality and suicide mortality compared to age, gender and municipality-matched controls. However, gambling disorder itself was not at the 0.05 alpha-level statistically associated with neither suicide nor general mortality when controlling for somatic and psychiatric comorbidities, gender, age and socioeconomic status. Thus individuals with gambling disorder suffer from increased mortality and suicide mortality and reasons for these appear to be multifactorial motivating careful suicide risk assessment and screening for somatic comorbidities in individuals with gambling disorder.

 

Or, to put it another way... 

 

In the regression model gambling disorder was not significantly associated with mortality, this was predicted by socioeconomic status, increasing age, low education level, somatic comorbidity, substance use disorder and previous intentional self-harm in men and for women by increasing age and somatic comorbidity. 

 

Of course, this is only one study and one cohort of people. But it is the same cohort of people that PHE and OHID used to come up with their spurious statistics (and those spurious statistics were then used to come up with equally useless claims about the cost of gambling to the health service). 

 

If you extrapolate the findings from this study, you get the result that no suicides are causally linked to problem gambling in the UK. Stick that on a t-shirt.

 

 

Share

Tweet

Horse racing strike

No horse racing today in Britain. Find out why at the Snowdon Substack. 

 

The subplot to all this is that the anti-gambling lobby have been working with the racing lobby to throw the rest of the gambling industry under the bus. The anti-gambling lobby in Britain is effectively Derek Webb and the various lobbyists and think tanks he funds or has funded, particularly Matt Zarb-Cousin (Clean Up Gambling), Will Prochaska (Coalition to End Gambling Ads) and the Social Market Foundation (SMF).

The SMF have called for remote gaming duty to rise to 50% (!) while Matt “not anti-gambling, just anti-FOBTs” Zarb-Cousin has called for online casinos to be taxed “into oblivion”. The SMF’s ‘concession’ to sports bookies is a 25% tax consisting 5% duty and 20% Horserace Betting Levy which amounts to the same as they pay now (15% duty plus 10% racing levy). This is because they know that horse racing is popular with the public and it gives them a way to “peel off and neutralise racing” - to quote Zarb-Cousin - while they hammer the rest of the remote gaming sector.

 

Share

Tweet

The endless "public health" playbook

Yawn. 

 

Food industry lobbying is leading Labour to drop public health plans, experts say

 

How could they possibly know that? Lobbying is virtually impossible to measure and there is no way of knowing whether it is effective or not. The fact that politicians side with one special interest over another does not prove that it was the lobbying wot won it. And even if the lobbying was effective, it only means that the politicians were more persuaded by one set of arguments than another. So what?

 

Labour has scrapped ambitious plans to tackle Britain’s growing toll of lifestyle-related illness after lobbying by food and alcohol firms, health experts have said.

Ministerial inaction on ill-health caused by bad diet, alcohol and smoking is so serious that the NHS could collapse as a result of conditions such as heart disease and diabetes, they warn.

 

The NHS could collapse as the result of government not doing what these people want, could it? Actually collapse? Who are they anyway?

 

The charge against ministers has been made by Sarah Woolnough and Jennifer Dixon, the chief executives of the influential King’s Fund and Health Foundation thinktanks.

 

The King's Fund exists solely to pressure governments to pour more money down the bottomless pit of the NHS, as far as I can see. It never used to get involved in campaigning for illiberal lifestyle regulation, but it is now run by Sarah Woolnough who turned Cancer Research UK into a lobbying outfit, so that is sadly changing.  

 

"There is a long history of lobbying from the food, alcohol and tobacco industries weakening and delaying measures that would improve people’s health."

 

It's a shame they're not as effective as the single-issue pressure groups that work night and day (or rather 9 to 5, except weekends and bank holidays) trying to relieve consumers of their freedom.

 

They have said Labour are repeating the mistakes of previous governments by letting “vested interests” wield too much influence and water down planned policies.

 

Plain packaging? The sugar tax? Banning disposable vapes? Which of these was "watered down"? Banning supermarkets from putting tasty food at the end of aisles? Banning everyone born after 2008 from ever buying cigarettes, cigars or Rizla? Where is the evidence of industries wielding too much influence when these were announced?   

 

“And once again long-promised restrictions on junk food advertising have been delayed while Labour’s proposals to extend smoking restrictions to outdoor areas of pubs and restaurants were squashed,” Woolnough and Dixon say in a joint blog.

 

The "junk food" advertising ban has been delayed by three months because the legislation was so badly written it would have prevented McDonalds from advertising salads. It will now take effect in January 2026, but the industry has voluntarily agreed to stop advertising HFSS food in October anyway. Is that going to make the NHS collapse?

 

“Minimum unit pricing for alcohol – successfully implemented in Scotland ..."

 

 – and a Clean Air Act, regularly promised by Labour in opposition, have both failed to materialise.”

 

I don't think the latter has anything to so with "the food, alcohol and tobacco industries" while the former had more to do with Westminster politicians looking at the alcohol-specific death rate in Scotland and concluding that minimum pricing is a policy they can do without.

 

Woolnough and Dixon single out the health secretary Wes Streeting’s threat to food firms in February 2024 that he would use a “steamroller” to force them to reformulate their products by putting less fat, salt and sugar in them. He has not acted on that pledge while in office, though, and instead published weaker plans intended to promote the take-up of more nutritious food.

 

He's going to literally fine supermarkets if they don't sell people less sugar, salt and fat. Are you lot never satisfied?

 

The answer, of course, is that they are not. They also want a ban on alcohol advertising (which wouldn't work). That, combined with an outdoor smoking ban, will supposedly be enough to stop the NHS collapsing. It's bollocks, obviously. Neither policy will have any measurable effect on the NHS workload and it is impossible for something that receives £200 billion a year to "collapse". What we need is for someone to deal with the NHS's horrendous productivity problem, but that would require a bit of effort rather than a finger-wagging blog post.

 

Even if the government capitulated to this wish-list, the King's Fund and the rest of the nanny state blob would be back five minutes later with another list of "bold" and "brave" policies to save the NHS from collapse. They will make an unreasonable demand. The government will decide against it but do lots of other things they want. They will then accuse the government of succumbing to industry lobbying and the Guardian will write it up as a story. It's just so boring and predictable now.

The lesson of the last fifteen years is that the amount of screaming the government will be subjected to if it does nothing that 'public health' lobbyists want is identical to amount of screaming it is subjected to if it does most of what they want. They will accuse politicians of being in the pocket of various industries. They will accuse the Health Secretary of being weak. They will claim that the NHS is going to collapse. 

It is the same script regardless. The government gets no thanks for capitulating to them again and again. Their list of demands is endless and their autistic screeching is loud and constant regardless of what any government does. On tobacco and food, in particular, no government in the world has done more to appease these fanatics in the last two decades. It hasn't worked. The obvious lesson is that politicians should stop trying to appease them. The only thing that is likely to make them shut up is a government that makes is clear that it will not be giving into any further demands.

There is a hint in DHSC's response to this latest outburst that Streeting is losing patience with these people.

 

The Department of Health and Social Care rejected the thinktank bosses’ criticisms. A spokesperson said: “We are legislating to make sure children today can never legally smoke, introducing a ban on high-caffeine energy drinks for children and new rules to make baby food better for families, preventing fast food shops from setting up outside schools, banning junk food adverts targeted at children, introducing supervised toothbrushing to prevent kids teeth from rotting, a Healthy Food Standard to make the healthy choice the easy choice, and investing an extra £200m in the public health grant after years of cuts.”

 

"Yeah, but apart from that, what has the government ever done for us?"

 

 

 

Share

Tweet

More reasons to doubt the official data on the illicit tobacco trade

I have written before about why HMRC's estimates of illicit tobacco sales are demonstrably wrong and greatly underestimate the size of the market. Aside from their figures being a mathematical impossibility and defying the evidence of one's eyes, there is a further reason to be suspicious of HMRC's claims.

HMRC reckons the manufactured cigarettes sold illegally in 2023/24 would be worth £800 million if sold at the normal retail price. But HMRC also tells us that cigarettes worth £697 million were seized by the authorities in 2023/24. 

If true, this means that the authorities are seizing nearly half (46%) of the cigarettes that are entering Britain before they can be sold. Who knew the British state could be so effective? It is much less effective at seizing cocaine (19%) or cannabis (26%) for example. If the figures are right, it isn't very good at tackling rolling tobacco either, having got hold of only £42 million's worth of it in 2023/24, a mere 2% of the supposed total.  

It doesn't pass the smell test, does it? The overwhelmingly more likely explanation fits with what anybody can see if they have their eyes open: the streets are awash with illicit whites and the authorities are - as ever - only intercepting a small fraction of it.  

Share

Tweet

Anti-capitalism and public health

A new IEA report from me - read it here.

And an article about it, also by me...

 

Academics who see disease spreading every time money changes hands tend to take a dim view of the market economy. As anti-corporate rhetoric ballooned into a blanket indictment of capitalism, many of them decided that the solution must lie in overthrowing the existing economic system. They urge the public to regard “neo-liberal capitalism as the fundamental cause of health harms” and call for “a fundamental restructure of the global political and socio- economic system”. During the pandemic, a former WHO advisor hailed China’s draconian COVID lockdowns for curbing economic activity and claimed that “switching off capitalism not only protects us from the virus, it protects us from ourselves.” Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, has told Socialist Worker that “we need a mass movement of resistance” against “neoliberalism”. A WHO report published last year blamed “deregulated forms of capitalism”, “trade liberalization” and “the promotion of free markets” for poor health, and concluded that “the importance of addressing that political economic system, and rethinking capitalism, cannot be ignored”.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

 

 

Share

Tweet

Spiralling down

ASH are agitating for outdoor smoking bans again, this time with a dubious survey - see my Substack.

And the government is looking at copying Scotland and pointlessly dropping the drink-drive limit - see The Critic.

If you're interested in the Lucy Letby case, I've written about that for the Spectator. 

Share

Tweet

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.  

 

 

 

Share

Tweet

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. 

Share

Tweet

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.

 

Share

Tweet

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. 

 

Share

Tweet

HMRC has its head in the sand about illicit tobacco

A 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. 

Share

Tweet

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!

 

 

Share

Tweet

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. 

 

 

Share

Tweet

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. 

Share

Tweet

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.

Share

Tweet

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.

Share

Tweet

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.

 

 

 

Share

Tweet