Twice as many people buying illegal tobacco since 2023

From The Independent…

Sales of illegal cigarettes soar as cost of living crisis bites

The proportion of smokers purchasing cheap cigarettes from illicit sources has almost doubled since 2023, according to new analysis. This significant increase is believed to reflect the rising cost of living that has impacted households in recent years, researchers suggest.

Tsk! I wonder which tobacco industry front group is behind this baseless scaremongering?

The study, spearheaded by UCL and funded by Cancer Research UK (CRUK), examined survey responses from 9,996 individuals aged 16 and over who identified as current smokers.

Oh.

The study is here and it does indeed find that the number of smokers buying tobacco from the black market doubled from 12.2% to 23.1% between mid-2023 and 2025. Since people are reluctant to admit to engaging in criminal activity, we can safely assume that both of these figures are underestimates. Among those aged 16-17, the figure was 32%, which doesn’t bode well for the success of the generational tobacco ban.

Moreover, 32.8% of smokers are buying tobacco abroad, up from 8% in October 2020 (when there wasn’t as much foreign travel, to be fair).

The massive rise in the the black market for tobacco since 2021 has been obvious to some of us for quite a while. As I said on TV yesterday, we don’t need this study to know that the black market has got out of control, but now that some ‘public health’ researchers are saying so in a study published by Cancer Research UK, the mainstream media have to take it seriously.

With the generational tobacco ban starting in January 2027, the last thing the anti-smoking lobby wants is for the government to worry about the illicit trade. Both CRUK and ASH have responded to the study by saying that a doubling in the number of black market customers doesn’t necessarily mean that the black market has grown. Maybe they’re just buying half as much!

Hazel Cheeseman, ASH’s Comical Ali, said:

“While the findings do not necessarily indicate a major expansion of the illicit market, they suggest there is a need to continue monitoring trends closely and maintain efforts to prevent illegal tobacco sales.”

Dr Ian Walker, executive director of policy and information at CRUK, said:

“While this research doesn’t signal that the illicit tobacco market has grown, it’s concerning that amongst the declining proportion of people who smoke, an increasing number of people are purchasing tobacco from illegal sources.

This was echoed by one of the authors of the study, Jamie Brown, who said:

“While our findings suggest a growing proportion of smokers are purchasing some or all of their tobacco from illicit sources, this does not necessarily mean the illicit market itself has become much larger.”

This is a blatant cope. Of course the black market has got larger! Legal sales have more than halved since 2021 and you can buy a pack of cigarettes for £5 anywhere.

As for this being a response to the ‘cost of living’, let’s be clear about why this particular cost of living is so high. Since 2020, the minimum excise on a pack of cigarettes has gone from £5.88 to £9.44 and will to rise to £10.38 in October. With VAT added on, that’s a rise from £7.06 to £12.45 before the retailer and manufacturer make a penny.

The tax on a 50g pack of rolling tobacco has gone from £14.08 to £30.23 in the same period and will soon be £34.46.

The government has been asking for trouble and now it has got it. And this is before they start banning 800,000 people from buying tobacco each year every year.

Lead author Sarah Jackson said:

“With the Smokefree Generation policy being introduced, it is hoped that access to tobacco will become more difficult for teenagers as the age of sale gradually rises.”

You can hope all you like, but it’s not going to happen. As I’ve said before, tax rises will make the generational tobacco ban irrelevant within a few years because it will be so normal to buy cigarettes illegally that age restrictions might as well not exist.

 

Cross-posted from my Substack. 

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Alcohol cancer warnings - why?

Interesting article in The Drinks Business about alcohol cancer labels...

 

“Throughout the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s tobacco control was consuming enormous public health resources,” says Dr Creina Stockley, co-director of the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research. But that began to change once smoking was banned in enclosed public spaces, following Ireland’s lead in 2004. Before long there were plenty of scientists, lobbyists and NGOs in need of a new purpose in life.

The direction of travel was obvious. As Sir Liam Donaldson, England’s then chief medical officer, told the Daily Telegraph under a headline, ‘Fat Binge Drinkers Beware’, in 2007: “Tobacco is a good example of a health problem that is in hand, but when we turn to obesity and alcohol misuse, those are not yet anywhere under control.”

 

My question about alcohol health warnings has always been why, if you think people are uninformed about the risks, would you focus on a relatively small number of mostly rare cancers when liver disease is by far the biggest cause of alcohol-related mortality?

 

The answer is that they are copying the anti-smoking blueprint.

 

“If you do your research most of the guys now doing alcohol, came from tobacco, and that’s in every country,” says Stockley. Having run what has been called ‘one of the most successful social change campaigns’ against smoking, it was only natural to apply the same tactics to drink given the links to cancer. Clearly part of that is to insist on cancer labels.

 

Dr Stockley gets it.

 

“If the goal is informed consumer choice, modest labels may be sufficient,” says Dr Stockley. “If the goal is measurable reductions in drinking, the historical trajectory of tobacco control suggests continual pressure for larger, more prominent, and potentially graphic warnings. I consider that distinction may become a central debate in alcohol policy over the next decade.” 

 

Me too. If we've learned anything from tobacco control is that it goes on forever, or until the product is banned entirely. 

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How to get things banned

As I have argued before, the anti-smoking lobby created a playbook which has become the Bible of the anti-obesity, anti-alcohol and anti-gambling lobbies. Yesterday’s announcement follows that playbook to the letter. If you have something you would like to ban, here are some of the boxes to tick.

1. Flatter politicians 

Most parliamentarians are powerless pygmies with delusions of grandeur. Having no answers to the big problems facing the country, they indulge themselves in the displacement politics of petty prohibition. They want to be seen as heroic, so be sure to flatter them by portraying the policy you are proposing as “bold” and “brave”. When the Health Committee proposed a sugar tax in 2015, it subtitled its report “Brave and Bold Action”. Jamie Oliver urged ministers to be “big and bold”. This week’s report from the Health and Social Care Committee uses the words “bold” or “bolder” six times. The first line of the press release calls for “a new, bold approach”. The committee’s chair, Layla Moran, said: “We ask this government to be bold, not to fudge and delay food restrictions.”

In truth, there is nothing courageous about taking on food companies that have shown no interest in standing up for themselves, let alone individual kebab shop owners who are just trying to make a living, but that is the beauty of it. MPs want to feel brave but don’t want to take risks. You have just the policies for them.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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Ultra-processed documentary

I was invited to provide some balance to a short documentary on ultra-processed food recently. The programme was broadcast by Al Jazeera on Saturday and you can watch it below. 

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End the licence fee to save the BBC

There is a new element to the BBC’s World Cup coverage this year. At some point in every match, the commentator will earnestly remind viewers that they need a TV licence to watch the game. It is a well targeted message, though almost certainly ineffective. If there is one time when the millions of people who claim to never watch the BBC are watching the BBC, it is during the World Cup.

 The BBC’s doom loop is gathering pace. The trickle of non-payment of the licence fee is becoming a flood. Prosecutions for non-payment have plummeted in recent years and the threat of licence fee “evasion” being decriminalised hangs over the corporation. As revenue declines, budgets are cut and services are cancelled. Radio 4’s long wave broadcasts ended over the weekend and the BBC is looking for £500 million of savings by ending shows like The World Tonight and Money Box Live.

 

The solution? Switch to a Netflix model and go global. 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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HMRC is still downplaying the illicit trade

HMRC put the latest tobacco tax gap estimates out on Tuesday. As with the previous few years, they defy both belief and mathematics. Only 14% of tobacco is illicit, they claim, and illicit hand-rolling tobacco is at an all time low! 

 

Simple maths shows that HMRC’s figures cannot possibly be accurate. Converting kilograms of rolling tobacco into sticks, the equivalent of 36.6 billion cigarettes were sold legally in the UK in 2022. If this declined at the same rate as smoking prevalence (-17 per cent), it would have been 30.4 billion by 2024. In fact, there were only 22.9 billion cigarettes sold legally in 2024, a shortfall of 7.5 billion.

If we imagine, for the sake of argument, that there was no illicit tobacco at all in 2022, this would mean that 25 per cent of the total market was illicit by 2024/25 (7.5 billion is 25 per cent of 30.4 billion). If you believe, as HMRC does, that 13 per cent of the market was illicit in 2022/23, it means that 33 per cent of the market was illicit in 2024/25. If HMRC underestimated the size of the black market in 2022/23, the real figure is higher still, but the absolute minimum it could be in a wildly optimistic and frankly impossible scenario is 25 per cent.

 

The calculation above is based on all other things being equal. HMRC always adjust the figures, but they must have really adjusted them in the last few years. They need to explain what they have done and why. Since 2020, the tobacco tax gap has been little more than a guess. 

 

The only piece of solid data is the legal sales figure. We have survey data for the number of smokers and the number of cigarettes they consume, but the ONS survey HMRC relies on had its status as an official accredited statistic withdrawn in 2024 due to “ongoing challenges with the response rates, levels, and weighting approach”. Moreover, smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption figures always need to be adjusted upwards to account for shy smokers and under-reporting. This requires a certain amount of guesswork. Estimates of how much duty-free tobacco is brought into the UK are also based on surveys and may be inaccurate. 

A further problem is that during the pandemic, the ONS stopped asking people how much they smoked. HMRC therefore “imputed” the figures for 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23. The question was asked again in 2023/24 and so HMRC describes its estimate for that year as “actual”, but it has gone back to guessing for 2024/25. Blaming “modifications to question sequencing and funding limitations” it says that “certain consumption data for 2024 to 2025 are incomplete”. It has therefore “projected consumption data” for 2024/25 “based on established historical trends.” But what we are seeing today is not in line with historical trends. That is the whole point!

 

One point that I didn't make in the article is that the ONS's estimates of how many cigarettes smokers consume has gone up, not down, since 2022. Since 2019, the daily cigarette consumption averages are:

 

2019: 10.6

2020: 9.3

2021: 9.8

2022: 10.5 

2023: 11.3

2024: 11.2

 

The figures for 2020 and 2021 are guesses. The survey question wasn't asked in those years so the ONS used "modelled predicted estimates". They seem suspiciously low. Since the question was asked again in 2022, the daily consumption estimate has risen from 10.5 cigarettes to 11.2 cigarettes.

 

That might not seem much but it represents a 7% increase in tobacco consumption or two and half billion extra cigarettes! That's another 2.5 billion cigarettes unaccounted for. More, in fact, because HMRC adjusts these figures upwards to account for under-reporting. 

 

HMRC seems to have ignored the ONS figure completely in its latest estimates, preferring "projections" instead. If nothing else, this shows how sensitive these estimates are to small changes and small errors. 

 

The current system has become farcical. Just use empty pack surveys for God's sake!

 

The best way to gauge the size of the black market in tobacco is to gather a large and representative sample of disused tobacco packs and see whether they were sold legally. Tobacco companies have been doing this for years. KMPG, acting on behalf of Philip Morris International (PMI), produce an annual empty pack survey which recently found that 33 per cent of cigarette packs in the UK were contraband or counterfeit. Japan Tobacco International (JTI) use a slightly different methodology in which they interview smokers in their homes and offer to exchange their empty or current pack of cigarettes for a JTI brand. Using this system, they estimate that 33% of cigarettes and 50 per cent of hand-rolling tobacco were illicit in 2024/25 (their figures for 2025/26 suggest that this has risen to 42 per cent and 60 per cent respectively). 

Many people are wary of claims made by tobacco companies, but the Irish government has been using a close cousin of the JTI survey since 2009 for its official estimates. With a similarly high level of tobacco duty, the official Irish figures are similar to the industry’s figures for the UK. Ireland’s 2025 survey found that 28 per cent of cigarettes and 37 per cent of hand-rolling tobacco was illicit. 

 

Read the whole thing. 

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The world won't listen

I spoke to Rohan Pike, the founder of the Australian Border Force’s Tobacco Strike Team, about his country’s black market tobacco nightmare. 80% of the market is illegal, tobacco tax revenue is down by three-quarters and there have been nearly 300 firebombings. It's a warning to the world but the world won't listen. 

Today, HMRC produced its tobacco tax gap estimate for 2024/25. As I have explained before, HMRC's methodology systematically underestimates the size of the illicit market and should be scrapped in favour of empty pack surveys (as used in Ireland). In their latest edition, they have resorted to "imputing" the figures for 2024/25. This is essentially guesswork based on projecting from past trends - and the past trends are themselves unreliable. It's a farce and needs to stop. According to HMRC, the amount of illegal handrolling tobacco sold is at an all time low!

Watch my interview with Rohan below. 

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More sausage action

Inside the Sausage Factory remains free to download and I've written an article for Cap-X about how rational actions lead to irrational policies.

I also did a podcast with the IEA yesterday in which I outline my arguments...

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Tales from the sausage factory

 

Today sees the release of my new book Inside the Sausage Factory: The Illusion of Evidence-Based Policy-Making. The title is a reference to something Bismarck supposedly said about law-making. It can be a messy process, but it is supposed to be ‘evidence-based’ these days, especially in areas like public health.

The book looks at four campaigns for “public health” policies in Britain in the 2010s: plain packaging for tobacco, minimum pricing for alcohol, the sugary drinks tax and the de facto ban on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). I look at the evidence that was cited the most by politicians and the media, but the thing that stands out is that the decisions to introduce (or reject) each of the policies do not seem to have had much to do with evidence.

Instead, I argue that everybody involved in the policy-making process, from voters up to the Prime Minister, was acting in their own rational self-interest. Paradoxically, this led to irrational policies being introduced (none of them worked).

I outline some of my findings at the Spectator today…

 

The evidence from Inside the Sausage Factory suggests that politicians will succumb to pressure on low-salience issues unless they believe that the policy will be widely unpopular or conspicuously backfire. Once the ‘public health’ interest groups had put their policies on the agenda, the government could not put off a decision forever. They became barnacles on the boat that needed to be scraped off. With the exception of minimum pricing in England, which had significant public and political opposition, the government in Westminster concluded that the reputational risks of inaction were greater than the political, economic and legal risks of acting. The squeaky wheel got the grease.

For those of us who are of a liberal disposition, this is not a happy conclusion to reach. It implies that politicians are hostages to small pressure groups manipulating public opinion and that the cycle will repeat itself again and again. Where will it end?

 

And I look at what happened next at The Critic…

 

In the campaigns I write about in Inside the Sausage Factory, several studies were referenced again and again by politicians, journalists and activists. The policies didn’t work and the evidence wasn’t very good, but at least evidence was cited from time to time. The evidence for banning “junk food” adverts and social media for the under-16s is negligible and the evidence from the generational tobacco ban is non-existent. Scientific evidence was not a decisive factor in any of the campaigns I studied from the 2010s. Today, it seems to be entirely optional.

 

And because the book is published by the IEA, you can download and read it for free.

 

Inside the Sausage Factory is the last in a series of publications about policy-making in “public health”.

The Corporate Playbook examines the fatuous view of policy-making that is trendy in “public health” academia.

Bootlegging Baptists looks at the economic incentives of paternalistic pressure groups and reasons why consumers do not mobilise to defend themselves.

The People vs Paternalism proposes a way of overcoming the paradox of participation and building a grassroots consumer rights organisation.

Anti-Capitalism and Public Health does what it says on the tin and examines the economic agenda of the “public health” lobby.

Not Invented Here asks why certain pressure groups oppose practical solutions to the problems they supposedly care about.

 

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Hockney's war on the dreary

I've written about David Hockney's anti-nanny state activism for Spiked. I had always hoped to meet him (he attended a few FOREST parties), but sadly I never will. 

 

The contrast between the playfulness of Hockney’s bouts of libertarian activism and the po-faced outrage he received in response only served to underline his point. After Hockney sent the Guardian a piece of art criticising ‘anti-smoking fanatics’ in 2012, its readers responded by making drawings of their own – the artistic equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight – to whine about how ghastly smoking is. Unsurprisingly, they were the height of cringe.

After the Guardian ran a sycophantic interview with the Australian anti-smoking academic Simon Chapman, Hockney wrote a letter to the newspaper explaining why it would have been better off talking to him. Hockney listed all the things that he was and Chapman wasn’t, including being ‘a good and satisfied customer of the tobacco companies’, ‘not a professional agitator’ and ‘someone who prefers the centre of Bohemia to Australian suburbia’. As Chapman’s flaccid reply showed, it was the charge of not being Bohemian that stung him the most. It was hard to believe that a septuagenarian living in Bridlington was more edgy than a sociologist living in Melbourne, and yet we all knew it to be so.

The puritans and killjoys of ‘public health’ had no answer to him. He was a living legend and they weren’t. Spending all day painting and smoking is not everybody’s idea of a fulfilling life, but it sounded better than whatever Chris Whitty was doing. By shifting the debate from the risks of death to the joys of life, Hockney had taken them out of their comfort zone. All they could do was ignore him. It must have pained them to see him live too long for them to say, ‘I told you so’, but he was bound to die eventually. And now he has, and the world is a drearier place for it.

 

Read it all (non-subscribers get three article free per month). 

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Uninventing the internet

Keir Starmer's attempt to build legacy is, like Blair and Sunak's, a ban, this time on kids using social media. I've written about it for The Critic...

 

We will continue to regress as a society until we learn to judge new legislation by its likely consequences rather than by the intentions of its advocates. The looming ban on under-16s having access to platforms “whose purpose is to enable social interaction and  which allow users to post material” has all the hallmarks of another government failure. It has already been tried — and failed — in Australia. It is being framed as an attack on Big Tech rather than its satisfied customers. It has been pushed through by the conflicted old media off the back of a narrow selection of bereaved parents who have been used a human shield against criticism. It seems designed to give Starmer a “legacy”.

These are all red flags. So too is the familiar refrain that the ban will not be a “silver bullet” and that the public should therefore brace themselves for further restrictions. (Many of the problems the ban is supposed to address were meant to have been solved by the Online Safety Act. Remember that?). In his early morning address to the nation, Starmer urged us to not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Teenagers sometimes drink alcohol, he said, but that was no reason not to ban the sale of alcohol to children. 

Fair enough, you might say, but leaving aside the fact that children can legally drink alcohol in Britain from the age of five, reducing some teenagers’ access to social media is clearly not perfect, but is it even good? The consequences of Australia’s “world leading” social media ban have been largely ignored by those who seek to emulate it, but any attempt to create evidence-based policy must start there. The Australian government’s eSafety commissioner found that 70 per cent of parents said their children still had active social media accounts three months after the “social media minimum age” was introduced. If, like Wes Streeting, you think that social media is as bad as tobacco, this sounds like a modest but non-trivial improvement, but who are the teenagers being denied this means of communication and what platforms are the rest using? 

 

Do read the rest. 

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David Hockney, enemy of the dreary

I'll be writing more about the great, late David Hockney next week. But for now, enjoy this interview from 2004.

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Activist-academia

I talk a lot about "activist-academics", but what other word can you use when a professor is literally recruiting young people, training them in the ways of temperance and teaching them how to lobby politicians?

 

High School Students Learn Activism and Policymaking through SPH Initiative 

David Jernigan leads the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy Coalition, a coalition of school- and community-based preventive healthcare programs he cofounded to prepare young people to address pressing issues.

 

This guy has got 60 Massachusetts high schoolers "to share data and insights on alcohol policy with lawmakers."

 

In the three months before the visit, Jernigan, professor of health law, policy, and management at BU’s School of Public Health, drilled them in democracy and alcohol policy via Zoom and an in-person training at BU, assisted by Hannah Martuscello (SPH’26). 

It’s the second year that Jernigan has recruited young activists from the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy Coalition, a statewide coalition of school- and community-based preventive healthcare programs he cofounded.  

 

How very academic. 

 

David Jernigan is a sociologist working at Boston University School of Public Health. He has over 200 publications to his name, mostly pushing neo-temperance policies. Examples of his efforts to extend the field of human knowledge include Alcohol Problems and Policies: the States Have the Power, But Will They Use It?, Strengthening Advocacy Skills for Public Health Leaders, and Media advocacy: lessons from community experiences.

 

“I grew up steeped in the Christianity of witness to injustice,” he says. “And the more I got into alcohol research, the more obvious it was to me: this is a huge injustice that’s being perpetrated.” 

 

In 2000, he became friends with Derek Rutherford who took the pledge at the age of 9 and has said: "In my youth I had three loves: the temperance movement; the church, because I was also an active member of the Baptist Church in Easington; and the Labour Party."

 

Rutherford went on to set up neo-temperance organisations all over the world, including Eurocare and the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance (Jernigan is on the board of the latter) and he was chairman of the Advisory Board at the Institute of Alcohol Studies. 

In a video for the Institute of Alcohol Studies (the successor to the UK Temperance Alliance), Jernigan uses rhetoric straight from the anti-tobacco playbook.

    

"When you have a product that kills three million people a year worldwide, is carcinogenic and is associated with more than 200 disease and injury conditions, you need to do a lot of marketing."

 

Although delivered with a self-satisfied smile, this is nonsense to anybody who gives it more than two seconds thought. Alcohol has been widely consumed for thousands of years, long before the advent of marketing, and it continues to be widely consumed in countries that ban alcohol marketing today. 

Despite being a religiously inspired temperance advocate who doesn't understand the market he has spent his career writing about, Jernigan has been an advisor to the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO) and was the principal author of WHO’s first Global Status Report on Alcohol and Global Status Report on Alcohol and Youth.

And now he is using children "to share data and insights on alcohol policy with lawmakers". Many such cases.

    

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Vaping and lung cancer

A study was published this week claiming that vaping causes lung cancer. The journal has helpfully published the peer review comments. One reviewer provided a strong reason why the researchers had drawn the wrong conclusion from the data, but the study was published anyway. 

Read all about it on my Substack. 

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Game over for Australia

Incredible scenes in Australia where illicit sales officially now make up 80% of the tobacco market. I wrote about this for The Critic...

 

The growth of the black market could have been prevented if the government had listened to economists, historians and criminologists. Instead, they fell under the spell of dogmatic fanatics masquerading as “public health” experts. As predictable as this fiasco was, the statistics in the ABS report are still breathtaking. The black market share of the tobacco trade went from 12 per cent in 2017 to 26 per cent in 2020 and then exploded after the pandemic from 40 per cent in 2022 to 80.6 per cent in 2025. In the same period, the quantity of nicotine consumed in the country rose by almost 40 per cent. The price of legal cigarettes nearly tripled between 2016 and 2025 while tobacco duty revenue more than halved. 

 

And on my Substack...

 

The blame lies squarely on the charlatans masquerading as public health experts who opposed the legalisation of vapes and pushed for ever higher tobacco taxes while scoffing at the idea that any of the obvious unintended consequences would come to pass.

In a sensible country, these people would have gone into hiding to live the rest of their lives in disgrace.

 

 

 

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Extended Producer Responsibility, more government failure

Extended Producer Responsibility is a boring name for a boring regulation, but it is worth understanding if you want to see how the government squeezes the life out of British industry and contributes to the cost of living “crisis”. 

The story begins, as such stories often do, with Theresa May and Michael Gove. After watching too many David Attenborough documentaries, Gove became obsessed with recycling. His first idea was to introduce a bottle deposit return scheme, which would have had huge operational costs and been largely pointless since everybody has a recycling bin at home. His second idea was Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which he said would “cement our place as a world leader in resource efficiency” by taxing businesses for every tonne of packaging they produce, on the basis that “the polluter pays”. Seven years and four Prime Ministers later, EPR came into force last April.

The logic of EPR is not entirely without merit. A company that produces packaging is not actually a “polluter” — although the end user might be — but there is an argument for making companies internalise the costs of recycling the packaging they produce. In effect, the policy takes billions of pounds from manufacturing firms and gives it to local authorities to spend on recycling and landfill.

The problem is one that is often overlooked by politicians. Since businesses get their money from consumers, an increase in costs to business is bound to lead to an increase in prices. Since it is consumers who pay the higher prices, the real question is whether it is better for recycling of widely used packaging to be paid for by individuals as taxpayers or by individuals as shoppers. 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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The anti-gambling slush fund

I said that the gambling levy would provide a slush fund for spongers and activists, and it has.

 

Dozens of pieces of research have already been commissioned. Since many social scientists specialise in woke postmodern guff, that kind of thing is well represented. Projects include “Intersectionality in gambling related harm” (£48,670), “Menstrual change and gambling: a hybrid review” (£51,092) and “A rapid evidence review of gambling harms in ethnic and faith minority communities” (£50,420). A review into “gambling and its spatial footprint” (£51,088) is being led by an economist who only seems to have taken an interest in gambling in 2024 when he received funding to conduct a study which came to the earth-shattering conclusion that “people living in close proximity to gambling establishments are more likely to visit in person”. 

A study of the “aetiology and treatment of disordered gambling” (£164,481) is being led by a psychologist who has been publishing gambling research for years, which sounds promising until you see that the first line of his proposal says: “Gambling is acknowledged as a mental health disorder.” It is not, but such claims will serve him well in “public health” where the distinction between gambling and problem gambling is being deliberately erased. A study about gambling and suicide is being led by an academic who is an expert on suicide but has never published anything about gambling. Her proposal begins with the nonsensical claim that “almost half of adults have gambled within the past four weeks and around 40% within the last year” before claiming that the gambling industry in Britain is expanding (it is shrinking) and that rates of problem gambling have “escalated” (they have not).

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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Introducing Action on Gambling

Action on Smoking and Health's former CEO Deborah Arnott famously insisted that...

 

"the 'domino theory' i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false." 

 

As a staunch denier of the slippery slope, it must have pained her when Consensus Action on Salt and Health was set up as a tribute act to her organisation, later followed by Action on Sugar. 

 

Another new campaign group has recently been moulded in ASH's image. Action on Gambling is now a thing. Amongst their members are the Labour MP Beccy Cooper, whom I wrote about two weeks ago. Her bio reads:

 

As a public health doctor Beccy has been a leading proponent of stricter regulations on the tobacco industry – a skill set she is putting to work to curb the harm caused by gambling. 

 

Even ASH have stopped pretending that the slippery slope isn't real. The webpage that gave us Arnott's immortal quote about the domino theory has been taken offline and their new CEO, Hazel Cheeseman, has some warm words for Action on Gambling...

 

 

We've gone beyond denying the slippery slope now, haven't we? We are now at the "Of course there's a slippery slope, what are you going to do about it?" stage.

ASH always denied being prohibitionists too, but we now know for a fact that they were lying. 

 

So there's a slippery slope and it ends up with prohibition if we let them. This is no longer up for debate. The anti-gambling people will claim that they don't want to ban gambling and the anti-alcohol people will claim that they don't want to ban alcohol. They will say whatever they have to say to get public support, but they are explicitly following the anti-tobacco blueprint that ends with prohibition. 

 

Don't get fooled again.

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Australia's tobacco tax disaster

I knew things were bad in Australia but this graph really show how dramatically the black market has grown since the tobacco turf war took off in 2023.

 

The green and yellow lines show the government's projections from the last few years. Each time, the government forecasts that revenues will flatten out somewhat but they just keep plummeting. It won't be long before the Australian state is spending more on enforcement than it gets in tobacco duty!

What a fiasco. It's great that Simon Chapman has lived long enough for him to see it happen.

 h/t Ed Jegaothy

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Omnipotent government

I wrote this last week for The Critic...

 

Not since the early 1980s has the government had such a stranglehold over economic life in Britain. It is well known that taxes are at a record high and that the state is spending a larger share of GDP than at any time since the Second World War, but these statistics do not do justice to the full extent of the government’s interference in the economy. The price of gas, electricity, water, bus tickets, train tickets and, in Scotland and Wales, alcohol is controlled by the state. So too is the price of labour — since 2010, the minimum wage has risen from half of the average wage to two-thirds. Listed companies are ordered to “comply or explain” why 40 per cent of their board members are not women. Captains of industry are summoned to Downing Street to receive bollockings over non-existent “price gouging”. Businesses are given targets to sell more of one product and less of another. 

We lack the words to describe our current economic model. The left call it neoliberal but neoliberals have had no meaningful influence on British governments for thirty years. The right call it socialist but neither the Tories nor Labour have shown much interest in seizing the means of production. Keir Starmer’s government is more left-wing than he wants you to believe, but even if he renationalises the rail and water companies, it will be a nostalgic gesture rather than a heartfelt effort to control the heights of industry. Only on the fringes of the left is there any desire to return to the days when British Airways, Jaguar and Thomas Cook were under “democratic control”.

On the face of it, the post-Thatcher settlement has held, but there is nothing Thatcherite about this government, nor the ones that preceded it. “State capitalism with British characteristics” would be one way of describing it, but that doesn’t really fit. Under state capitalism, as practised in China, the government owns the major industries but allows them to use the price mechanism and other levers of the free market to compete. What we have in Britain is almost the opposite of that. Businesses are allowed to stay in private hands but with so many instructions, targets and, increasingly, price controls that it could perhaps best be described as a capitalist command economy. 

 

I go on to discuss the government fining companies for selling too much of a product which is, I think, completely new for this country. Everything else I mention has probably been tried before because every terrible economic policy has appealed to governments at one time or other. But it is the mix of these policies that is unique for the UK. It is no longer a question of being more socialist or more capitalist.

 

Upon publication, some people said what I was describing was corporatism or crony capitalism but I don't think that is right. Someone pointed me to Mises' Omnipotent Government, which I had not read, and said that a capitalist command economy is similar to what Mises called "the German pattern of socialism", i.e. the economic policies of the Third Reich. Certainly, there are similarities: private companies were kept private but threatened and bossed about to achieve the regime's goals. But Mises distinguished the German pattern of socialism with what he calls "interventionism". It is "interventionism" that is closest to what I am describing.

 

He wrote:

 

Nor should interventionism be confused with the German pattern of socialism. It is the essential feature of interventionism that it does not aim at a total abolition of the market; it does not want to reduce private ownership to a sham and the entrepreneurs to the status of shop managers. The interventionist government does not want to do away with private enterprise; it wants only to regulate its working through isolated measures of interference. Such measures are not designed as cogs in an all-round system of orders and prohibitions destined to control the whole apparatus of production and distribution; they do not aim at replacing private ownership and a market economy by socialist planning.

In order to grasp the meaning and the effects of interventionism it is sufficient to study the working of the two most important types of intervention: interference by restriction and interference by price control.

And there's a video...

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Deluded wowsers

It's time to laugh at the Aussies again. 

 

The article is here. The delusion and hubris is strong in this one. Australia hasn't beaten tobacco. Tobacco is beating Australia. It has unleashed a crime wave, and it seems that the underworld is now expanding into bootleg alcohol. It will be bootleg hamburgers if the wowser who wrote this article gets his way. 

It contains all the usual NPC talking points from someone who has considered the issue for about five seconds. "Let's have a sugar tax!' (They've never worked anywhere.) "Let's ban advertising! (Ditto.) "Let's subsidise healthy food!" (How?) And then there is the usual diversion about TeH iNdUsTrY.

 

There will be predictable objections. Industry will argue that taxes are unfair, advertising restrictions are excessive, and governments should stay out of people’s kitchens. Similar arguments were made about tobacco. But Australia did not become a world leader in tobacco control by accepting industry talking points. It acted because the health and economic costs were too large to ignore. 

 

If Australia is the world leader in tobacco control, send me to whichever country got the wooden spoon. It will probably be safer there. And yes, the government should stay out of people’s kitchens.

 

As for those "industry talking points", they turned out to be correct. Every one of them. The taxes were regressive, the black market did explode and, as this article proves once more, there was a slippery slope. 

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Quiet, children. The grown ups are talking.

Accelerationists believe that things have to get worse before they get better and that the faster things get worse, the sooner people will wake up and demand radical change.

I've always been sceptical about this because, as Adam Smith said, there is a lot of ruin in a nation. Some people will never change their minds or admit that they were wrong.

Australian tobacco policy is a prime example. Even the government now accepts that most of the cigarettes and nearly all the vapes in Australia are sold on the black market. The number of firebombings linked to the illicit trade is nearing 300. But, as this article shows, politicians and 'public health' academics cannot tear themselves away from the script that says that the real problem is BiG ToBaCcO.

 

Australia’s illegal cigarette trade has exploded into a full-scale criminal economy, prompting fears within the legal tobacco industry that its industry is being pushed towards extinction.

The debacle is hitting the big tobacco giants hard. So much so that a representative of Philip Morris International privately warned a Senate inquiry this week that its days were numbered in Australia.

... At the centre of the crisis is Australia’s booming underground cigarette market, now estimated to account for as much as 60 per cent of all tobacco sales nationwide.

Authorities say the scale of the problem is staggering. Nicotine is widely accepted to be one of the toughest addictions to crack, and broader cost-of-living pressures have encouraged smokers to look elsewhere as service station packs skyrocket.

The issue has merged into the disposable vape market, which has exploded in Australia over the past decade.

... But despite the massive enforcement effort, the black market continues growing.

Australia’s soaring tobacco excise — which is among the highest in the world — has pushed cigarette prices beyond $70 a pack in some cases, creating an enormous financial incentive for organised crime groups flooding the country with cheap illegal products.

In recent years, the illicit trade has become increasingly tied to gang violence, extortion rackets and a wave of tobacco shop firebombings across Melbourne and Sydney as syndicates battle for control of the market.

 

Oh dear, what a mess. But everyone knows that "world-leading" tobacco taxes caused the problem and, therefore, that cutting taxes is the way to tackle it. The government, the tobacco companies and the public all have an interest in dealing with this issue, but when a representative of Philip Morris said the bleeding obvious, left-wing politicians jumped down his throat.

 

The Philip Morris representative argued during the Senate inquiry that lowering tobacco excise could help undercut criminal operators by making legal cigarettes more competitive again.

That sparked fierce backlash from health advocates and Labor MPs, who criticised Coalition senators for allowing the hearing to take place behind closed doors despite Australia’s obligations under the World Health Organisation tobacco control framework.

The secret hearing turned combative after Coalition senator Jonathon Duniam asked the representative what Australia could face “in this dystopian world in 2030, when all tobacco or nicotine is illegal”.

The company warned organised crime could effectively take over the country’s nicotine supply chain if current trends continued, saying the legal market was becoming “unsafe and definitely unsustainable”.

But Labor senator Dorinda Cox aggressively challenged the company over whether any of its products were ending up in the illicit market.

“Are you able to guarantee to the Australian Senate that none of your tobacco that you produce ends up in Australia’s illicit market?” she asked.

When the representative pointed to anti-diversion controls and counterfeit products, Senator Cox fired back: “How do you know that if you don’t have any production controls in place? That doesn’t make sense at all.”

 

Tobacco companies can't control what people do with their products once they've been sold, but since the big sellers on Australia's black market are Chinese brands and brands like Manchester which are not made by 'Big Tobacco', it seems safe to say that Senator Cox is barking up the wrong tree.

 

But she is a beacon of common sense compared to the man from the Green Party...

 

Greens senator Jordon Steele-John went further still, comparing the company’s appearance before the inquiry to “inviting mosquitoes to give evidence at an inquiry related to the prevention of the spread of malaria”.

 

Sounds like someone's been given his lines by a "public health" activist, doesn't it? It's an analogy that doesn't work well at the best of times and is completely fatuous when the subject at hand is not the spread of smoking but the spread of illegal tobacco products. 

 

He later mocked Philip Morris’s argument that lowering tobacco excise could help weaken criminal operators.

“So, in your infinite wisdom, the best idea you can chuck at us … is lower the amount of tax that you pay,” he said.

 

I imagine he had a smug little smile on this face after delivering that zinger. Except that excise tax is paid by the customer, not the company.

 

“It’s a sophisticated submission that ends in the shocking conclusion that you should pay less tax. It’s not a serious proposal.”

 

They don't pay the tax, dumbass. 

 

Prof Garry Jennings of the Heart Foundation likened the scene to inviting “the enemy into the war room”.

“Big tobacco will simply argue for a reduction in excise so it can sell more cigarettes legally,” he said via the publication.

 

Yes, that's the idea, Garry. We want demand to move from the illicit, untaxed and violent market to the legal, taxed and peaceful market. The Australian government has paid a big enough price for listening to ideological halfwits like you. Now that the thing you said would never happen has happened spectacularly, it's time to listen to the grown ups.

 

University of Sydney public health professor Becky Freeman said the illicit trade was no longer a hidden “black market” operating in the shadows.

“It’s clearly an in-your-face market,” she said.

“It’s part of the business model now that retailers just sell untaxed illicit goods.”

 

Yes, we know, Becks. And it is, quite specifically, your fault. 

 

Australian tobacco control has been an absolute disaster but even now, with the fires burning around them, the political class cannot change the record. 'Big Tobacco' only controls a minority of tobacco sales now. The real Big Tobacco in Australia settles its disputes with guns. The legitimate tobacco companies should exit the country and leave them to it.

 

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Public health scholars

Some self-described "public health scholars" have called on doctors to stop talking in public about drugs that could save their lives. I look at their backgrounds and possible motivations for wanting to focus instead on BIG FOOD on my Substack...

 

The second author, Grant Ennis, is an Australian with a Masters in Public Administration. He has written a book titled Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment which has been praised by no less a luminary than our old friend Greg Fell. 

He also “lectures at Monash University (Australia) on activism, organizing, corporate disinformation, and the role of subsidies in creating global problems (the content of Dark PR).”

This seems to be only his fourth journal article. The others are titled ‘From Corporate Activism to “Dark PR:” Corporate Discourses and Their Influence on Public Opinion in the Digital Society’, ‘We Do Have Enemies and We Should Know Who They Are: The Commercial Determinants of Physical Activity’ and ‘Calling for a more coherent policy response to driving harm’ (the latter article was co-authored with Mr Fell and tries to apply the Total Consumption Model to motoring).

The third author, the splendidly named Yogi Hale Hendlin, is based in San Francisco and has a PhD in Environmental Philosophy. He is currently writing a book titled Interspecies Solidarity: Valuing difference in the biotic community. He has a keen interest in ‘Critical Plant Studies’ and has written “the first ecohumanities book dedicated to algae”. He’s written a lot of papers but none of them seem to be about obesity. He does, however, have a book in the pipeline titled Industrial Pandemics: The Spread of the Corporate Virus and How to Stop It and he is affiliated with The Center to End Corporate Harm. He is not only interested in ‘interspecies politics’ but also in ‘understanding industries themselves as disease vectors’.

What does this tell us? Firstly, it tells us that anybody can call themselves a “public health scholar” these days. Secondly, it tells us that some people in the “public health” conversation about obesity might possibly have more of a political interest in fighting corporations than a medical interest in making people healthier.

 

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Not everything is a public health issue

Is gambling advertising a "public health issue"? And if it is, then what isn't? 

I've written for Spiked about this... 

If your definition of public health is so broad that it encompasses everything that could potentially have a direct or indirect effect on the health of somebody somewhere, then everything can be described as a public-health issue, but what is the point? If everything is a public-health issue, there can be no such thing as a public-health expert. Expertise requires specialised knowledge of a narrow field. A problem doesn’t become easier to solve just by putting it under the umbrella of ‘public health’. What do they teach people in schools of public health that makes them better equipped to solve every social and economic problem than anyone else?

Similarly, what do civil servants at the Department of Health know about gambling that the people at DCMS don’t? What expertise do they have on the three key licensing objectives of preventing gambling from being a source of crime, ensuring fair and open play, and protecting children and vulnerable people? At a push, they might have some ideas about how to protect the ‘vulnerable’, but they would be no more than the usual sledgehammer tactics of taxing and banning. ‘Public health’ academics have shown themselves to be hilariously out of their depth when they attempt to transfer their supposed wisdom to the world of gambling. If they can’t borrow a trick from the anti-smoking lobby, they don’t know what to do.

 

Read it all.

 

NB. Spiked has a partial paywall these days. I recommend subscribing, but if you don't you can still register and read three articles for free each month.

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The idiocy of MMT

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!  

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The "stickiness" of betting shop customers

It was only six months ago that Carsten Jung from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) was telling the Treasury Select Committee not to listen to those silly gambling industry lobbyists who were warning about hundreds of betting shops closing if gambling duty was hiked up. I wrote at the time...

 

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.

 

Reassured by the IPPR and the Social Market Foundation that any claims about shop closures and job losses were "scaremongering" and that betting shop customers were "sticky" (i.e. loyal with inelastic demand), the government did pretty much everything the IPPR wanted in the last budget. And lo and behold...

 

Gambling giant blames UK tax rises as they close hundreds of stores

 

Evoke, 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.

 

It would appear that the anti-gambling lobby have outwitted the politicians once again. 

 

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

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Democratically Deficient Organizations

With Julian Morris and Roger Bate, I have written a short paper about Democratically Deficient Organizations (DoDOs). We focus on the World Health Organisation and the massive NGOs that fund it.

 

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.

 

You can read the whole thing for free. I also interviewed Roger for the IEA podcast last week...

 

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Drinking on the job

 “Churchill tries to find luck in drink, but the bottle distorts the view.” - Nazi propaganda, 1942

 

The online British public are having one of their fits of moral outrage because they have discovered, seemingly for the first time, that there are bars in the parliamentary estate and MPs use them. I have written about it for The Critic. 

 

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. 

 

Read the rest. (NB. The Critic has put up a paywall for magazine articles and old articles, but you can continue to read mine for free when they come out. Although I do recommend getting a subscription.) 

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The EU Tobacco Tax Directive

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:

• The TTD’s extension of minimum taxes to low-risk nicotine products conflicts with the EU’s goal of reducing smoking prevalence.
• Taxing safer alternatives will likely increase consumption of more harmful cigarettes.
• Higher minimum tobacco taxes will stimulate the illicit market, particularly in Eastern Europe.
• The proposal is highly regressive and fails to account for income differences across member states.
• The principle of differentiating taxes by relative risk is sound and should be strengthened, not diluted.
• A risk-proportionate reform would impose minimal or zero EU-level taxes on e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches to maximise substitution away from smoking.

 

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