Christopher Snowdon's Blog, page 4

Following Australia down the road to ruin

I've written about the Tobacco and Vapes Bill for the Telegraph . We must never forget how stupid and reckless this legislation is. 

Illicit vapes and counterfeit cigarettes are being sold more or less openly on high streets up and down the country.  We have the second highest cigarette taxes in Europe (after Ireland) and the government is on the cusp of introducing the Tobacco and Vapes Bill which will ban a growing number of adults from buying tobacco products from 1 January 2027. Even the Australians haven’t been daft enough to dabble with this form of prohibition. 

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill will also allow the government to restrict the flavours of legal vapes, thereby giving the black market a lucrative new niche. Not content with banning disposable vapes last month, the government is going to double the cost of using refillable e-cigarettes by imposing a tax of £2.20 (plus VAT) per bottle next year.

If you wanted to make a bad situation worse, you could hardly design a better set of policies than this. Sales of legal cigarettes nearly halved between 2021 and 2024 despite the number of smokers only falling by 5 per cent. It is obvious that the illicit market picked up the slack and yet HMRC claims that only one in ten cigarettes smoked in Britain is illegal. Reassured by such Panglossian factoids, virtue-signalling politicians have given the Tobacco and Vapes Bill minimal scrutiny and are patting themselves on the back for creating a “smoke-free Britain”. It is a fantasy bordering on madness. 

They have picked the worst time to be complacent. The police are too busy to play whack-a-mole with Britain’s countless illicit tobacco retailers. A £2 billion drop in tobacco duty revenue has already been added to Rachel Reeves’ black hole. For the time being, the violence associated with Britain’s booming black market tobacco trade is less visible than Australia’s but it will only take a bit more prodding from guileless politicians for it to come out of the shadows.

 

 

 

The commercial determinants of health?

I've written a two-parter on my Substack about an issue of a journal, guest edited by Chris van Tulleken, dedicated to the "commercial determinants of health" and - his main obsession - "conflicts of interest".

In part one I look at van Tulleken's contribution.

In part two, I look at articles by Lord Bethell, Anna Gilmore, May van Schalkwyk, and others.

Alcohol advertising ban on the way?

The government is reportedly looking at a ban on alcohol advertising, although on current trends it will probably do a U-turn on that too.

I wrote about it for The Critic and discussed the evidence for alcohol ad bans (there isn't much of it) with Reem at the IEA. I wrote about the evidence based two years ago in this report.  

It took Keir Starmer less than a year to dash what few hopes we had of him. There was talk of the Labour Party having more room to manoeuvre on public sector reform than the tentative Tories. It was assumed that the state of the public finances would leave the government with no choice but to tighten its belt. Withdrawing the Winter Fuel Allowance from wealthier pensioners was largely symbolic, but it showed that Sir Keir was prepared to take tough decisions. 

All that fell apart upon contact with the first set of local elections. What we have instead is yet more borrowing, much more spending, and the hope that the economy will somehow grow. It is Sunakism with a dash of socialist spite directed at farmers and private schools. 

Rishi Sunak left a bunch of displacement policies behind him and the new government has been dutifully pushing them through Parliament, but Starmer can’t rely on this stockpile for much longer. The Pet Abduction Act is already law. The Football Governance Bill has had its third reading. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill is in the House of Lords. There is a danger that the well of headline-grabbing policies that are cheap to implement but ultimately futile runs dry. 

And so Labour’s policy wonks have had a pow-wow and come up with the idea of banning alcohol advertising. What could be more Sunakian? According to the Telegraph, health officials are “exploring options for partial restrictions to bring [alcohol promotion] closer in line with advertising of unhealthy food”. It is rumoured that a ban of some sort will be part of Wes Streeting’s optimistically titled Ten Year Plan for the NHS next week. 

  

European Commission comes after vapers again

A leaked document reveals that the European Commission has some dramatic plans for EU-wide taxes on vapes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches. It predicts that its proposed vape tax of €3.60 per bottle will wipe out 40% of the market. They say that like it's a good thing. It's time to fight again.

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

The idea that the Commission is driven by health concerns goes for a Burton when the report moves on to vapes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches. It wants to tax all these too, even though various member states do not. The case for leaving them alone is simple: they are much less dangerous than cigarettes and if you tax them, fewer people will use them to give up smoking. 

On the other hand, governments lose tobacco duty revenue when people quit smoking and that is what really worries the European Commission. The leaked report openly states that one of its “specific objectives” is to “discourage tax induced substitution between different tobacco products and their substitutes”. This is an extraordinary admission. They know that price is one of the factors that leads people to switch from smoking to vaping and they think that this is a bad thing! 

The report proposes a minimum tax on vape juice of €3.60 per 10ml bottle. To put this in context, a bottle of e-cigarette fluid in the UK typically costs £2 or £3 and can sometimes be as cheap as £1. The Commission is proposing that the cost of vaping should at least double. It expects a €3.60 tax to reduce sales by 40 per cent which would be the ruin of many independent vape shops but a boon to the cigarette business.

 

We're doctors, we say what we want

Ian Gilmore has been mouthing off in the letters section of the Financial Times. I have written about it for The Critic ... 

Prof Ian Gilmore, who runs the neo-temperance pressure group the Alcohol Health Alliance, is cheesed off with the chief executive of the brewer Asahi for saying that while he is “absolutely not denying that there are risks” associated with drinking, there is also “lots of evidence” that moderate alcohol consumption can have health and wellbeing benefits. For this measured and inarguable contribution to an article about how the alcohol industry could be facing its “tobacco moment”, Prof Gilmore has accused him — not unpredictably — of using a “tactic” from Big Tobacco’s “playbook”:

As a biomedical scientist and liver specialist, I know of no credible, independent expert in the field who would support these statements of disinformation.

Really?! Not a single one? What about the countless epidemiologists who have identified clear reductions in heart disease, stroke and diabetes risk among moderate drinkers for decades in every corner of the world? What about the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine which confirmed last year, for the umpteenth time, that moderate drinking reduces the risk of premature mortality? What about Professor Sir Richard Doll, one of the legends of public health, who concluded in 2002 that “the inverse relationship between ischemic heart disease and the consumption of small or moderate amounts of alcohol is, for the most part, causal” and should “now be regarded as proved”? Hell, even the Chief Medical Officer’s cherry-picked panel of anti-alcohol academics who lowered the drinking guidelines in 2016 had to admit that there were some health benefits from moderate alcohol consumption. 

 

Snowdon on Fire at Will

I returned to the Spectator's Fire at Will podcast this week with Will Kingston, talking the nanny state. And you can hear more from Will on next week's episode of Last Orders if all goes to plan.

 

YouGov and outdoor smoking bans

Because of course they do. 

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

One of the worst things about campaign groups being funded by the government is that the campaigning never ends. Grassroots pressure groups eventually get tired or run out of money or decide that enough is enough. There comes a time when voluntary activists want to get back to their day job. For the state-funded lobbyist, however, activism is their day job and they must always find new dragons to slay. Combine this with the mentality of what C. S. Lewis called the omnipotent moral busybody and you have someone who will “torment us without end”.

The hateful and vindictive pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), which has relieved taxpayers of millions of pounds since its inception in 1971, is staffed by such people. At their request, the government is currently legislating for the gradual prohibition of tobacco, but ASH are not the types to let the grass grow under their feet. No sooner had politicians capitulated to their last unreasonable demand before they were back for more. 

When the French government announced a ban on outdoor smoking “where there are children” on Friday, ASH immediately commissioned a poll from YouGov to test the water in Britain. People who do YouGov polls seem to be a particularly joyless and intolerant bunch. In November 2022, when COVID-19 was a fading memory and Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister, 61 per cent of respondents to a YouGov poll wanted the government to force people to wear face masks on public transport and 20 per cent wanted to bring back the “rule of six”. Two-thirds of respondents to another YouGov poll said they preferred staying in to going out. Half of them want to ban vapes completely and a third of them are teetotallers, as compared to a fifth of the general public. 

 Read the rest. 

 

'Junk food' advertising ban delayed, nanny state fat cat responds

The government pushed back the 'junk food' advertising ban last week. It was meant to start in October but has been postponed for a few months while the government sorts the legislation out.  Greg Fell from the Association of Directors of Public Health is not happy. Regular readers will recall that Mr Fell is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he has the say-anything, do-anything attitude that gets you the top jobs in 'public health'. Let's see what he had to say... 

“89% of deaths in England are caused by illnesses and disease which are linked to the consumption of unhealthy food and drink. The simple fact is that these deaths, including from many cancers, respiratory, heart and liver disease, are preventable.

 Boom! How's that for a lie to kick things off? Go big or go home.  
It is obviously not true that 89% of deaths are caused by the consumption of 'unhealthy food and drink'. If you click on the link that he provides you will find that: "In 2019, 88.8% of deaths in England were attributable to NCDs." NCDs are non-communicable diseases. That is what you die from if you don't die from an infectious disease, suicide, murder or an accident. In a perfect world, the figure would be 100%. Are some of those NCDs related to diet? Yes. Is 89% the correct figure? No. Nowhere near. The second sentence is almost as misleading. NCDs can be prevented, but only through the spread of infectious disease and violence. 

“The consumption of unhealthy food and drink is not the result of personal choice. The reality is that with healthy alternatives around three times as expensive as unhealthy options, and our consumption habits heavily influenced by clever advertising and marketing campaigns that are backed by multi-million pound budgets, we simply don’t have the freedom to choose.

 People choose what they eat so the first sentence is untrue and the size of advertising budgets does not make that choice any less free. The second sentence is also untrue. Fell is just repeating some nonsense from the Food Foundation that I have written about before. 

“There is no quick fix, but we know from our experience of tackling tobacco harm, that one of the key ways to reduce illness and death caused by harmful products is to introduce tighter restrictions on advertising those products.

 Fell is using the anti-tobacco playbook because he has no credible evidence that the upcoming ban will work.
 

“There is a wealth of evidence to say that this will work and yet a comprehensive ban has been repeatedly delayed.

 The evidence provided by campaigners for this ban is, in fact, piss poor. The evidence for banning ads for 'less healthy' food on TV is atrocious and the evidence for banning it online is non-existent. 

“Again, we just need to look back at how the tobacco industry lobbied to retain their influence to see that the industry giants behind harmful food and drink are using the same tactics. To reduce the numbers of people dying from avoidable disease – something this Government has promised to do – industry voices must be taken out of the equation and the advertising ban should be introduced as planned.”

 Accusing industries of using the tobacco playbook is a core part of the anti-tobacco playbook. The reason the ban has been delayed is that the legislation was botched because the government spent too much time listening to the likes of Greg Fell and too little time speaking to people who do something useful for a living. In any case, advertisers and broadcasters have agreed not to show adverts for 'less healthy' food from October as part of a voluntary agreement. What page of the tobacco playbook is that on?

Shroud-waving as a basis for public policy

Shroud-waving is a terrible basis for public policy. We all know this. We know that hard cases make bad law. Being a victim of a terrible crime or a rare disease or a freak accident does not make you an expert on policy-making. Being the relative of a victim does not give you a unique ability to understand a contentious issue. On the contrary, it makes you uniquely susceptible to action bias and much less able than the average person to soberly evaluate trade-offs.

There are times when it is especially important to point this out, but they are the very moments when emotions are running at their hottest and the speaker of blunt truths is most likely to be accused of being heartless. It is an intimidating atmosphere and it is intended to be. That is how the emotional blackmail works. Whichever liberty millions of people are expected to give up seems small when compared to the horror that the victim has suffered. Who would want to add to their pain? For that reason, the immediate trigger for this article will go unmentioned. The point is general anyway.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.

Last Orders - now in colour

You may have noticed that I don't plug Last Orders episodes here any more. That's because we've been doing it for years and if you haven't subscribed yet, you probably never will. 

But I should point out that we've been filming the show for some time now, so if YouTube is more your kind of thing, you can watch it there. Here's the latest episode...