Emmanuel Maggiori has a book about Modern Monetary Theory out today. It's very good and I was delighted to sit down with him on Tuesday to talk about it.
There's a danger of giving credibility to this ridiculous theory just by talking about it. It's so idiotic that it feels like punching down, but since it seems to be growing in popularity, it needs to be addressed.
Enjoy!
The IPPR claims that its tax rises would bring in an extra £3.2 billion a year which former Prime Minister Gordon Brown says should be used to “solve” the child poverty “crisis”. The government currently spends the thick end of £400 billion a year on social security and yet relative child poverty persists, so it is far from certain that an extra £3 billion would solve anything, but despite the Treasury’s notorious resistance to hypothecation, anti-gambling campaigners have craftily made the two issues of gambling taxation and child poverty synonymous. Whose side are you on? Hungry children or online casinos? And what kind of monster are you anyway?
Cunning though it may be, this plan does rather depend on the onshore gambling industry not being a smoldering ruin after these duties have been hiked sky high.
Gambling giant blames UK tax rises as they close hundreds of storesEvoke, the owner of William Hill and 888, has confirmed the closure of approximately 270 betting shops across the UK. This decision aims to offset the financial impact of higher gambling taxes and mounting debts faced by the company. Evoke reported pre-tax losses more than doubled to £549.1 million in 2025, largely attributed to increased UK duty costs. The shop closures are expected to result in hundreds of job losses, although the precise number has not yet been confirmed.
The very thing that this sweaty little geezer from the IPPR said wouldn’t happen! pic.twitter.com/UrNKShOZsj
— Christopher Snowdon (@cjsnowdon) April 30, 2026
In tobacco control and pandemic governance, foundation funding, WHO authority, NGO advocacy, and academic research reinforce one another to produce policy consensus insulated from scrutiny. Law & economics frameworks help explain the result: incentives favor persistence over performance. The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has not accelerated global declines in smoking, while discouraging harm-reduction approaches that have succeeded in countries such as Sweden. Proposals to expand WHO authority in pandemic preparedness risk replicating the same institutional failures revealed during COVID-19.
The problem is not insufficient resources, but weak accountability. The brief proposes reforms to restore it: rebalance WHO funding toward assessed contributions, strengthen transparency and conflict-of-interest rules, open governance processes, embrace harm reduction, and return policymaking authority to domestic democratic institutions. Without such changes, the continued expansion of the DoDO model will deepen existing failures—with consequences measured in human lives.
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| “Churchill tries to find luck in drink, but the bottle distorts the view.” - Nazi propaganda, 1942 |
After the latest attempt to assassinate the President of the United States on Saturday, an attendee at the White House correspondents’ dinner was spotted making off with a couple of bottles of wine. As several people noticed, many Americans seemed to think that this was a greater outrage than the shooting itself, whereas British observers were firmly on the side of the minesweeper.
Perhaps the difference is that Americans can afford to turn away free booze, but it seems more like another manifestation of the USA’s strangely prudish attitude towards alcohol. It is still less than a hundred years since Prohibition ended. The Anti-Saloon League is no more, but its place has been taken by “sober influencers”, gym bros and longevity-obsessed billionaires who preach the gospel of total abstinence. Last year, the number of drinkers in America fell to an all-time low, with barely half of the adult population touching a drop.
We Brits cannot afford to be complacent. As another viral video released over the weekend showed, the American culture of puritanism has spread to these shores. Hannah Spencer, the recently elected Green MP for Gorton and Denton, has exclusively revealed that members of Parliament can be a bibulous bunch. In an interview with Politics Joe, she said: “Like, there’s a room where I walked past and I doubled back and looked in because people are just sat having a drink.” That room, I fancy, is what is known as a “bar” and there are nine of them on the parliamentary estate. There are also several pubs within walking distance which, rather wonderfully, have a bell that rings when MPs need to stagger back and vote.
The European Commission is pressing on with its plans to have an EU-wide tax on nicotine pouches and e-cigarette fluid, in addition to a sharp increase in the minimum tax rate on tobacco. Epicenter's experts at the EU Regulatory Observatory have been assessing the proposals and are unimpressed.
I've written a short briefing with Constantinos Saravakos outlining their views and discussing some of the main dangers.
The main findings are:
I was in Brussels for the World Nicotine Congress last month and had a chat with my pal Peter Beckett from Clearing the Air about vaping. Video below.
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which is soon to receive royal assent, is the most empty-headed and illiberal piece of legislation passed in my lifetime. It is a pathetic epitaph for a vacuous political class, a sad fart from the rotting corpse of Blairism, and a new low for the nanny state. Waved through by the political pygmies in the House of Commons and cheered on by the freedom-hating gibbons in the House of Lords, it has given a quick dopamine rush to self-righteous windbags as the British state crumbles around them.
Most people have been only vaguely aware of what the new law says, but the media coverage yesterday alerted millions to the fact that the so-called generational smoking ban has nothing to do with smoking in pubs (which was banned in 2007) or selling cigarettes to children (which was banned in 1908). Instead, it will create an almost surreal two-tier society in which people born after 2008 become permanent children in the eyes of the law.
It has been nearly six years since the Social Market Foundation, a leftish think tank, came up with the brilliant wheeze of banning people from spending more money on gambling than they can afford. They proposed a £23 a week cap on gambling expenditure and said that anyone who wanted to exceed this “socially acceptable gambling budget” would have to prove that they were good for it. They did not explain how this would work in practice, but in a submission to the Gambling Commission in 2021, their gambling regulation spokesman, Dr James Noyes, said that the checks should be “non-intrusive” and “based on the data already held” by the company.
The idea of “frictionless affordability checks” was supported by the the Gambling Commission, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Gambling Related Harm, the House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Social and Economic Impact of the Gambling Industry and every anti-gambling group worth its salt, but it was a mirage. Background checks for County Court Judgements and past bankruptcies are insufficient to show whether a person is spending beyond their means. Customers can be phoned up and asked if they have an adequate income, but nothing compels them to tell the truth. When push comes to shove, you need bank statements and pay slips, but two-thirds of punters are unwilling to show these to a bookmaker.
And why should they? Gambling companies use all sorts of methods to identify problematic patterns of play and intervene with questions and advice, but they cannot look into their customers’ souls. If they ask too many questions, there are plenty of unregulated and offshore websites for punters to bet on. And since those websites do not pay tax, they often offer better odds. When General Betting Duty rises from 15 per cent to 25 per cent next year, “black market” sites will gain a further competitive advantage over the companies that are regulated by the Gambling Commission.
Read the rest at The Critic.
SARG has worked closely with the Institute for many years – our researchers have been involved in a wide range of IAS outputs, while senior colleagues from the IAS have sat on Steering Groups for SARG research projects.
Reflecting on the appointment, Professor John Holmes said:
"Having worked closely with the IAS for many years, providing informal advice and supporting their research, I am delighted to take up a formal role on the panel. The IAS plays a vital role in ensuring that public debate on alcohol is informed by the best available evidence, and I look forward to supporting their mission over the next three years."
The Mexican newspaper El Universal has reported allegations that Bloomberg Philanthropies have used donations and bribes to influence policy. Bloomberg's pet policies are sugar taxes and e-cigarette flavour bans.
The documents indicate that Bloomberg Philanthropies uses its multimillion-dollar financial support to influence and promote regulatory and fiscal changes in Mexico and other countries, focusing on imposing restrictions, high taxes, and strict regulations that directly affect large U.S. companies.
To achieve this, it funds public institutions —such as health research institutes—and civil society organizations, mainly those dedicated to consumer protection and public health , creating a coordinated ecosystem that includes the production of “scientific” studies, media campaigns, political pressure, and strategic dissemination.
To carry out these irregular acts, the documents reveal that the Bloomberg Philanthropies foundation triangulates funds through intermediaries such as Fernwood Group Fund.
... Bloomberg's funding of El Poder del Consumidor is so extensive that it ends up paying million-dollar salaries to those close to Alejandro Calvillo, the leader of this NGO.
For example, his brother Jorge Luis Calvillo Unna received a total of 7 million 800 thousand pesos from 2020 to October 2025; while Suzanne Elaine Kemp, wife of Alejandro Calvillo, received more than 4 million 285 thousand pesos in the same period.
Several payments were also found to former federal government officials, such as Alfonso Guati Rojo, who served as Director General of Standards at the Ministry of Economy (SE), leading the design, defense and legal strengthening of the new [food] labeling system in the face of business injunctions.
Five months after leaving office in 2022, payments began for “consulting” and “monitoring of injunctions” from El Poder del Consumidor (The Power of the Consumer), coinciding with the review of key cases in the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation ( SCJN). These payments totaled more than one million pesos for the former federal official.
Based on public documents, the dates and concepts indicate that the consulting functioned as a piece of parallel strategy: while the government legally defended the regulation in courts, Alfonso Guati Rojo transferred technical knowledge to El Poder del Consumidor to strengthen its political, communicational and public pressure action in support of the defense against the injunctions before the Court.
Under the heading “The case for liberal paternalism”, he makes such a shallow and uninformed case for lifestyle regulation that one starts to doubt whether he has read On Liberty. In addition to making a number of factual errors, he puts forward a series of hoary old chestnuts that he seems to think are argument-winning zingers. So you think you like freedom, eh? What about the drunk driver that kills someone? (Drink driving is banned.) Why should thin people have to pay for the healthcare of fat people? (The obese take less out of the welfare state than the thin because they don’t live as long.) He cites Richard Thaler’s work on behavioural economics to justify “nudging” and “soft paternalism” and then lists a slew of anti-smoking policies that Thaler would consider to be unacceptable because they impose costs and cannot be opted out of.
He rejoices in people being banned from smoking not only inside but outside and then says that similar tactics need to be used against people who eat “fattening foods”. He celebrates governments that put “comprehensive taxes on unhealthy food” and cheers on Japanese companies that “measure the waistlines of employees to make sure that they are not getting too fat”. “We should go further”, he says. “Why not use the proceeds of food taxes to subsidize healthy foods?” (Because the government doesn’t control the price of food.)
The problem with this is not so much that the policies he proposes are ineffective, though they are (Britain’s sugar tax, which Wooldridge thinks is wonderful, did absolutely nothing to reduce obesity and nor did the warning labels put on “unhealthy” food in Chile.) The real problem is twofold. Firstly, whatever else they might be, policies that “demonise” (his word) consumers of tobacco, cast them out from private buildings, extort money from them through sin taxes and restrict where they can buy the product are not liberal; a word that, as the author helpfully reminds us, is derived from the Latin word libertas, meaning liberty. Wooldridge is right to say that John Stuart Mill was comfortable with more state intervention than some libertarians care to admit, but when it came to state-sponsored paternalism he was crystal clear. “To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained,” he wrote, “is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition; and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase of cost is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price; and to those who do, it is a penalty laid on them for gratifying a particular taste.” Laws restricting where alcohol can be sold, said Mill, are “suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages.” If banning people from smoking outdoors and having the government define and prohibit “misinformation” is Wooldridge’s idea of liberalism, we can only be thankful that he never developed an interest in fascism.
The second problem is that if Wooldridge wants a government that will take on populism by hassling smokers, meddling with the food supply and censoring the internet, he has already got it. Under Boris Johnson — the supposed populist “strongman” — the UK put into legislation the most stringent restrictions on “junk food” marketing and promotion in the world. His successor, Rishi Sunk, announced the total prohibition of tobacco, albeit over a timeframe that is almost surreal. Both policies were eagerly pursued by Keir Starmer when he became Prime Minister, as was the Online Safety Act. The House of Lords recently tried to ban social media for under-16s, Kemi Badenoch has already said that the Conservatives will enact such a ban, and it is only a matter of time before it becomes official Labour policy. Is it any wonder that populists talk about the Uniparty?
I spoke to my friends at the Sloavkian think tank INESS (the Institute of Economic and Social Studies) recently. We talked about my 2025 paper Anti-Capitalism and Public Health and you can watch the video below.
Flattening the curve – i.e. allowing the virus to circulate while suppressing it enough to stop the health service being overwhelmed – was as much Whitty’s plan as it was anyone’s, but when he pivoted to supporting full lockdown in March 2020 he essentially never looked back. By May, the curve was flat but the country would remain in lockdown for another two months. The belief that everything is more important than the economy and nothing is more important than “public health” had taken hold.
Whitty seemed to become obsessed with the idea that epidemics are always halving or doubling. Since the only time the infection rate (the infamous R number) went down in the first 18 months of the pandemic was during lockdowns, this meant that he could always foresee the Tiber foaming with blood. The only solution was more lockdowns. Longer lockdowns. Lockdowns to prevent lockdowns. For the rest of the pandemic, every piece of advice from Sage, which was co-chaired by Whitty, was nudging the government towards that end.
Politicians decide, but their decisions are based on the advice and evidence given to them by experts. During Covid, the evidence presented appeared partial and excessively pessimistic and the advice seemed relentlessly illiberal. A few examples should suffice.
In October 2020, the NHS was nowhere near being overwhelmed. There were more empty hospital beds than there had been a year earlier. Things were worse in parts of northern England but local restrictions seemed to be working in the northwest and infection rates were falling in the northeast. Nevertheless, Chris Whitty appeared on television at Halloween with some graphs and Boris Johnson capitulated with a four-week lockdown. When that ended, Sage used out-of-date infection data to justify putting nearly every English county into the top two tiers, thereby extending lockdown in all but name and crushing the hospitality sector.
In December 2021, the Omicron variant was causing renewed panic around the world despite all the evidence showing that it was significantly milder than its predecessors and that hospitalisation rates in South Africa, where it had originated, were a small fraction of what they had been before. On 15 December, more than a fortnight after the chair of the South African Medical Association told us that we were “panicking unnecessarily” about an “extremely mild” variant, Whitty appeared on television to warn about the “misinterpretation” of the South African data and saying: “I want to be clear, this is going to be a problem.” He argued that South Africans benefited from high levels of immunity, seemingly forgetting that the British had been repeatedly vaccinated for the last year. “There are several things we don’t know [about Omicron]” he said, before adding inaccurately, “but what we do know is bad”. It seemed like every effort was made to bounce Boris Johnson into a fourth lockdown that Christmas. It is to his credit that he resisted. It was not until 23 December that Sage finally admitted that Omicron was indeed much milder. In February, Whitty conceded that Omicron’s impact on mortality had been “much more muted” and was “essentially not visible”. The government spent £9.3bn on lateral flow tests that winter.Whitty was not alone in pushing lockdowns at the drop of a hat. It took a team effort to lay waste to Britain’s economy and inflict an injury to the nation’s psyche from which it has yet to recover. Weak politicians, flawed modellers and hysterical journalists should all be held accountable. But if the finger has to be pointed at a single individual, it is the man who has never apologised and who was knighted when in my view he should have been sacked. Chris Whitty, the softly spoken boffin, the unassuming technocrat, broke Britain with Powerpoint.
Gamban, the app that blocks gambling sites on the devices of problem gamblers (at their request), has been turned down for funding by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID).
Loyal readers will recall that the gambling industry used to pony up many millions of pounds for treatment, research and education. The puritans at the Department of Health decided that this was tainted money that could only be made clean by taking it from gambling companies by force. Most of the long-term recipients of this cash went along with the idea of replacing voluntary donations with a compulsory levy because they assumed that it would guarantee them funding for life.
It didn't quite work out that way. GambleAware were the first to be cut loose after the hardcore anti-gambling twunts and Jolyon Maugham tried to blacken their name. Despite playing up their anti-gambling credentials, the charity couldn't deny that it had received industry funding in the past and that is an unwashable sin now that gambling is a 'public health' issue.
Others have been simple victims of government incompetence. OHID is so useless that it can't even give away money without cocking it up. As Zak Thomas-Akoo has reported, treatment services, including Gordon Moody and GamCare, are in chaos because bureaucrats can't get them their grants in time.
This year, the UK government’s Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) oversaw the distribution of funding and decided to exclude Gamban on the basis of its entity status being a limited company.
— Gamban (@gambanapp) March 31, 2026
This was not a reasonable basis to omit the best available gambling… pic.twitter.com/l9Qid6c4HU
Chris Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the right-leaning think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, said Scotland was “in a league of its own when it comes to funding its own pressure groups”. He believes another flagship SNP policy — minimum unit pricing for alcohol — is an example of the public debate being influenced by charities which the SNP chose to fund well.
He cited Alcohol Focus Scotland, which last year received more than 85 per cent of its £792,000 annual income direct from the Scottish government in the form of a “core grant”, and Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems, entirely government funded. He said both groups acted as “the Praetorian Guard of the SNP” when it came to minimum unit pricing, a contentious policy introduced in Scotland in 2018.
After the policy was introduced, alcohol deaths in Scotland increased, with some evidence emerging that it had forced those addicted to drink to go without food.
A report by Public Health Scotland said there was “strong evidence” it had reduced deaths compared with how many would have died had it not been in place. However, it also acknowledged “negative health and social consequences at an individual level” including driving up debt, reduced spending or even alcoholics turning to “acquisitive crime”.
In 2024, after lobbying from charities heavily funded by the SNP, the minimum price was increased, from 50p to 65p. The SNP cited charities to back up its policy.
In February 2024, Sandesh Gulhane, a Scottish Tory GP, pointed out in Holyrood that despite minimum pricing, alcohol deaths were at a 14-year high, and only one out of 40 studies had claimed it led to a reduction in deaths. In response, Shona Robison, then the deputy first minister, quoted the chief executive of another charity, Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol & Drugs, accusing the MSP of being “the only person in the room who does not believe the evidence”.
It is another charity that the SNP has chosen to fund well because of its ideological position. Last year, it received almost £1.9 million in government, 17 times more than it received in donations. A decade earlier, it received only £447,000 from the devolved administration. Snowdon said: “It is creating a fake level of putatively public support that wouldn’t exist, or at least wouldn’t have any amplification, if it wasn’t for government money.”
Charities in England protected
A paper Snowdon wrote almost a decade and a half ago, “Sock Puppets: How the government lobbies itself and why”, led to changes in England.
Under David Cameron, the government banned charities from using government money to lobby the parliament or government, although they remained free to do so using income from other sources. SNP ministers rejected the idea, arguing that it would amount to “gagging” clauses against charities.
Last year, the Labour government introduced what was known as the civil society covenant, which explicitly states charities that criticise government policies cannot be penalised “by excluding them from policy discussions or funding opportunities”. Again, no such contract is in place north of the border.
In Scotland, there are claims that the SNP has in effect shut down criticism from the charity and voluntary sectors because of a system that leaves them umbilically tied to its political objectives and fearing grave consequences if they step out of line.
There are never explicit threats — and never anything put in writing. But according to numerous sources, a dependence on public funds has meant scores of charities in Scotland have been co-opted into becoming proxies for the SNP. Those with the same objectives as the SNP have been given millions of pounds in funding, allowing it to use them as advocates for its policies.
According to Alex Neil, who served in SNP governments under Sturgeon and Alex Salmond, including as health secretary, the administration would regularly ask “friendly” charities to support it publicly with controversial policies. He said any link between funding and the requests, often made by SNP special advisers, was always implied, but that it was understood their dependence on the government meant they would almost always fall into line.
A Scottish government spokesman said: “We are improving the way we provide funding to the third sector through our commitment to fairer funding”, a reference to a policy intended to make the awarding of grants more transparent and making them over several years.
He added: “The Scottish government agrees with the regulator’s position that political campaigning, such as advocating for or against changes in government policy or legislation is a legitimate way for some charities to pursue their aims. Charities play a vital role in civil society and it is right that they have the ability to advocate for change that aligns with their charitable purposes.”
Earlier this month I reported that legal cigarette sales fell by 52% between 2021 and 2025 in the UK. These are official clearance figures from HMRC and show a rate of decline which far outstrips any estimate of the decline in smoking. The conclusion is obvious: more and more smokers are buying tobacco from illicit sources.
The state-funded pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) have responded by claiming that things are not as bad as they look. The accelerated decline since 2021 is, they say, “consistent with a long-term downward trend”. While they acknowledge that “the illicit trade may also be a factor” and that “ongoing cost of living pressures may have pushed some smokers, particularly those on lower incomes, to seek out cheaper, illicit alternatives”, they insist that “declining tobacco clearances appear to be driven mainly by falling smoking prevalence and reduced consumption among those who still smoke”.
Read the rest at IEA Insider
Things will be bad enough after the government doubles the price of vaping in October with its new vape tax without going full prohibition, but the “ban it harder” mentality always seems to prevail. It is this kind of displacement politics that paves the road to anarcho-tyranny. You want to tackle systematic child exploitation in the Midlands? Sorry mate, the best I can do is regulation of vape flavours.
Australia, as ever, has taken things to tragicomic extremes. In the latest episode of its ongoing tobacco turf war, a gunman opened fire in a Melbourne shisha café this week, injuring a 49 year old man. In Melbourne alone, there have been over 130 arson attacks and several murders since the tobacco and vape market fell into the hands of organised crime. E-cigarettes have always been illegal in Australia and it has the highest cigarette taxes in the world. According to official estimates, between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of tobacco products are now sold on the black market.
On Thursday, a government minister came up with a brilliant new ruse to put an end to this: banning tobacconists. “Health advocates are doing interesting work”, he said, “asking why our society continues to permit standalone tobacconists.” Would those be the same “health advocates” who got Australia into this mess? The ones who swore on a stack of Bibles that there is no link between tobacco taxes and the illicit trade? The ones who lobbied for e-cigarettes to be banned in the first place and who successfully lobbied for the ban to be extended to nicotine-free vapes and imports for personal use? Sure, let’s hear what those guys have to say.
Most of the studies are from researchers who are actively looking for risks and who write up their work in a way that emphasises the “potential” harm. They generally fail to provide adequate context by referring to typical readings among active vapers, let alone active smokers, and they rarely refer to the safe thresholds of the substances they are examining (the 2021 study by Amalia et al is one of very few exceptions). That is because the levels recorded are generally considered safe by regulators in workplaces and outdoors (which is where the regulations tend to be applied). Unable to show that the measurements are unsafe or abnormal, the researchers focus instead on an increase in one substance - usually cotinine - and imply that any increase above the baseline must be hazardous.
It should be noted that these are the studies mentioned by organisations such as the WHO who want vaping banned indoors. Weak as it is, they presumably think that it is the best evidence to support their position, but other evidence is available. For example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sampled the air in a vape shop (where e-cigarette use was obviously heavy in a confined space) it found that all chemicals in the air were below the occupational exposure limit. It expressed concerns about detectable levels of two chemicals (diacetyl and 2,3-pentanedione), but both of these are banned for use in e-cigarette fluids in the UK (and EU).
Similar studies have found that even in very high exposure conditions in a small, non-ventilated vape shop, nicotine concentrations in the air were undetectable and those chemicals that were detectable were at very low (and legal) levels.
A systematic review of the evidence found “no evidence of potential for exposures of e-cigarette users to contaminants that are associated with risk to health at a level that would warrant attention if it were an involuntary workplace exposures” and “no evidence that vaping produces inhalable exposures to contaminants of the aerosol that would warrant health concerns by the standards that are used to ensure safety of workplaces.” And that is to the users of e-cigarettes! “Exposures of bystanders are likely to be orders of magnitude less, and thus pose no apparent concern.”
Public Health England said in 2016 that “there is no evidence of harm to bystanders from exposure to e-cigarette vapour and the risks to their health are likely to be extremely low.” They also said that “e-cigarette use is not covered by smokefree legislation and should not routinely be included in the requirements of an organisation’s smokefree policy”. Why? Because there is no risk to bystanders and vaping bans discourage smoking cessation.
As Prof Peter Hajek, Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) says:
“While health risks of e-cigarettes to vapers themselves have been estimated at up to 5% of health risks of smoking, health risks to bystanders are most likely reduced by a much bigger margin, and most likely altogether. This is because e-cigarettes release no chemicals into the environment themselves, only what users exhale, and such exhalation has so far not been shown to generate any toxicants at levels that could conceivably affect the health of bystanders.”
There has been a concerted effort by anti-vaping academics to find evidence that ‘secondhand vapour’ is harmful to bystanders. Despite using a variety of methods, they have come up empty-handed, with the partial exception of a few studies that have looked at air quality in unrealistic laboratory conditions. The levels of chemicals measured in the atmosphere and in the bodies of people ‘exposed’ to vaping in everyday situations are not only vastly lower when compared to tobacco smoke, but are lower when compared to everyday activities such as cooking and are consistently below the safe level for indoor and outdoor air quality.
Speaking at the Medical Journalists’ Association annual lecture last week, the Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty took at pop at “fat jabs” such as Mounjaro and Ozempic. Thrashing away at a strawman of his own construction, he asked: “Does anyone in this group believe that the correct answer is to allow obesity to rise because of pretty aggressive marketing of obesogenic foods to children and then stick them on GLP-1 agonists at the age of 18?”
“Just relying on the drugs seems to me the wrong answer,” he said. To which we might ask, who is just relying on the drugs? Not the public, most of whom manage to avoid “living with obesity” by controlling their appetite and doing a spot of exercise, and certainly not the politicians, who have saddled Britain with the most extensive set of anti-obesity policies anywhere in the world.
Most social scientists pay lip service to the old adage about correlation not equalling causation, but the temptation to find a deeper meaning in statistical relationships can be hard to resist. In Australia, which is becoming a centre of excellence for human stupidity, an anti-vaping program was recently launched on the basis that: “Studies have shown that engaging in unsafe sex, other substance abuse, drink driving, texting while driving and driving without a seatbelt are associated with increased e-cigarette use among youth”. I dare say they are, but a campaign to reduce unsafe sex by clamping down on e-cigarettes (which, incidentally, are already illegal in Australia) is as doomed to failure as a campaign to reduce drownings by clamping down on ice cream sales.
It was my great pleasure to appear on Matt Forde's Political Party podcast last week. You can listen to it here. Here's his blurb for it...
What is lifestyle economics and why does it matter?
The IEA's Christopher Snowdon is a fun-loving political thinker and explains his opposition to puritanism, why we should have more freedom and what that would mean for our policies on smoking, alcohol, gambling and the very existence of the NHS.
Also... what are ultra-processed foods and are they necessarily bad?
Figures published last week show that legal tobacco sales fell by 52% in the United Kingdom between 2021 and 2025. The volume of manufactured cigarettes sold dropped by 46%, from 23.4 billion sticks to 12.6 billion sticks, while the volume of rolling tobacco fell by 59%, from 8.6 million kilograms to 3.6 million kilograms.
The decline in legal rolling tobacco sales is particularly significant because loose tobacco has been subject to the heaviest tax rises in recent years, with the duty rate doubling since 2020. Rolling tobacco is often the last resort for low income smokers before they turn to the black market.
Converting kilograms of rolling tobacco into sticks, we find that a total of 19.8 billion cigarettes were sold legally in the UK in 2025, less than half the figure recorded in 2021 (40.6 billion).1 This decline is far greater than any estimate of the decline in the smoking rate. These estimates vary. According to the Opinion & Lifestyle Survey, the smoking rate among people aged 16 or older in Great Britain fell from 12.7% to 9.1% between 2021 and 2024. According to the Annual Population Survey, the rate among people aged 18 or older in the United Kingdom fell from 12.3% to 10.5% in the same period. Neither survey has an estimate for 2025 yet, but the monthly Smoking Toolkit Study suggests that the rate of daily cigarette smoking in England was 10.6% in 2025, only modestly less than in 2021 when the rate was 11.4%.
If the Smoking Toolkit Study is correct then overall tobacco consumption has barely changed since 2021 and it is a mathematical certainty that at least 50% of the market is illicit. If the other estimates are correct, the illicit share is still much larger than the official estimate of 13% from HMRC.
I may return to the question of why estimates of smoking prevalence are so different and why HMRC's estimate is so wrong in the future. For now, read my analysis of the latest data on the IEA Insider Substack.
The BBC has been unearthing cases of people behaving unusually after taking a drug for Restless Legs Syndrome. Since reporting the story of one woman who “began leaving her house in the early hours of the morning to cruise for sex” and would “flash her chest at any man she could find” after taking Ropinirole, the Beeb has received messages from hundreds from people who claim to have suddenly developed a taste for reckless hedonism after being prescribed the medication.
“I think I’m obsessed with sex,” says Michael (not his real name), whom the BBC says has “now slept with about 20 men and women, despite being married. Previously, he never cheated on his wife or had any homosexual encounters”. Other alleged victims of the drug say that they lost tens of thousands of pounds on gambling (“at the time I didn’t know it was no fault of my own”) and on shopping (“I knew that the behaviour wasn’t me, but I couldn’t control it”). One man “felt compelled to go on three-day long fishing trips every single week” and “found himself shopping compulsively for clothes, despite never previously having any interest in fashion”.
Read more about this odd phenomenon at The Critic.
The New Nicotine Alliance has produced a simple, accurate and easy-to-read summary of why the proposed vaping ban is an appalling idea. You can read it on a webpage or as a PDF.
Please take a few moments to complete the official consultation by visiting the government website here and sharing your views. When you fill out the form, you might find it helpful to focus on how vaping has helped you or others stay away from combustible tobacco. Do not be put off by questions which ask for new evidence, your lived experience is evidence in its own right, so please feel free to tell your stories.
You can also mention that current scientific evidence shows no material harm to bystanders, as explained in our briefing.
Your contribution does not need to be long or overly technical to be effective. It simply needs to be an honest reflection of why a public ban would be counterproductive to health goals. By speaking up now, we can help protect the progress the UK has made in reducing smoking rates. Thank you for your continued support and for taking the time to make your voice count in this important discussion.
Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs and editor of the Nanny State Index, which ranks countries by how much they interfere with people’s lifestyle choices, said: “The World Health Organisation’s campaign against vaping has been influential, especially in low- and middle-income countries.
“Bans on vaping and e-cigarette flavours, as well as e-cigarette taxes, have been steadily growing for years and it is important for travellers to be aware of what the rules are.”
Snowdon explained that this is particularly true of countries where the government owns or holds a stake in tobacco companies. Along Asia’s backpacking routes, Thailand and Vietnam have state-owned monopolies of the tobacco industries and heavily enforce anti-vaping laws, particularly in tourist areas. Visitors to Thailand face up to 10 years’ imprisonment for possession of vapes.
Prison sentences will soon also be on the cards for vapers in Hong Kong. The region already prohibits the import and sale of e-cigarettes, but a further ban on carrying vapes is due to be introduced on April 30.
“Vapers also need to be aware that they could be heavily fined for bringing an e-cigarette into Australia,” said Snowdon. The country banned vapes for recreational use, and devices containing liquid nicotine can now only be purchased from a pharmacy, with a prescription.
There are exceptions to this tide of vaping regulation, though. Highly conservative Saudi Arabia – despite forbidding alcohol – has surprisingly lax laws on it. Meanwhile, Norway plans to legalise e-cigarettes this coming July. But with the vaping crackdown picking up speed and legislation in regular flux, Snowdon warns that travellers should always check what the latest rules are before booking a trip.
“Caution is advised,” he said. “If all else fails, vapers can always go back to smoking for the duration of their holiday...”
According to the Charity Commission, the prohibitionist astro-turf group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) relieved taxpayers of £245,000 in 2024/25. Donations from the general public brought in a miserable £4,607.
This racket has been going on for more than fifty years now and is surely due to come to an end. ASH's grifters are currently trying to gold-plate the Tobacco and Vapes Bill with ludicrous ideas such as individual warnings on cigarettes and banning filters, but since prohibition now has cross-party support, it is hard to see what purpose ASH serves.
ASH themselves seem to recognise this. In their 'Statement of Risk', they openly ponder why the government needs to keep funding an extremist pressure group to lobby itself when anti-smoking extremism is now the norm amongst the political class.
My article featuring ASH and other government sock puppets is still outside the paywall for now: Bootlegging Baptists: the logic of paternalistic collective action.
The "gateway" theory of vaping is based on the observation that teenagers who have ever vaped are more likely to smoke than teenagers who have never vaped. I have often pointed out that teenagers who have ever vaped are more likely to have done lots of things that never-vaping teenagers have done, because they are different people. That doesn't mean that one behaviour causes another.
Since marijuana has never killed anyone, supporters of the war on drugs resort to claims about it being a gateway to heroin. E-cigarettes have never killed anyone either and so anti-nicotine extremists resort to claims about vaping leading to smoking.
In both cases, correlations can be found, but it is fairly obvious that they are not causal. Teenagers who vape are more likely to smoke, but they are also more likely to ride motorcycles, watch X-rated movies and have unsafe sex. They are also more likely to smoke cannabis, for that matter, but that doesn’t mean that vaping leads to any of these behaviours, nor would they be less likely to engage in them if vaping didn’t exist.
Indeed, one of the studies in the Soneji review found that e-cigarette users were not only more likely to smoke cigarettes but were more likely to smoke marijuana (Unger et al. 2016). It would not be surprising to find that they are also more likely to drink alcohol and have unprotected sex, but it would be a stretch to claim that these risky activities are somehow caused by their earlier experiments with vaping.
Teenagers who like the idea of drinking non-alcoholic beer are presumably more likely to be interested in drinking real beer in the same way that risk-taking teenagers who are drawn to vaping, motorcycling and unprotected sex are more likely to be interested in smoking and illegal drugs. This is known as a ‘common liability’ and it could produce a statistical correlation between non-alcoholic beer consumption and actual beer consumption, but it would not be serious evidence of cause and effect, i.e. a ‘gateway’.
Emergency medicine expert Professor Brian Burns said the anti-vaping program was vital to help curb vaping among youth given it was a gateway to cigarette smoking and high-risk behaviours.
“Studies have shown that engaging in unsafe sex, other substance abuse, drink driving, texting while driving and driving without a seatbelt are associated with increased e-cigarette use among youth,” he said.
“Sensation seeking – the desire to experience novel sensations and the willingness to take risks is also associated with e-cigarette use. These activities can result in severe physical injury and harm.”
Vapers going back to smoking is by far the most likely consequence of the vaping ban, especially since it will be accompanied by a tax on e-cigarettes that will double the cost of vaping, and the possibility of a ban on various flavours. And for what? DHSC admit in the Impact Assessment that “we cannot conclusively say whether these policy options will impact smoking, heated tobacco product, or vaping prevalence or consumption, and therefore whether there will be an improvement on health.” It puts the cost of the various new restrictions at £531.8 million, mostly from businesses having to put up new signs and train employees, while the benefits are priced at £0 because DHSC have no idea what the consequences will be. I never thought I’d say this about a government department, but you have to admire their honesty.
In the Government of Canada regulatory impact analysis statement for the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act it was assumed that the mortality and morbidity risks associated with vaping are 20% of the mortality and morbidity impacts of cigarettes. This assumption was developed with members of an expert panel composed of five academics in tobacco control.
Taking the evidence that each person who does not take up smoking gains 1.0 QALY, we could therefore estimate the number of lifeyears gained for each young person that does not take up vaping to be 0.2, or £14,000 in monetary terms. Additionally, taking the evidence that each person who quits smoking is equivalent to 0.74 QALYs, we could therefore estimate the number of life years gained for each person that quits vaping to be 0.148, or £10,000 in monetary terms.
Most people know that the number of drinkers and smokers is in decline in the UK, but you might be surprised to hear that the same is true of gamblers. For the first time since the early 1990s, gamblers are in the minority with only 48% of English adults engaging in any gambling activity in the past year.
This is largely because the National Lottery has become less popular. Only 31% of adults in England bought a lottery ticket in 2024, down from 65% in 1999. But fewer people are participating in non-lottery gambling too. As the graph below shows, participation in non-lottery gambling has been in decline for well over a decade. These games are now played by a smaller proportion of the population than in the early 1990s.
The most notorious — and risible — part of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill is the generational ban on tobacco sales which will effectively raise the smoking age by a year every year. This will do nothing for people who have been smoking for decades and whose health is most at risk. But the Bill also gives unlimited “Henry VIII powers” to the Health Secretary to regulate e-cigarette flavours, packaging and advertising, as well as controlling where people can legally vape. The government has said that it plans to use these powers as soon as it gets them and since the Health Secretary is Wes “tonne of bricks” Streeting, it is unlikely to use them wisely.
This is where the Tobacco and Vapes Bill stops being merely stupid and illiberal and becomes counter-productive even on its own terms. There is strong evidence from other countries that bans on vape flavours, e-cigarette advertising and other anti-vaping policies lead to increased cigarette sales and higher smoking rates. Since cigarettes and e-cigarettes are direct substitutes for one another, this is hardly surprising. Vape taxes undoubtedly have the effect of boosting the smoking rate and yet a punitive tax on e-cigarettes will be introduced in October. All this is happening at a time when the black market in tobacco is exploding and the de facto price of a pack of cigarettes is five pounds.
I am genuinely puzzled why the government is picking a fight over this, especially when their main political threat is Reform. Do they even know themselves? The way it has been announced makes it seem like they’re almost embarrassed about it. Are they hoping to do it without anyone noticing (it will not require primary legislation once the Tobacco and Vapes Bill becomes law). There are more than five million vapers in the UK and I hope they/we put up one hell of a fight.
Last week a reporter from the Sunday Post contacted Forest to say she was working on a feature ‘marking the anniversary of Scotland’s smoke-free legislation and its long-term public health impact’.
‘As part of the piece,’ she wrote, ‘I’m reporting on expert claims that improved respiratory health following the smoking ban may have helped reduce the severity of respiratory outcomes during the Covid-19 pandemic.
‘I’d welcome a response from Forest to include balance in the article.’
Doctor Rachel O’Donnell, Associate Professor at the University of Stirling’s Institute for Social Marketing and Health (ISMH), said that Covid outcomes could have been worse without the smoking ban legislation.
She said: “It’s not an unreasonable leap to suggest that as a nation we might well have seen a different scenario in terms of the respiratory impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic without the smoke-free legislation. I think we could have seen a different picture.”
After botching their modelling on minimum pricing, the Sheffield Addictions Research Group have turned their hands to economics. In a paper published in the journal Addiction this week, they accidentally invented mercantilism, the zero-sum misunderstanding of the economy that was discredited by Adam Smith 250 years ago.
The authors say that the British government should do more to stop us spending money on “tobacco, gambling and sweets” because “shifting that spending toward domestic sectors like retail, recreation or trades, money stays within the UK for longer.” This, apparently, is the path to prosperity.
By the same logic, the government should announce a crackdown on foreign holidays. That would undoubtedly make money “stay within the UK”, but it would come at the cost of preventing people from doing what they want to do. From the perspective of the Sheffield Addictions Research Group, preventing people from doing what they want to do is the whole point, but they can’t say that out loud so they have resorted to a weirdly jingoistic approach to economic planning.
