Check out the new episode of Last Orders with Mark Birbeck, co-founder of the Our Fight campaign, as we discuss why we shouldn't be banning smoking or pro-Palestine marches. If you still haven't subscribed, you can listen here, but this is episode 83 so you really should have subscribed by now.
Wednesday 1 May 2024
Last Orders with Mark Birbeck
Monday 29 April 2024
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill echo chamber
When I mentioned the ludicrously one-sided Tobacco and Vapes Bill committee last week, I speculated about who would be called to give 'evidence'...
We shall see who gives oral evidence next week. I would guess it'll be Debs from ASH plus someone from the Department of Health, a local public health director and one of the other sockpuppet NGOs like FRESH.
The list has now been published. Sure enough, Debs will be first up to speak tomorrow morning alongside Sheila Duffy (ASH Scotland) and someone from Cancer Research UK (which funds ASH). Ailsa Rutter (CEO of FRESH) will appear in the afternoon alongside local public health director half-wit Greg Fell and a host of prohibitionist academics including Robert West, Linda Bauld and Ann McNeill.
On Wednesday, the MPs will be treated to the thoughts of England's chief medical officer Chris Whitty plus the chief medical officers from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. A couple of NHS mandarins are also on the bill. Anna Gilmore will make her inevitable appearance in the afternoon.
It doesn't stop there. They've also got someone from the godawful Local Government Association and various representatives from big charities, including Age UK for some reason (perhaps they will be talking about what happens when only pensioners are allowed to buy tobacco). The general secretary of the teachers' union NASWUT will also be making an appearance.
The only person who vaguely represents the private sector is Adrian Simpson of the British Retail Consortium. He is also among the small handful of speakers who are not funded by the state. There will be no one representing smokers and no one making the case for personal freedom, although they have found space for an obscure PhD student, Laura Young, who wants to ban disposable vapes.
My 1st first authored publication, and it's in @ScienceMagazine about disposable vapes! An honour to pull this together with leading scientists to discuss the rise of disposable tech!💻♻️❌@RebeccaCarrotte @markmiodownik @TSuenamiDawson @Imogennapper https://t.co/XxuIH2JeCG
— Laura Young (@LessWasteLaura) April 25, 2024
You just have to laugh, really. The Chinese Communist Party makes more of an effort to appear pluralist than this government. The only consolation is that the prohibitionist MPs will be stuck in this echo chamber listening to the same clichés for two solid days. I hope it feels like a lifetime.
Friday 26 April 2024
Tobacco and Vapes Bill - another stitch up
Desperate to rush the Tobacco and Vapes Bill through Parliament before anyone can think about it too carefully, the government is taking it to the committee stage next week. There is no chance of anyone asking awkward questions because none of the 17 MPs on the committee voted against it.
As Guido reports...
16 of the 17 committee members voted for the bill and the one who didn’t, Labour MP Mary Kelly Foy, is vice-chairman of the APPG on Smoking and Health which has been pushing the ban constantly. Almost a quarter of the committee members are from the APPG, which is run by the anti-smoking lobby group ASH. Sorry news for MPs who hoped amendments might be considered fairly…
Simon Clark, director of smokers’ rights group Forest tells Guido: “Committees don’t need to be balanced but this is such an obvious stitch-up it’s embarrassing. The make-up of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill Committee is effectively a f*ck you to every MP who voted against the Bill, and every member of the public who opposes the generational smoking ban.” It wouldn’t be the first time the government has deployed smoke and mirrors for this bill…
Four of the 17 MPs are on ASH's APPG (which was originally called the All-Party Group on Action on Smoking and Health), including its chairman Bob Blackman. I can only assume that Mary Kelly Foy didn't vote for the Bill because she wasn't in London at the time.
This is obviously a stitch up. Everyone
knows the Bill is going to be rammed through on a tide of
virtue-signalling from political pygmies, but they don't need to make it
this obvious. Is the government so fearful of opposition that it won't allow a single dissenting or sceptical voice?
We shall see who gives oral evidence next week. I would guess it'll be Debs from ASH plus someone from the Department of Health, a local public health director and one of the other sockpuppet NGOs like FRESH.
The House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee recently held its 'evidence sessions' and kicked off with Chris van Tulleken, Henry Dimbleby and Tim Spector, all of whom will be familiar with anyone who is up to speed with modern diet entrepreneurs. Also in the first sessions were Katharine Jenner (Food Foundation/Action on Sugar), Anna Taylor (Obesity Health Alliance), Fran Bernhard (Sustain), Rob Percival (Soil Association) and a host of lesser known academics whose bias is obvious from their tweets, such as...
Nikita Sinclair (Imperial College)
Is it fair for the largest food industry players to make most of their money selling cheap, unhealthy food - with big advertising budgets behind these sales often seemingly targeting children and young people? @BiteBack2030 youth movement don’t think so & neither do I! https://t.co/jy8gHgXbs2
— Nikita Sinclair (@nikitasinclair) February 23, 2024
Wendy Wills (University of Hertfordshire)
Say no to food industry sponsorship. http://t.co/mHppnFDZ3p
— Professor Wendy Wills (@Wendy_J_Wills) May 20, 2014
Amelia A Lake, (Teesside University)
The interlocking directorate smoking industry & food industry - highlighted by @ModiMwatsama #cancerpreventiondiet #cancerprevention @CRUKresearch pic.twitter.com/qdurXIAhEi
— Prof Amelia A Lake (@Lakenutrition) December 4, 2018
The difference is that the House of Lords committee is essentially a vanity project in the second chamber whereas the Tobacco and Vapes Bill committee is responsible for crafting good legislation. What a joke.
Thursday 25 April 2024
More useless alcohol modelling
The 'public health' lobby has been spinning plates this week, trying to exploit the UK's rise in alcohol-specific deaths while claiming that minimum pricing is saving lives. Meanwhile, Colin Angus has admitted that a model he produced in 2022 completely failed to predict what was about to happen.
I've written about all this for The Critic...
The increase in deaths in 2022 is more of a puzzle. Although there were no Covid restrictions, higher rates of consumption among some drinkers continued. There is some evidence that the figure for 2023 will be lower, but there is no sign of it coming down to pre-Covid levels. The number of people drinking a dangerous amount of alcohol (not just exceeding the Chief Medical Officer’s ridiculous guidelines, but actually drinking more than is good for them) is still higher than in 2019.
The neo-temperance lobby has reacted in predictable fashion. Richard Piper, CEO of Alcohol Change UK, called for “proper regulation of alcohol marketing, clearer alcohol labelling, and a minimum price for a unit of alcohol”. In Scotland, where the alcohol-specific death rate is 56 per cent higher than in England, the state-funded pressure group Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems demanded “a package of measures which tackle pricing, marketing and availability of alcohol on a population-wide scale”.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You can’t blame campaigners for not letting a crisis go to waste, but there are some glaring problems with both the diagnosis and the prescription here.
Firstly, Scotland already has a minimum price for alcohol...
An interesting sidenote is that Angus's model assumed that alcohol consumption rose during the pandemic. In fact, it fell. So why did he think it had risen? Because the number of problem drinkers had risen. It's circular logic based on blind faith in the single distribution theory. He and his team then modelled every conceivable scenario, including everybody returning to their pre-pandemic levels of drinking, nobody returning to their pre-pandemic levels of drinking, everybody drinking more than they did in 2020 and everybody drinking less than they did in 2019. Every model has been shown to be completely, hopelessly wrong. The proverbial dart-throwing chimp could have done a better job.
This garbage was funded by the supposedly cash-strapped NHS. As I say in the article, what was the point? Even if its predictions had been accurate, it wouldn't have helped in any way.
Thursday 18 April 2024
Libertarian prohibitionists - you've heard it all now
I wasn't going to write about the tobacco ban again for a while, but the ludicrous spectacle of prohibitionists purporting to be champions of liberty has set me off.
Their logic is that smoking is so addictive that it restricts freedom. They claim that smokers do not actually want to smoke, but were foolish enough to get hooked in childhood and are now unable to quit. And so, despite the evidence of your eyes and ears, it is the people who keep banning things who are standing up for freedom while libertarians support enslavement.
This was the message of a slightly Orwellian editorial in The Times yesterday which explicitly described smoking as “enslavement” and described the right to smoke as “a fake freedom”. It was the message of Deborah Arnott, the CEO of the Department of Health’s sockpuppet pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), who said: “Smoking is not a free choice. It is an addiction.” And it was the message of public health minister Andrea Leadsom who told the House of Commons that “this is not about freedom to choose; it is about freedom from addiction.” The words ‘addiction’ and ‘addicted’ were mentioned 83 times in that parliamentary debate.
I have already conceded that giving up nicotine is more difficult than giving up cupcakes (although Chris van Tulleken may disagree). But the rhetoric around addiction this week has reached a different level. We have been told that smoking is not only a difficult habit for some people to break, but is almost impossible, so much so that smokers “face a lifetime of addiction”, as Bob Blackman MP put it, and that while smokers might say that they want to purchase tobacco, they actually do not.
It is difficult to reconcile this with figures from the Office for National Statistics which show that 69 per cent of all the people in England who have ever smoked are now non-smokers. Andrea Leadsom is one of them. Despite claiming in her speech that people who take up smoking can look forward to “a life of addiction to nicotine”, she also mentioned that she gave up a 40-a-day habit when she was 21. Deborah Arnott is also an ex-smoker. She only gave up after she got the job at ASH. I suppose it wouldn’t have been a good look.
Read the rest at The Critic.
Regarding that Orwellian Times editorial. Let's remember what they say about banning tobacco sales completely for when they inevitably support total prohibition in a few years' time.
And let's give a shout out to Peter Hitchens who doesn't think nicotine (or anything else) is addictive, but wants to ban smoking anyway because he doesn't like it and he thinks he knows best. At least he's honest about it.
A swift half with Adrian Chiles
You won't want to miss the new episode of The Swift Half in which I talk to broadcaster and Guardian super-columnist Adrian Chiles about drinking.
Tuesday 16 April 2024
The hazards of unopened cigarette packs
Proving that there is no end to 'public health' hysteria, some quackademics in South Korea are warning that unopened cigarette packs put nicotine into the atmosphere and need to be regulated. I wish I was making this up. See my Substack for more.
Our findings indicate that packaged, unopened, and uncombusted cigarettes in cigarette racks at tobacco retailers emits airborne nicotine, which is a previously unrecognized source of nicotine exposure. This result has implications for policy considerations, such as the potential installation of ventilation systems on cigarette racks or the exploration of alternative packaging methods.
Also, check out the new episode of Last Orders.
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