The war on gambling: phase two

The Times is strangely puritanical about sugar and gambling. You'd hope that a newspaper so obsessed with these issues would familiarise itself with the basic facts and yet its reporters and columnists have made mistake after mistake from day one. If you relied on The Times for information you would think that the number of problem gamblers doubles every few years, whereas it has remained low and flat for twenty years. 

The Times is far from being alone in misreporting gambling statistics but, along with the Guardian, it seems to have made it a personal mission to get rid of the dreaded fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs). 

You know the rhetoric: crack cocaine of gambling, £100 every twenty seconds, casinos on every high street, etc. Well, that all came to an end on April 2019 when the maximum stake was slashed to £2, thereby making games with a 1:1 payout unplayable to most punters. 

 

From the media coverage between 2012 and 2018, you would think that FOBTs were almost the sole cause of problem gambling. Certainly, they were portrayed as the main cause. One of Derek Webb's pressure groups, the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, asserted in 2013 that...

 

‘FOBTs is [sic] the only gambling activity significantly and positively associated with disordered gambling’

 

Has a de facto ban on this alleged scourge pacified the campaigners who swore on a stack of Bibles that they were 'not anti-gambling'? Has it reduced the number of problem gamblers or significantly reduced the amount of money that is 'lost' to gambling? Reader, it has done none of these things. As I predicted in 2018, it has instead led to open season being declared on gambling, starting with raising the age at which you can play the Lottery as the hors d'oeuvres for a no-holds-barred review of all gambling regulation that has been described as a 'reformers' shopping list'.

 

The All Party Parliamentary Group on FOBTs has become the All Party Parliamentary Group on Gambling-Related Harm. The Campaign for Fairer Gambling has morphed into Clean Up Gambling, still funded by Derek Webb and fronted by Matt Zarb-Cousin, but with a much wider remit. You will hear no more about FOBTs being the only gambling activity that is 'significantly and positively associated with disordered gambling'. 

 

The Times has also moved swiftly on to the next phase. There is not a hint in today's editorial that the banishing of FOBTs has reduced the amount of gambling-related harm or done any good at all. On the contrary, it suggests that things are getting worse, as they always are when people are looking for new dragons to slay. 

As betting shops close and online gaming takes its place, the old adage that the house always wins is truer than ever.

Is it? Maybe we shouldn't have closed all those betting shops then (1 in 8 have gone since 2017).

Last year total losses for British gamblers ballooned to £14.4 billion.

 

No, they fell slightly to £14.2 billion, but who cares about facts when there's a crusade to win? The big losers between 2019 and 2020, as expected, were the bookies who saw their revenue drop by £750 billion, but this was nearly all offset by gains in other areas, particularly adult gaming centres and online. 

 

Still, 4,000 people lost their jobs in bookmaking last year so you can't say the anti-FOBT measures had no effect at all. 

There is no obvious endpoint to this new war on gambling so expect the bans, lies, destruction and ignorance to continue indefinitely.

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Food fight

The Adam Smith Institute have set up a campaign to oppose the government's preposterous ban on food advertising. They make a number of salient points on their website, such as...

The proposed ban will have huge ramifications for the food and advertising industries. This is particularly true for small businesses that increasingly rely on online ads and are facing huge pressures from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Research from the Internet Advertising Bureau found 69% of SMEs use online advertising (both free and paid). Of that, 64% believe digital advertising is now more important to the future of their business in recovering from the pandemic.

Up to 45% of the UK’s total digital ad spend comes from SME spend, coming in at over £7bn in 2019.

There were approximately 7,130 SMEs in the food and drink sector with turnover of around £21 billion and 135,000 employees in 2019. In the food sector (excluding beverages) SMEs accounted for 79% of businesses, 27% of employment and 17% of turnover.

So what is to be done? This is where you can help...

The Government thinks that everyone is perfectly happy for them to ruin their local restaurants, pubs and cafés. That’s where you come in. We need to spread the word. You can take action against the ad ban by:

Responding to the Government’s consultation.
You can make your thoughts on the ad ban clear to the Government by responding to its consultation here.

Writing to your MP.
You can find out how to contact your local MP here.

Spreading the word on social media using #ScrapTheAdBan.

I responded to the consultation this morning. It is slanted towards a certain outcome, as government consultations tend to, but you can still make it clear that you disapprove.

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Desperate ASH demand plain packaging for rolling papers and filter tips

The tax-spongers at Action on Smoking and Health are really scraping the barrel now. Palpably desperate to find new dragons to slay, they want plain packaging for rolling paper and filter tips

 

We welcome this report’s recommendations.

The UK Government should apply standardised packaging laws to all tobacco products and accessories, including filters and papers. https://t.co/pzenxfG6mb

— ASH (@ASH_LDN) December 3, 2020

 

If they weren't such a hateful organisation, you could almost feel sorry for them. 

The hook for this latest demand is a flimsy report from CRUK which cobbles together some junk science from the activists at Bath and Stirling Universities, Anna Gilmore being amongst them. 

The first piece of research, from Bath, falsely claims that the 'rate of decline for tobacco sales doubled around the introduction of standardised packaging'. 

 

On average seven million fewer sticks were sold per month pre-implementation whereas an average of 13 million fewer sticks were sold per-month post- implementation.

This can easily be debunked as we saw when the same activists made a similar claim in July. 

HMRC's tobacco bulletin keeps track of tobacco sales. It shows a steep decline in (legal) cigarette sales until 2016/17, no doubt largely thanks to the emergence of e-cigarettes, after which the downward trend slowed appreciably.

 

For roll-your-own tobacco, sales bottomed out in 2016/17 and have since risen by 20 per cent.

 

It's nigh on impossible for a credible academic to turn this pig's ear into a silk purse. And so the job was left to Anna Gilmore of Bath University's Tobacco Control Research Group, which is now awash with Bloomberg cash.

 

John Britton and his team of anti-smoking zealots had to reluctantly concede that the same point in a study published in 2018:

Conclusions

The implementation of standardized packaging legislation in the United Kingdom, which included minimum pack sizes of 20, was associated with significant increases overall in the price of manufactured cigarettes, but no clear deviation in the ongoing downward trend in total volume of cigarette sales.

 

Nevertheless, Gilmore and co. are once again claiming that black is white. 

 

The other piece of research, from Stirling University, comes to the unsurprising conclusion that tobacco companies didn't start selling cigarettes in plain packaging until they had to.

 

Tobacco companies used the full 12-month transition period to delay the removal of fully-branded products and gradually phase in standardised packaging.

 

The Stirling research actually contains some mildly interesting and useful information. Tobacco companies made sure there was plenty of branded stock on the market until the ban on selling branded cigarettes began on 20 May 2017. I don't think I saw any branded packs until 2017 and this research suggests that I wasn't alone.

Of the 20 fully branded products monitored, 18 continued to be sold throughout the transition period but some changed name. Almost all new names included a colour descriptor and adjective. 

 

No standardised variants were sold in the first five months. It was not until March 2017 (two months before mandatory compliance) that the average number of standardised products sold by each retailer exceeded the number of fully branded products.

So, although cigarettes had to be manufactured in plain packaging from May 2016, there can't have been any impact on consumer behaviour until 2017 because hardly any consumers had seen them. This further undermines Gilmore's study which compares sales in May 2015 to sales in April 2018. Cigarettes were only widely sold in plain packaging for a third of this period and were not even manufactured in plain packaging for the first third. 

Both the Bath and Stirling studies claim that cigarette prices 'increased as standardised packaging was implemented' in direct contradiction to the Britton et al. study mentioned above. 

All in all, it's the kind of quack science we expect from tobakko kontrol. It's a bit sad to see CRUK endorse it, but never mind. 

The report concludes that the government should ban bevelled edges on cigarette packs, extend plain packaging to filters and rolling papers, and ban the 'use of colours or other descriptors in product variant names'. 

This is desperate stuff, but if you make it to the last page, there are some telling comments.

Unresolved research questions

To date, the evidence we have on the market and industry response to standardised packaging shows that, despite tobacco industry’s tactics to undermine the effect of the legislation, this legislation has been effective in reducing tobacco sales and in tobacco industry revenues in the UK. However, there are still gaps in the academic literature that must be addressed in order to fully evaluate the impact of the legislation. While by no means an exhaustive list, the following key research gaps have been identified:

Smoking behaviours

1. What was the impact of standardised packaging of tobacco products on smoking prevalence in the UK?

2. As standardised packaging was intended to reduce youth uptake of tobacco products, what was the impact of standardised packaging on youth smoking prevalence and consumption in the UK?

In other words, they still don't know whether plain packaging works. Four years after it was introduced, you might hope they'd have an answer by now. 

Spoiler: it doesn't.

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Last Orders with Madeline Grant

There's a great new episode of Last Orders out with the Telegraph's Madeline Grant. It was recorded last week when I naively thought that having some of the lowest Covid infection rates in England would put my region in Tier 1. 

Listen here.

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Global nicotine prohibition with the WHO

The useless and corrupt World Health Organisation has published a new Global Youth Tobacco Survey (in 'selected countries of the WHO European region', so not very global). It finds that cigarette smoking among 13-15 year olds has declined in nearly every country studied, but there are some telling remarks in the press release.  

 

New WHO report reveals that while smoking continues to decline among European adolescents, the use of electronic cigarettes by young people is on the rise

 

How can this be when the WHO reckons that vaping is a gateway to smoking? Or could it be that the fall in smoking is partially related to the rise of vaping? 

 

While cigarettes remain the most used form of tobacco products, there is a concerning trend emerging from the use of electronic cigarettes (or e-cigarettes). According to the latest available data, young people are turning to these products at an alarming rate. The new report reveals that in some countries the rates of e-cigarette use among adolescents were much higher than those for conventional cigarettes. 

And that's a bad thing?

E-cigarettes and other novel and emerging nicotine- and tobacco-containing products, such as heated tobacco products (HTPs), are the next frontier in the global tobacco epidemic. While the latter is a tobacco product, e-cigarettes do not contain tobacco, and may or may not contain nicotine.

 

So why are they included in the Global Youth Tobacco Survey? 

Although there are challenges involved in regulating these products, a rigorous application of the WHO FCTC would close advertising loopholes and deny the industry the ability to push its products to young people with impunity. 

That's because the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which shouldn't include non-tobacco products in the first place, stupidly wants a total ban on lifesaving vaping products.

And here comes the grift...

Another crucial tool in the fight against tobacco- and novel nicotine-containing products is collaboration between research institutes and governments. For several years, the Smoke Free Partnership has been highlighting the need for governments and the European Union to invest in tobacco control policy research, ensuring that research is supported, population-focused and policy-relevant.

 

Yes, it's a racket. But this is the most telling part...

 

The tobacco industry has been ruthless in its attempts to maintain and increase profits, with e-cigarettes and heated tobacco being just another means to preserving and expanding its markets. However, with good guidance, research and a rigorous implementation of the WHO FCTC, a path can be built towards a tobacco and nicotine-free future.

 

Many of us have always said that wiping out nicotine use is the ultimate goal of these fanatics and that they will use the same prohibitionist methods as they have with cigarettes. Well, there it is in black and white. Since when was this within the remit of the World Health Organisation? How do get rid of these people?

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SAGE's tier trick

As of today, 99 per cent of the English population will live under tough new Tier 2 or Tier 3 rules. Mixing indoors with people from outside your household will remain illegal in both of these tiers. In Tier 2, you have to buy a ‘substantial meal’ if you want a drink in a pub - and leave when you’ve eaten it, according to the Prime Minister’s spokesman.  In Tier 3, which includes most of the North, all pubs, restaurant and other venues will be closed.

This amounts to carpet-bombing of the hospitality industry by the government and will lead to unprecedented bankruptcies and unemployment in the sector. The affront to civil liberties since March is unlike anything Britain has seen before, even in wartime, and the tier system looks like it will stay in place for at least four more months.

People who went into lockdown in Tier 1 only to come out of it in Tier 3 are understandably perplexed. Lockdown has been working well. On Friday, SAGE finally acknowledged that the rate of infection (R) was below 1. In fact, the number of positive tests reported each day has fallen by 40 per cent since the lockdown began on 5 November and will fall further. So why is Cornwall, which has an infection rate of 45 per 100,000, in Tier 1 when the Cotswolds and Mid-Suffolk, with rates of 41 and 40 per 100,000 respectively, in Tier 2?

The answer is that government scientists have constructed the evidence for the tiered system in a way that ignores the success of lockdown. For a region to be in Tier 2, they want to see (a) low rates, (b) falling rates, and (c) sufficient hospital capacity. The second two of these are a given in most of the country after nearly four weeks of lockdown, so it all depends on the rate of infection being low. A graph published by the government on Thursday suggests that they are looking for the rate to be below 100 per 100,000 people (the places to the left of the line are those where the infection rate has fallen).

Based on current figures, this should include Dorset, Huntingdonshire, Suffolk, Sussex, South Cambridgeshire and many other places. But SAGE are not using current figures. They are using figures from 19 November and comparing them to figures from 12 November. This is a big problem because the data from 19 November do not tell us what was happening on 19 November, let alone what is happening now.

People don’t typically ask for a test unless they have symptoms, and it can take up to ten days for an infected person to become symptomatic. They then have to request a test and take it. All this takes time and creates a delay between infections occurring and infections being reported. After Wales introduced its ‘firebreak’ on 23 October, for example, the number of cases rose for a week before they began to drop - and they kept dropping for a week after it ended. This is to be expected and it was the same in the Czech Republic, France, Israel and many other countries. Now that we have mass testing, we can see it more clearly than we did in the spring.

By using data from 19 November to decide which areas should go into each of the three tiers, the government is, in effect, using infection data from 12 November, only a week after lockdown began. The number of infections had fallen by 25 per cent by 19 November and will continue to fall at a similar rate until 9 December, but the government has made no attempt to account for the subsequent decline.

Any honest attempt to put regions in the appropriate tier would estimate what the infection rate will be when the lockdown ends, not what it was three weeks ago. SAGE are no strangers to predictive modelling, but on this occasion they decided to base their decision on what happened in the past.  

Contrast this with the decision to go into the lockdown on October 31. The number of new infections had been flat for a week and many of the areas of greatest concern, such as Liverpool and Manchester, were seeing a decline. The government nevertheless introduced a national lockdown off the back of a ‘reasonable worst case scenario’ which, according to Prof Neil Ferguson, assumed that the infection rate was high and the tiered system was having ‘minimal impact’. With these implausible assumptions fed into it, the computer model pointed to lockdown. What else could it do? Garbage in, garbage out.

Making predictions seems to be fine if it deprives us of our liberty, but is unthinkable when it comes to restoring it. The common denominator is an almost pathological desire by government scientists to promote lockdowns at the expense of less costly options.

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Think of the children, ban all advertising

With the government leaving us all to rot until Easter and systematically dismantling the pub trade, the clown show of 'public health' almost offers light relief. 

The nanny state fanatics have yet to get their ban on 'junk food' advertising ban over the line in the UK, but they are already eyeing up the next opportunity to extend their control. They lobbied for the ad ban with the usual 'think of the children' excuse. Earlier this year, the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission of self-appointed do-gooders, including international quango queen Helen Clark, (self-)published an article in the Lancet titled 'A future for the world's children?' which included a section on marketing.

Companies make huge profits from marketing products directly to children and promoting addictive or unhealthy commodities, including fast foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, alcohol, and tobacco, all of which are major causes of non-communicable diseases.

Because you can't move these days without seeing alcohol and tobacco being marketed 'directly to children', can you?

 

As we have seen with tobacco, and increasingly with food, the zealots insist that children cannot be 'protected' from advertising without advertising being banned entirely. That will always be the longterm goal, not least because they don't want adults seeing adverts for things of which they disapprove either. 

This week, an academic from New Zealand by the name of Darren Powell has written to the Lancet, accusing the Commission of not being extreme enough.

The WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission identified an important threat to children's health and futures by stating that children across the globe are exposed to exploitative advertising and marketing by the private sector. Fast food and sugar-sweetened beverages, alcohol, tobacco, e-cigarettes, breastmilk substitutes, and gambling, were positioned as the key products that children are increasingly exposed to and harmed byy [breastmilk substitutes are life-saving and their advertisements are obviously not aimed at children - CJS]. However, by focusing on the marketing of particular so-called unhealthy products, the Commission has made a critical oversight. They failed to acknowledge that all marketing to children is potentially harmful to children's health.

It's not about health, is it? It's about capitalism.

...researchers and policy makers must shift the focus from merely the so-called unhealthy products that are being marketed to children and towards all products and industries—food, toys, clothing, technology, sports equipment, entertainment, and more.

He wants no advertising of anything ever because 'marketing strategies in general shape children's emotional, mental, and spiritual selves', which he evidently thinks is a job best left to progressive academics. 

Aghast at being out-woked, the Commission has written back to insist that they are on the same wavelength. They are just being strategic.

We thank Darren Powell for his insightful feedback. Members of the WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission agree with Powell that marketing of any products to children might encourage potentially harmful consumption for the child, the planet, and children's futures, and that more work in both academic and political spheres is needed to highlight the risks.

 

... Our proposal to add an Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on commercial marketing of harmful products was designed to serve as a first step in protecting children from those who would sell them a lifetime of ill health.

 

... Beginning with overt threats to physical and mental health would seem wise. It will be hard enough to tackle opposition from corporations promoting health-harming products. Imagine trying to fight opposition from a large coalition of companies that range from toys and games to technology and household products.

 

Don't say you weren't warned, toy, game, technology and household product manufacturers.

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