The end of the COVID-19 pandemic left a hole in the lives of two groups of people. The first are those who loved the pandemic because it allowed them to flaunt their hypochondria. They have largely disappeared but they can occasionally be spotted, fully masked up, sounding the alarm about things like monkeypox. The second are those who loved the pandemic because it allowed imbeciles to masquerade as contrarians. They graduated to taking photographs of contrails in the sky, but nothing could quite recapture the thrill of talking with ill-deserved confidence about Gompertz curves, spike proteins and false positives.
But now they’ve found a new target for their rage: vitamin B9, otherwise known as folic acid. It has been known for decades that consumption of folic acid at the start of a pregnancy prevents spina bifida, a neural tube defect that often condemns children to a life in a wheelchair. From December, most of the flour sold in Britain will be fortified with folic acid by law at a level of 250ug (micrograms) per 100g.
Wednesday, 14 October 2026
Shouting at vitamins
Wednesday, 7 October 2026
Christopher Snowdon on Pints and Policy
I was on Great British Think Tank's Pints and Policy podcast yesterday. You can watch it below.
Thanks to GBTT's thorough description of the chat, I can tell you exactly what we discussed:
0:00 Pints & Policy
0:08 Welcome: Chris Snowdon and the IEA
0:49 What is a capitalist command economy?
4:08 Fined for missing heat pump and EV targets
5:14 Back to the 1970s under Labour?
6:45 Riots, immigration and public anger
8:24 The mini-budget v now: gilts, debt and the deficit
9:53 Do we need a bond crisis?
11:15 Austerity "was barely done at all"
12:03 Wealth taxes, rent controls and the Laffer curve
14:00 Are young people less liberal?
17:01 "Is it time to ban...?" The BBC and the media
19:14 More vapers than smokers
20:04 Cheap Chinese EVs
20:42 An £11 broadband levy for the BBC?
23:17 Inside the Sausage Factory: does evidence matter?
25:24 Minimum unit pricing: 65p in Wales
26:09 20mph limits
27:34 Impact assessments: costs counted, benefits not
31:22 Devolution as a policy trial
34:38 Will the state ever get smaller?
36:31 The simple fixes: repeal and deregulate
37:44 Blair, Brown and the Tories
39:06 Tory hangovers: plastic taxes and the "Uni Party"
40:35 Busy with Brexit and Covid, so why ban straws?
42:40 The one policy to change first
44:20 Disability benefits and the TaxPayers' Alliance tool
Tuesday, 6 October 2026
Smoking down, tobacco sales down a lot more
New ONS stats out today report that the smoking rate has dropped to 9.8% in the UK. This means that the number of smokers has dropped by a quarter since 2021.
All well and good, except that legal tobacco sales have fallen by more than half since 2021.
And, moreover, look at the drop in smoking rates among the under 35s since vaping went mainstream...
Wednesday, 30 September 2026
Let us drink at the football
Apologists for illiberal regulation often insist that the restriction on liberty is too small to worry about, that it is easy enough to get around and that, all things considered, it doesn’t really count as a ban at all. These arguments were all swiftly deployed last week. Martin Samuel, the Sunday Times’ “voice of sport”, explained that “It is not as if alcohol is not available in the stadium; just not in sight of the pitch”, as if being in sight of the pitch were not a prerequisite for watching a sporting fixture. The Guardian’s Barney Ronay told his readers that “if you really must drink, it’s not that hard to smuggle in the gin flask.” Don’t try to change the law, just break it! Both journalists resorted to implying that there is something wrong with anyone who resents being bossed around for no good reason. Ronay opined that “nobody really needs to be more drunk at football” while Samuel offered some sneering advice, saying: “If you can’t go 45 minutes without alcohol you should be in the Betty Ford clinic, not the Hill Dickinson Stadium.”
This is the same straw man argument that is sometimes used to justify banning alcohol on trains or banning vaping anywhere. “Can’t you just wait a few hours? What’s wrong with you?!” It flips the conversation from a debate about the appropriate limits of state coercion and puts the onus on the individual to explain why they “need” to do something. Of course nobody needs to have a drink while watching sport, but then nobody needs to watch sport. Life would be unbearably dull if we were only allowed to meet our physical needs. But we are not talking about drinking at eight in the morning or drinking in the workplace. We are talking about how people choose to spend their leisure time on a Saturday afternoon. Having a pint and watching a game of football is a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the weekend and it should be none of the government’s business.
ASH have become shameless grifters
When the government first proposed a ban on disposable vapes, ASH said it would disadvantage mental health patients, elderly smokers and those who have dexterity issues. They said that “the risk of unintended consequences is too great for us to support a ban”.
But once it was clear that the government was serious about the ban, this supposedly “independent” charity dropped its objections and, when it came into force last year, ASH called it “a step in the right direction”.
For several years, ASH have been calling on regulation to stop “cartoon characters, garish colours and sweet names” being used on vape packaging. I think this is a policy that most adult vapers could live with. ASH never called for plain packaging for vapes which is hardly surprising since they once insisted that the idea that “once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false.” It was only in September 2025, after the then-health secretary Wes Streeting announced his desire to put vapes in plain packaging, that ASH came out in favour of this policy. I can find no record of them ever supporting a full display ban for vapes and, as the image above shows, they still don’t. They say, quite rightly, that treating cigarettes and vapes as if they were equally dangerous “risks undermining the role of vapes for smoking cessation”. You’d think that smoking cessation would be a priority for an anti-smoking group, but they are urging their supporters to support a full ban anyway because that’s what the government wants to hear.
These people are amoral grifters. They have achieved everything an anti-smoking group could dream of and now exist purely to ensure their own preservation. They were always going to throw vapers under the bus, but their attack on a real health charity (the NNA) is a new low. ASH are cynical, unprincipled agents of the state that who say anything to keep the grant cheques rolling in.
Friday, 25 September 2026
Nanny State Newsletter #4
Wednesday, 23 September 2026
All that is not proven safe must be banned
Last week, the House of Lords Liaison Committee called for a “comprehensive ban” on gambling advertising, reversing its previous that there wasn't enough evidence to justify it. The U-turn is a good example of how stupid "public health" concepts like the Total Consumption Model and the precautionary principle infect policy-making.
Establishing a definitive causal link between gambling advertising and gambling harms is subject to major and intrinsic methodological challenges.
The Government’s focus on the lack of such a causal link, despite clear explanations of the methodological difficulties by academic experts, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of social science research and the ways in which it can usefully contribute to policy development. Continued reliance on this argument is contrary to the principles of evidence-based policy making and sets a largely unattainable standard of proof that has been used to justify unwillingness to take decisive action.
We note that the Government’s expectation of a clear, proven causal link is also atypical of the standard of proof required in other areas of public health policy to which social science research has made valuable contributions.
There is no clear evidence to suggest that gambling advertising is safe and does not contribute to gambling harms. The current permissive framework is therefore inconsistent with a public health approach.
Monday, 21 September 2026
Moral economics?
I have never been fond of the term “demerit good”. It bestows the objective language of the economist onto something that is fundamentally subjective. Alcohol is supposedly a demerit good because of its effect on health, which would be fine if moderate drinkers didn’t live longer than teetotalers and if health were the only thing that mattered, but it isn’t. No decent economist would be arrogant enough to tell someone that the risks of heavy drinking outweigh their enjoyment of getting drunk.
In 2007, Alvin Roth coined the term “repugnant transactions” to describe the exchange of controversial goods and services. I prefer this to the term “demerit good” because what people find repugnant varies in time and place and the word “repugnant” more accurately reflects the fact that this is really a question of personal taste and morality. Roth’s argument was that repugnance can be an unhelpful constraint on markets. Moral opposition to the sale of live organs, for example, costs lives.
Roth’s new book Moral Economics expands on this theme. Opposition to repugnant transactions is often difficult to justify in logical terms. California’s ban on horse meat – one of Roth’s favourite examples – applies only to horse meat sold for human consumption. It is not illegal to kill a horse for other purposes, nor is it illegal to turn a horse into pet food. It is only illegal to kill a horse “if that person knows or should have known that any part of that horse will be used for human consumption.” It is not a question of animal rights or food safety. The law reflects nothing more than an irrational disgust.
Moral objections are usually framed as consequentialist objections, but further probing often reveals these to be hollow. Those who favour laws against incest (of whom I am one, fwiw) on the grounds that it can lead to birth defects are generally not prepared to make exceptions for family members who use failsafe contraception. Those who support laws against tobacco on the grounds that smoking imposes a cost on the health service seldom change their minds when it is explained that the net cost is less than zero. Those who, like me, support the criminalisation of child pornography on the grounds that it fuels demand for the creation of more child pornography, and thus child abuse, remain deeply uneasy (at best) about such images being generated by CGI or AI.
We are not, therefore, talking about market transactions that necessarily create negative externalities. Activities such as prostitution and dwarf tossing are consensual and have no direct spillover effects onto others, but are nevertheless widely condemned.
Monday, 14 September 2026
School dinners: leave those kids alone
Pastries and croissants will no longer be permitted in breakfast clubs. Sausages and bacon are allowed, but only once a week. Fried eggs are banned completely. Only breakfast cereals that are very low in sugar can be served. Teacakes, crumpets and unsweetened pancakes can be served, but only twice a week. Porridge is permitted but only if it is ‘plain’ and ‘unflavoured’ – no sugar, honey, syrups or sweeteners are to be made available.
For lunch, kids can no longer be offered fried chips or any other deep-fried food. Processed meat and ‘foods containing pastry’ can only be served once a week. Meals containing cheese, such as lasagna, are limited to three portions a week. Lentils and chickpeas are to be compulsory at least once a week. No foods containing chocolate are permitted. ‘Sweetened desserts’ can only be served twice a week.
As for the tuck shop, the government has decreed that the ‘only permitted snacks are plain fruits, vegetables, savoury crackers, breadsticks, yoghurt / plant-based versions (as per the dairy food group) and houmous’. Nom, nom!
The new rules go far beyond ensuring that kids have a balanced diet and consume enough calories to get through the day. They are a grab bag of arbitrary prohibitions on random food products and compulsory targets that seem to have been devised by rolling dice. Their only redeeming feature is that they will save the taxpayer money if children decide to eat their breakfast at home and take a packed lunch with them to school.
This is why Jamie Oliver was so keen to ban packed lunches 20 years ago and it is why nanny statists have been echoing his demand ever since. Only last month, the cake-promoting anti-obesity campaigner Prue Leith said the quiet part out loud when she called for packed lunches to be banned because the government ‘can’t police’ what parents put in them. The constant expansion of breakfast clubs and ‘free’ school meals isn’t about preventing children from going hungry. It is about control. The state doesn’t trust parents to follow the latest food fad and it wants to overrule the preferences of not just the child, but also of the child’s family.
Schools to police children’s lunch boxesSchools will be expected to tell parents what they can put in their children’s lunch boxes as part of Labour’s plans to promote healthier meals for pupils.
... From September next year, schools will have to publish their packed lunch policies online to “strengthen accountability and improve compliance”.
The DfE has also reiterated that teachers are encouraged to offer prizes or other incentives to pupils for bringing in a healthy lunch.
Schools will be expected to continue following guidance from 2019, which recommended restrictions on sugary and fatty foods.
The rise of command capitalism
I've got a new paper out with the IEA about a growing trend in the British economy: command capitalism.
Friday, 11 September 2026
The nanny state newsletter
I've started doing a nanny state newsletter for my Substack subscribers (free). There's no particular schedule but they've been coming out every two weeks so far. If you don't subscribe, head on over and sign up. Here's a sample...
Belgium’s slippery slope
The Belgian government passed a law in May to put warnings on alcohol advertisements saying ‘Alcohol is harmful to health’. Not ‘Alcohol can be harmful to health’ or ‘Excessive drinking is harmful to health’, but ‘Alcohol is harmful to health’.
Belgian Brewers, a trade association, has now published an open letter with more than 1,000 signatures opposing the measure. The Flemish Centre of Expertise on Alcohol and Other Drugs has been lobbying for the new warnings (the phrase ‘alcohol and other drugs’ is a massive red flag for prohibitionism). Its director, Kathleen Peleman, said:
“The core of this message is that alcohol is damaging to your health,” Peleman adds. “Not just for the small group that struggles with addiction, but for everyone who drinks.”
That is indeed the message and it is clearly untrue. The anti-alcohol lobby are copying the anti-tobacco blueprint again. They want to portray alcohol as harmful at any level. That is why activist-academics such as Tim Stockwell devote to much energy to torturing the evidence to erase the health benefits of moderate drinking. This is not an arcane academic dispute. ‘No safe level’ is a crucial rhetorical device for taking alcohol down tobacco road.
The government wants to force the Belgian booze industry to put information on their adverts that is misleading at best and a lie at worst. It will not end there. The industry should take legal action before this gets out of hand.
HMRC tries to get real
HMRC is finally trying to do something about its hopeless estimates of the size of the illicit tobacco market. The title of a document that has not yet been made public - The Tobacco Tax Gap: Improving Tax Gap Statistics Through Wastewater Analysis - indicates that it intends to follow Australia’s lead and look for nicotine in sewage. When the Australian Bureau for Statistics did this, it estimated that 80% of tobacco sold Down Under was illicit. In the House of Commons, the health minister James Murray was asked how the study will differentiate nicotine from tobacco and nicotine from vapes (or pouches or heated tobacco or patches, etc.). He replied:
The methodology will distinguish between tobacco and nicotine consumption by analysing different chemical metabolites present in wastewater samples.
Specifically, tobacco consumption will be measured using the metabolites anabasine and anatabine, while nicotine consumption will be measured using cotinine and its metabolite 3-hydroxycotinine.
It’s a nice methodology. Meanwhile, the Co-op supermarket - which is losing out to the illicit trade - has found that 36 per cent of UK smokers have bought illicit cigarettes, rising to 49 per cent among those aged 35-44. Time is running out for the black market deniers.
Thursday, 3 September 2026
The tyranny of surveys
In the most recent edition of the YPGS, 44 young people out of the 3,666 surveyed were considered to be problem gamblers, which is not the same thing as being an “addict” but involves gamblers reporting such symptoms as chasing losses and often thinking about gambling.
How seriously can we take the responses of those 44 people? The gambling expert Dan Waugh recently looked under the bonnet of the last three editions of the survey, which yielded 125 “problem gamblers” out of 10,985 participants and noticed some curious findings.
Most striking were the six kids who claimed to have gambled in every conceivable way in the last week, including visiting casinos, visiting seaside amusement arcades, playing bingo online, playing bingo in a licensed bingo clubs, gambling on machines in a licensed betting shop, betting on e-sports and gambling in an online casino. One of them was only twelve years old.
This seems unlikely, to put it mildly. In total, 31 of the supposed problem gamblers claimed to have gambled in a bricks-and-mortar casino in the past week. While it is not impossible for an older teenager to fool a doorman with a fake ID, most of these kids were aged between 12 and 15. If you take the YPGS seriously, more 12 year olds have gambled in a casino in the last week than 17 year olds. One 13 year old claimed that they did not engage in any gambling activities that are legal for children, such as seaside arcades or having private bets with friends, and only gambled in licensed bookmakers, in online casinos and in actual casinos, all of which he or she had done in the last week.
Friday, 28 August 2026
Bootlicking gimps
As laws become more preposterous and governments intrude ever further into the private lives of individuals, you might expect the public to revolt. Instead, the growing state has given rise to a strange breed of bootlicking gimps who go out of their way to bat for the government.
The journalist Tom Harwood was in Washington D.C. this week and tweeted a video of himself unscrewing the cap from a bottle of Coke with the caption “Sweet land of liberty”. The point was that he was able to fully remove the plastic cap without violently twisting and tugging its tether — a freedom that has been denied to residents of the EU since 2024 thanks to Article 6 of the Single-Use Plastics Directive.
The bottle-top law has been a gift to eurosceptics. It epitomises the over-reach of pettifogging bureaucrats, the malign influence of fanatical NGOs and the apparently limitless ambitions of the “European project” to involve itself in every aspect of people’s lives. It is annoying and yet futile, a pointless irritation, and a daily reminder of the EU’s preference for regulation over innovation, but that didn’t stop the bootlicking gimps from crawling out from under their rocks to shoot the messenger. The law was intended to stop people throwing their bottle caps in the ocean, but almost none of the EU’s apologists defended it on environmental grounds. There was some whataboutery (“The USA doesn’t have universal healthcare”) and there was a novel cope about the supposed inconvenience of having to hold a bottle cap in the opposing hand, but mostly they complained about Harwood having the nerve to complain. “You know you can just tear the attached caps off with very little force if you want to, right?”, said one. “You do know that if you have the strength greater than a 5 year old girl, that you can just remove the attached cap, right?”, said another.
There was a great deal of this kind of chat, along with the usual “Is this really the hill you want to die on?” straw men. The government’s sycophants are always keen to remind you that there are worse things happening in the world and, by implication, that if you aren’t tweeting about the worst thing in the world, you shouldn’t be tweeting at all. It seems to escape them that they are tweeting about a petty irritation themselves and that their energy is being more thoroughly wasted because they are wrong.
Tuesday, 18 August 2026
That national alert
The nauseating thing about the national alert was how many bootlicking gimps came out in support of it. It’s just another text message, they said. You probably get notifications all the time, they said. True, but they are notifications from people I want to hear from and they don’t have the audacity to override the mute button. I don’t want to hear from the government on a sunny Friday evening. I don’t even want to be reminded of its existence. In the immortal words of Javier Milei, my contempt for the state is infinite. National alerts are another encroachment into our lives from a state that has already encroached too much.
The impact of gambling sponsorship bans - a preview
This is pretty basic economics but apparently it needs spelling out…
Sponsorship deals go to the highest bidder. If the highest bidder is excluded from the process then the organisation that is looking for a sponsor will have to take the next highest bid, which will be lower.
The upshot of banning a whole industry from sponsoring football clubs, for example, is therefore that the football clubs will make less money from sponsorship.
With a week to go before the English Premier League resumes, that lesson is now being learned.
Heading into this summer, almost half of the teams in the Premier League found themselves confronting the same commercial headache.
Back in April 2023, all 20 member clubs collectively agreed to end front‑of‑shirt sponsorship deals with gambling firms from summer 2026.
… For years, gambling companies have underpinned the commercial reality of the league’s middle and lower tier, offering inflated sponsorship fees that other industries simply could not, or would not, match.
You can see where this is going…
“Collectively, the gap these clubs had to plug, as we worked it out, was around £80m,” said Mike Haywood, vice‑president at Octagon, one of the world’s largest sports sponsorship consultation firms. “There were between eight and 12 clubs that needed to plug that gap. Some of those clubs are still looking for long‑term solutions, while some of them are waiting for the market to heat up.”
Many football fans will find it hard to sympathise with the big beasts of the Premier League. I’m sure they will be alright in the end. But it is worth remembering that the anti-gambling lobby insists that companies are queuing up to sponsor teams and that football clubs can make the same amount of money being sponsored by more wholesome companies. You hear the same kind of thing from those who want to ban sponsorships and advertising of alcohol brands or so-called ‘junk food’ companies.
It is nonsense. When tobacco sponsorship was banned in snooker, for example, the number of tournaments dwindled to a handful and the amount of money in the game collapsed. It had to settle for the second best bids, which these days are often from gambling companies. If gambling sponsorship is banned, it will have to settle for the third best bid. And so on. Banning the top sponsors inevitably leads to less revenue.
The Premier League ban is “voluntary” because the people who run it thought that they were being clever trying to appease the government of a command capitalist economy.
“There is an element of tokenism with all of this,” explained football finance expert and author of The Price of Football, Kieran Maguire. “When the Premier League were lobbying against the Independent Football Regulator this was seen as something they could do to show that they could self‑govern appropriately. Now, in their eyes, they have the worst of both worlds with the IFR and no gambling income.”
Appeasement rarely works in the short term and never works in the long term.
Maybe they’ll increase ticket prices to make up the shortfall.
Cross-posted from the Snowdon Substack
Tuesday, 11 August 2026
Can the high street be saved?
The idea that the high street can be revived by killing off the few remaining businesses that are able to operate on it is just silly. These companies are not taking up shopfronts that WH Smith (now TG Jones!) is desperate to use. They are on the high street because WH Smith has gone.
The high street of the future will have fewer shops and those shops will be devoted to services - pubs, coffee shops, key-cutters, ice cream parlours, repair shops, cafés and, yes, barbers. The rest should be turned into residential housing.
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Monday, 10 August 2026
Nothing to see here, says ASH
But how credible are JTI’s figures, and how do they compare with evidence that is independent from the tobacco industry?
A recent survey of smokers in the North East of England, commissioned by Fresh, found that 32% of smokers in the region had been offered illegal tobacco, most of them infrequently. Applying this figure to the UK as a whole would equate to roughly 3% of the total population (around a third of smokers), not 31%. On that basis, JTI's estimate appears to overstate the scale of the problem by 90%.
This is nothing new. In their response to the latest national illicit tobacco estimates, JTI claimed that 42% of cigarettes consumed in the UK were illicit. If this is correct it would be the highest level off illicit cigarette consumption ever recorded. However, official data published by HMRC estimates that around 12% of cigarettes smoked in the UK are illicit, down from 20% in 2000 when the black market was at its peak...
There are two possibilities. Either, JTI has identified a problem that every independent data source has somehow missed. Or this is another case of a tobacco company using dodgy stats or misleading reporting to cry wolf about the black market.
Honestly, cigarette prohibition in Australia is probably the most innovative happening within any domestic market in 40 years.
— 𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐚'𝐬 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐛𝐨𝐲 (@SardineTruther) August 9, 2026
Can you imagine a pack of whatever these are for under $15 even two decades ago?
Absolutely not. pic.twitter.com/92H5VpKCee
Anti-smoking groups were sanguine about the illicit trade in Australia before the problem became too big (and violent) to ignore. Fool me once, etc.
Wednesday, 5 August 2026
The dumbest epidemiology
Last week, the BBC publicised the results of a study which claimed that sugar consumption in early life increases the risk of dementia. People who don’t eat much sugar in the first years of life are supposedly 23 per cent less likely to develop the condition when they are older. “Our findings suggest that limiting sugar during the earliest stages of life may have lasting benefits for brain health,” said the study’s lead author Jiazhen Zheng.
How does he know this? He looked at data from the UK Biobank and found that people born between 1940 and 1953, when sugar was rationed, were less likely to develop dementia than those born afterwards.Of 15,025 who experienced sugar rationing before birth and during their first year of life, 388 developed dementia. Of 15,256 who experienced sugar rationing before birth and during their first two years of life, 456 developed dementia. Of 23,774 born after sugar rationing, 504 developed dementia.
If you get your calculator out, you will find that these figures show that the rate of dementia actually fell over time, with 2.1 per cent of the youngest cohort suffering from the disease, compared to 2.6 per cent of the oldest cohort and 2.5 per cent of the second group. The claim that the people who endured sugar rationing were 23 per cent less likely to get dementia is based on numbers that have undergone substantial adjustment.But that is not the real problem with this study. The real problem is something that has doubtless already occurred to you and that would be obvious even to a small child. If people born between 1940 and 1953 are healthier than people born after 1953, there could be any number of explanations for it. There is no more reason to attribute it to sugar rationing than to anything else, including meat rationing and egg rationing. There is no reason to assume that it has anything to do with diet, nor indeed to anything people do in their first two years of life. These individuals grew up and lived in different times when the prevalence of some diseases declined and others increased. Focusing on one event and giving it the credit for everything that happened afterwards is so stupid that there is a name for it: the post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy.
Tuesday, 4 August 2026
A nation divided!
Nineteen years after the hated smoking ban was introduced, more than a third of the public still think smoking should be allowed, in designated smoking rooms at least. Simon Clark has the news at Taking Liberties.
Still, it is pretty worrying that 51% of UK adults refuse to mind their own business.
Friday, 31 July 2026
The ongoing saga of the energy drink sales ban
You may not care about the freedom of teenagers to buy caffeinated fizzy drinks, but it will not just be children who find things more difficult if a ban is introduced. There are 170,000 vending machines in the UK selling cold drinks, none of which will be able to stock energy drinks once the ban comes into effect. This is ridiculous because, according to the Vending & Automated Retail Association, more than 82 per cent of vending machines are in places that either ban children or are of no interest to children, such as offices, factories and warehouses. Millions of adults will be inconvenienced for no obvious gain.
Furthermore, adults will have to prove their age to buy these drinks. This is already a common complaint from those who shop at the virtue-signalling supermarkets that have brought in a voluntary ban. It will soon apply to every shop in England.
Thursday, 30 July 2026
Today's quack science
You wait ages for the worst quack science of the year to show up and then two contenders arrive at once.
Read about them on my Substack.
Tuesday, 28 July 2026
Repeal the smoking ban
Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore, incited howls of outrage even from his own supporters this week when he espoused the low-status opinion that pubs should be allowed to have a separate, well ventilated room in which people can smoke, as is the norm in much of Europe. “I detest smoking.” he said. “I would not use these rooms, but should that stop others?” In my view, Lowe did not go far enough. If a landlord wants to allow smoking throughout his pub, that is no business of the government. But even Lowe’s watered down policy proposal, accompanied by an elucidation of the most basic liberal principles, was treated as if he was calling for the slaughter of the first-born.
No cliché went untouched. Why should I be forced to breathe someone’s ghastly cigarette? Why should I come home with my clothes stinking of smoke? What if the smoke drifts into another room? What about the poor bar staff? It was the only good thing Labour ever did!
Most of these arguments are undermined by the fact that no one would be forced to enter the smoking room. Insofar as bar staff would be obliged to enter it from time to time, the solution would be to make this part of the job description and only hire people who are smokers or who have no objection to going into a room in which people are smoking. In any case, with modern air conditioning the air in the smoking room would probably be cleaner than the air outside.
But the smoking ban was never really about secondhand smoke. The simple fact was that many nonsmokers disliked the smell of tobacco and, flattered by decades of propaganda which portrayed them as superior beings, they felt entitled to demand that it be eliminated from any building they might ever choose to enter. That this required a step-change in state control was welcomed by socialists and progressives as another milestone in the regimentation of society. More surprising was the failure of so many conservatives and liberals to push back on this assault on personal liberty and property rights. Instead, they joined forces with a “public health” lobby that was now unshackled from liberal norms in a broader war against other supposed vices.
Monday, 27 July 2026
More cash for ASH
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is making £150,000 per year available for the financial years 2026/27, 2027/28, 2028/29. A total of £450,000 of grant funding is available. The intention of this grant is to support implementation and impact of the Tobacco and Vapes Act which introduces a range of new measures making major changes in the tobacco and vaping landscape.
Surveys and polling
Working with DHSC, identify surveys and polling which could support implementation of the Tobacco and Vapes Act.
Undertake agreed surveys and polling.
Feedback findings to DHSC in an accessible format.
Support for local communications for a smoke-free UK, building on national communication plans.
Work with DHSC to identify and develop the right research and investigative frameworks to support the development of future vaping and nicotine product policy, e.g. analysis on the health impacts of specific substances or ingredients.Produce and disseminate supportive evidence-based resources to make the case for continued tobacco control measures and investment, with a focus on cost-benefit analysis.
Eligibility
Funding is available using the powers set out in section 70 of the Charities Act 2006. To be eligible to apply for the grant organisations must therefore be charities, or charitable, benevolent, or philanthropic in purpose.
Inside the Sausage Factory - with Martin Durkin!
I've been speaking to the great filmmaker Martin Durkin about my book Inside the Sausage Factory. Check it out...
Thursday, 23 July 2026
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.
Wednesday, 22 July 2026
Alcohol cancer warnings - why?
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
Friday, 17 July 2026
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.
- 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.
Monday, 13 July 2026
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.
Thursday, 2 July 2026
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.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Thursday, 25 June 2026
HMRC is still downplaying the illicit trade
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 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!
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.
Tuesday, 23 June 2026
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.
Friday, 19 June 2026
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...
Thursday, 18 June 2026
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).
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?
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.
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.
