On my Substack this week...

... I scoffed at some Australian quackademics who were flown in to Scotland to tell us to copy their disastrous anti-vaping policies.

 

Now, I never took the course to call myself a ‘public health professional’ but you’d think it would be best practice to copy the countries where smoking is going down and underage smoking is going down rapidly rather than the country where smoking is not going down and underage smoking is going up. But what do I know?

 

And I had a laugh at what passes for science among those who want to treat ultra-processed food like tobacco.

 

Notice that one defining characteristic is the pursuit of profit. Companies who make ultra-processed food want to maximise their profits, whereas other food companies feed us out of the goodness of their hearts. Adam Smith famously praised the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer and the baker!

 

It's all free so have a read and - if you haven't already - subscribe.

Share

Tweet

Nanny state chat

I sat down recently with my Tufton Street pals at the Taxpayers Alliance to talk about the Nanny State Index and the state of public health paternalism in Britain. Check it out.

Share

Tweet

On minimum pricing

Public Health Scotland have said that minimum pricing 'works'. Not a great surprise coming from a government public health agency when the government needs something to get one of its flagship policies through the sunset clause, but not consistent with PHS's own evaluation.

I've written about this for The Critic...

 

It was perhaps inevitable that a government-funded public health agency would find in minimum pricing’s favour. Minimum pricing is a flagship policy for the Scottish Government and the public health lobby is keen for it to be rolled out to other countries (Wales already has it, and it didn’t work there either). But it is a shabby end to an evaluation process that has cost a great deal of money and has been impressive in its breadth and depth. Taken together, the reports give a good impression of what has happened in Scotland under minimum pricing. Most of it is rigorous and impartial. Much of it supports the common sense criticisms of the policy made by sceptics before it was introduced. To make the case for minimum pricing, you would have to pretend that most of it doesn’t exist, and so that’s what Public Health Scotland have done.

 

Read it all.

 

I was on BBC Scotland this morning from 9am. It was an interesting hour of radio as it slowly dawned on the presenter that in the world of 'public health' doublethink, minimum pricing can reduce the number of alcohol-related deaths by 13% but the number of alcohol-related deaths can be at an 11 year high.  

Share

Tweet

Learning from Australia??

The Health Secretary Steve Barclay is reported to be interested in learning from Australia’s experience with e-cigarette regulation. Quoted in The Times this week, he said: “I met a leading Australian figure this morning in terms of some of the lessons around the vaping industry in Australia, and how we can look at what has been done there and are there any lessons that we can share with each other.”

Britain does indeed have much to learn from Australia’s approach to vaping, in the same way as air crash investigators have much to learn from a black box. They say that every air crash makes air travel safer so long as the authorities understand what went wrong. On that basis, the world can benefit from studying the smouldering crater of Australia’s tobacco control policies.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.

Share

Tweet

Last Orders with Claire Fox

The Online Safety Bill, ultra-processed food and a monkeypox update are all in the latest episode of Last Orders.

Share

Tweet

Corporate rent-seeking

A food and soft drink company wants more regulation of ultra-processed food. They have received a surprising amount of praise for this blatant rent-seeking, as I discuss in The Critic.  

 

According to the Observer, it once owned “popular biscuits brands, including Lu biscuits, but sold its biscuit and cereal snack unit to Kraft Food in 2007”. It now boasts that “90 per cent of its UK portfolio of products by sales volume is not high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS)”. The key phrase here is “by sales volume”. As the owner of two of the UK’s top selling mineral water brands, this is less impressive than it sounds.

The good people at Danone UK & Ireland may be sincere in their belief that Britain has “reached a point where meaningful intervention from the government is a necessary course of action.” But nobbling your competitors with taxes and bans looks rather like regulatory capture and corporate rent-seeking.

 

Read the lot.

Share

Tweet

Minimum pricing failed in Wales too

Wales introduced minimum pricing for alcohol in March 2020 but you don’t hear much about it. There has been an evaluation but it has tended to use surveys rather than empirical data. The evaluation team have done their best to paint minimum pricing in the best light, but you don’t need to read between the lines too much to see that the policy has hugely underperformed.

The proportion of people in Wales classified as increasing or higher risk drinkers rose from 33% in 2018 to 40% in 2020 to 45% in 2022.  

People in Wales are drinking more frequently and fewer people are abstaining.

 

 

More people are binge-drinking, and twice as many people are binge-drinking every day than they did before minimum pricing.

 

 

Obviously there is the confounding factor of the pandemic and lockdowns which polarised drinking patterns and led to more heavy drinking across the UK. We don't have comparable figures for England, which does not have minimum pricing, but we do know that alcohol-specific mortality trends have been very similar in both countries since Wales introduced minimum pricing. 

 

As the graph below shows, alcohol-specific deaths rose by 3.2 per 100,000 in Wales after 2019 (27%) and by 3.0 per 100,000 in England (27%). (In Scotland, they rose by 3.8 per 100,000, or 20%.)

 Great success! 'Public health' just can't stop winning.     

Share

Tweet