School dinners: leave those kids alone

The government has announced some extraordinarily harsh restrictions on what kind of food can be sold in food. I've written about it for Spiked...

 

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 rules are arbitrary, capricious and have very little scientific basis. The kids are going to hate it.

 

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. 

 

Not coincidently, today also saw this announcement... 

 

Schools to police children’s lunch boxes 

Schools 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 younger generation would be quite entitled to hate us.

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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.

 

Download it for free.

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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.

 

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The tyranny of surveys

There are supposedly 80,000 child gambling "addicts" in the UK. This is based on a tiny proportion of school kids self-reporting their behaviour. As I explain in The Critic, it is very likely that many of them are lying or don't understand the questions...

 

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.

 

Read the rest.

 

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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.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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That national alert

The government sent a noisy alert to every mobile phone in Britain on Friday to tell us not to light a barbecue. I have written about it for Spiked...

 

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.

 

Read it all.

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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 

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Can the high street be saved?

Andy Burnham thinks he can save the high street by stopping bookies and vape shops opening. I disagree.

 

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.

 

Read the rest on my Substack. 

 

With weary predictability, the prohibitionists are taking the win but immediately demanding more.

 

 

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Nothing to see here, says ASH

ASH are still playing dumb about the illicit tobacco market. It's possible that they're not playing and are, in fact, dumb. The state-funded prohibitionist pressure group has been having a pop at Japan Tobacco International (JTI) for commissioning a survey which found that 31% of Brits have been offered illicit tobacco.

 

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%.

 

Can you see the problem with this logic? FRESH did a survey of smokers whereas JTI did a survey of the general population ("15,228 UK adults aged 19 and over, including 5,444 smokers"). ASH assumes that the smoking rate is only 9% (it is actually higher than that) and then disregards the other 91% of the population, as if only smokers are ever offered illicit tobacco. 

This will be news to a friend of mine who was recently telling me that he is offered pouches of tobacco every time he goes into a certain convenience store despite repeatedly telling them that he doesn't smoke.

 

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...

 

Blah, blah, blah... The HMRC estimates are ASH's only life raft on this issue. I have explained at length why those estimates are worthless and have responded to ASH's cope as well. You only need to look at the collapse in the legal market to see that the illegal market has exploded in scale.

 

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. 

 

FRESH is no more an independent data source than JTI. Like ASH, it is a tax-sponging prohibitionist outfit that will not take responsibility for the mess it has helped create. JTI and PMI both carry out empty pack surveys, both of which find that the illicit market share is much higher than HMRC's estimates suggest. HMRC itself admits that it has "low confidence" in its findings. The Irish government also uses empty pack surveys - the gold standard method of sizing up the black market - and these show that 26% of cigarette packs in Ireland were illegal in 2024 and a further 11% were legal but bought abroad via duty-free/EU. For rolling tobacco, the figures are 36% and 13% respectively. It is hard to see why the UK would be doing much better.

 

Moreover, ASH don't mention the study published last month, funded by Cancer Research UK, which found that the number of smokers buying tobacco from the black market doubled from 12.2% to 23.1% between mid-2023 and 2025. Given the illegal nature of this activity, we can assume that these are both underestimates. 

 

And then we have the halving of legal sales in three years and rapidly declining tobacco duty revenue. Alongside the obvious proliferation of illegal tobacco on the high street and the 1.2 billion illegal cigarettes seized last year, it is the HMRC estimate that looks like an outlier.

 

Meanwhile in Australia, the birthplace of plain packaging, child-friendly cigarettes are being sold by organised crime to anyone for a relative pittance...

 

Honestly, cigarette prohibition in Australia is probably the most innovative happening within any domestic market in 40 years.

Can you imagine a pack of whatever these are for under $15 even two decades ago?

Absolutely not. pic.twitter.com/92H5VpKCee

— 𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐚'𝐬 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐛𝐨𝐲 (@SardineTruther) August 9, 2026

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.

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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. 

 

It gets worse. Read about it at The Critic. 

 

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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.

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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. 

 

Read all about it at The Critic. 

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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. 

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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.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.  

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More cash for ASH

The government has created a £450,000 Tobacco and Vapes Implementation Grant "to support implementation and impact of the Tobacco and Vapes Act". It looks tailor-made for Action on Smoking and Health (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.

 

What "support" does this legislation require? Mainly, it seems to require some propaganda to make it look like a success...

 

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. 

 

And...

 

Support for local communications for a smoke-free UK, building on national communication plans. 

 

But it's not all about "support". Either ASH keeps moving or it dies. It must always find new dragons to slay and it has always relied on taxpayers' money to develop exciting new policies. Therefore part of the £450,000 can be used to... 

 

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. 

 

If you're thinking that anybody could do that, you're wrong because...

 

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.

 

By a stroke of luck, ASH is a charity.

 

Ker-ching!  

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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...

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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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