You are a critic of Michael Bloomberg’s role in tobacco policy, why?
The New York financial services billionaire and philanthropist, Michael Bloomberg, spends hundreds of millions of dollars in this field and serves as a WHO ambassador for non-communicable diseases. Yet his policy instincts are those of an out-of-touch elitist, beset by a range of obvious, harmful, unintended consequences. He remains totally unaccountable for the consequences of his actions and interactions with governments through his giant complex of well-funded activists, academics, PR professionals, and officials. He is surrounded by people who refuse to engage with evidence suggesting he is doing more harm than good. Nowhere is this more evident than in low- and middle-income countries, where his staff and money can make a significant impact with little resistance. Though they like to pretend to be independent academics, journalists or civil society organisations, Bloomberg’s complex of organisations serves the ambitions and policy preferences of one overconfident, unaccountable billionaire and his prohibition agenda. It is the most counterproductive use of philanthropic money in the whole of public health, and it needs to stop before even more people are killed by philanthropic negligence.
Monday, 12 January 2026
Clive Bates on Substack
Friday, 9 January 2026
Anti-alcohol plot backfires in the USA
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform does not pull its punches. Its report - A Study Fraight with Bias - concludes that ICCPUD’s Alcohol Intake and Health (AIH) study was a politically motivated waste of money that violated federal law.
Thursday, 8 January 2026
Lowering the drink-drive limit
Lacking anything else to do, the Labour government is planning to lower the drink-drive limit. England and Wales have a higher limit than most European countries and fewer drink-related road accidents per capita than nearly all of them. We also know from Scotland that lowering the limit won't have any effect on road safety but will damage the pub trade.
The worst people in the country are all in favour of this, namely the anti-motorists ("Just walk lol"), the pub gentrifiers ("I support my pub by going in every now and again for a lime soda") and the people who support every pointless restriction on liberty by saying "What's the fuss? All you have to do is obey the law."
But it is a pointless restriction on liberty. As I say in Spiked, it is the opposite of evidence-based policy. If you support unnecessary restrictions on liberty which damage businesses just so you can feel morally righteous, you are the problem.
Wednesday, 7 January 2026
Food advertising ban introduced - what's next?
It takes wilful blindness not to see that food is being dragged down the same slippery slope as tobacco, with a full advertising ban being the next step. Where is the food industry in all this? Where are the advertising platforms and TV companies? The Food and Drink Federation hasn’t put out a press release since mid-December and hasn’t tweeted for over a month. In an unbelievably tepid quote given to the BBC, it said that it was “committed to working in partnership with the government and others to help people make healthier choices” and claimed that its members’ products “now have a third of the salt and sugar and a quarter of the calories than they did ten years ago”. Whoopee. Where has that got them? With the most hostile business environment in the developed world, that’s where. And there is undoubtedly more to come. I don’t expect a trade association to call for the head of Wes Streeting but it could at least say that it is disappointed with the government and call for a ceasefire. Instead they essentially boasted about shrinkflation.
As for the broadcasters, they have spent years whipping up hysteria about food and are now sowing what they reaped. The boss of Channel 4 has said that the ad ban could cost her company £50 million a year. She should have thought about that before she commissioned all those Jamie Oliver documentaries. ITV has been no better with its scaremongering about “ultra-processed food”. These companies were perfectly placed to put out an alternative viewpoint and had years to do so, but they never did, even though it would have been justified in the name of balance.
Tuesday, 6 January 2026
The stakeholder state
We need to strip funding from all politically active NGOs, charities and pressure groups. We need a true bonfire of the quangos. We need to - for want of a better word - purge those “arm’s-length bodies” and government departments that have been “captured” by ideologues. Above all, we need to repeal or significantly amend a number of laws, including the Climate Change Act, the Equality Act, the Children and Families Act, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act, the Town and Country Planning Act, the Employment Rights Act, and the Human Rights Act. We probably need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Much of this will be unpopular, and not just with the “stakeholder state”, because all this legislation sounds nice (governments never call a law ‘The Anti-Growth Act’ or ‘The Business Suffocation Act’). Some of these laws have only just been introduced.
The government - this government, the last government and the next government - is in a strait-jacket of well-meaning but badly drafted laws that have been exploited by activist judges and single-issue campaigners. There is no point complaining about the judges and the campaigners. The only way out of the woods is do the one thing that politicians can do and change the law.
Friday, 2 January 2026
Michael McFadden RIP
Michael went on to write another book about the coming prohibition of tobacco (TobakkoNacht – The Antismoking Endgame), but could mostly be found in forums and "below the line" in a Sisyphean struggle against online misinformation. He was kind enough to read an early draft of my book Velvet Glove, Iron Fist and provided many helpful comments, particularly with regards to the situation in his native USA. He continued pinging me occasional e-mails with encouraging words for the rest of his life.
Michael J. McFadden grew up in Brooklyn in the ’60s, studied Peace Studies and Peace Research at Manhattan College (BA) and the U of PA’s Wharton Graduate School, and then moved to being an activist/trainer in a nonviolence commune, canvassing door-to-door for an anti-nuke group, organizing bicycle activism, and eventually writing two books aimed at fighting the antismoking movement.
So how does a hippie peace/bicycle activist become a pro-smoking activist and writer?
The answer is that I’m NOT a “pro-smoking” anything: I’m a pro-freedom, pro-science, anti-overpowering-government-control, anti-manipulation-through-dishonest-propaganda activist and writer.
He'll be missed.
