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The unstoppable rise of the nanny state, with Christopher Snowdon
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Across the Anglosphere, governments on both sides of politics have never been more interested in the personal lives of their citizens. The nanny state thrives from Australia to the United Kingdom, and even in that traditional bastion of freedom, the USA.
Christopher Snowdon is the UK’s leading warrior against the excesses of the nanny state. He is the Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, the author of six books, the editor of the Nanny State Index, and the co-host of the brilliant “Last Orders” podcast from Spiked.
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Read The Spectator Australia here.
Visit Christopher's website here.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Fire at Will'
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston.
Critique of Political Hypocrisy
00:00:26
Speaker
In his first rally speech, as Kamala Harris' running mate Tim Waltz said,
00:00:31
Speaker
in wisconsin we respect our neighbours and the personal choices they make because we know there's a golden rule mind your own damn business Great sentiment, but comically hypocritical and misleading. Across the Anglosphere, governments on both sides of politics have never been more interested in the personal lives of their citizens than any state thrives from Australia to the United Kingdom and even in that bastion of freedom, the US.
Christopher Snowden on Government Intervention
00:00:59
Speaker
Christopher Snowden is the UK's leading warrior against the excesses of the nanny state. He is the head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, the author of six books, the editor of the Nanny State Index, and the co-host of the brilliant Last Orders podcast from Spiked. Chris, welcome to Fire at Will. Thank you, got very nice introduction, Will. My pleasure. There was an assumption in that introduction, though, an assertion, and that was that We are at a low ebb when it comes to nanny-statism. When you look across not just the UK, but you look across the West more generally, would you agree with that? Is government intervention as bad as it's ever been in modern history? ah since Since the war, I would say, yeah, I mean, the US had full on alcohol prohibition for 14 years. So things have been worse in in parts of the West. But yeah, there was I think after prohibition around the world already. But remember, it wasn't just America that had prohibition. A lot of places did pass Scandinavia.
00:01:56
Speaker
New Zealand and Australia very nearly did. They had very close referendums on the issue. And they were parts of of the UK, which were pretty keen on on the temperance lobby. um But after you prohibition so catastrophically fell apart in 1933, I think there was a gradual loosening and and relaxation of these kind of lifestyle freedoms that went on for most of the 20th century.
Shift in Public Health Focus
00:02:16
Speaker
and Possibly part of that was kind of due to the the Cold War in a sense that the West needed to show that it believed in in freedom. And then from, I don't know, that The very end of the 20th century, I guess, you know the the the late 20th century, when the World Health Organization in particular got more involved in the idea that some you health wasn't just the absence of disease, but it was a sort of a human right, and that it was the
00:02:42
Speaker
what they now call non-communicable diseases, were the real threats and that it was the lifestyle factors behind those diseases ah that really needed tackling now that infectious disease in the West had been pretty much eradicated. So yeah, I mean, I think that for a large part of the 20th century, things were pretty good if you wanted to eat what you wanted and drink what you want and smoke. um But there has been an increasingly rapid kind of turn back on that, including, as you say, in the USA. A million dollar question is why? So I understand that it's not just governments, it is also international bodies like the WHO that are now pushing more intrusive agendas around health and lifestyle. But what actually are the driving forces in our modern age, which makes these people more keen to tell you how to live your life
00:03:30
Speaker
Well, I think it's important to note that there have always been people like that. I'm not sure there are necessarily any more people who are kind of aggressively paternalistic than there've been in the past. Over the course of history, you could say that, generally speaking, religion provided cover for that kind of attitude. I think there are I've
Paternalistic Motivations in Public Health
00:03:46
Speaker
heard several reasons. but One of them is that the public health movement, as it did successfully deal with infectious diseases, needed to find new dragons to slay. and Initially, the main one was smoking, and as smoking has been become you know and increasingly
00:04:01
Speaker
fatally wounded dragon, there has been a desire amongst people who've been tackling smoking to apply the same kind of policies to drink, to gambling, to ultra-process food, sugary drinks, and so on, and vapes. So there is that, and it's also, it's a question of resources, really. You know, I think there have always been plenty of people who are paternalistic, some of whom would support coercion.
00:04:21
Speaker
There are plenty of people who are very libertarian, think we should roll back the state, and there's loads of people in the middle who aren't that bothered either way unless it directly affects
Libertarian Struggles with Government Overreach
00:04:29
Speaker
them. The question is, how does that play out in in policymaking and lobbying? And in practice,
00:04:36
Speaker
the the paternalistic side of winning because they're getting a lot of money, mainly from the government, but from some billionaires as well, whereas the libertarian side aren't really getting anything except from some of the affected industries sometimes on a rather sporadic basis. And so consumers are kind of left in a position in which they're hoping that the industry fights their battles for them, which industry doesn't necessarily do very well. And in any case, the industry hasn't always got its consumers' best interests at heart. It's got its own profits to pursue. And that may be in line with consumers' desires insofar as, you know, if you're dealing with literally with prohibition as we are now with tobacco in the UK, clearly consumers of tobacco and producer tobacco both have an interest in keeping it legal. But that's not always the case. And sometimes you get industry
00:05:22
Speaker
lobbying for their kind of short-term self-interest in a way that doesn't benefit consumers. So it's
Funding and Policy Influence in Public Health
00:05:27
Speaker
not ideal. The government doesn't give consumers groups any money at all. It gives the public health side quite a bit of money. And so just on a pound-for-pound basis, you're going to hear much more from the public health than you do from consumers.
00:05:40
Speaker
Understand that, but I still sometimes struggle as to why the libertarian side can't put up a better fight. I remember that old PJ Rourke quote that said something along the lines of being a libertarian means wanting to get high, have sex, and save money at the same time, and really, who doesn't?
00:05:58
Speaker
and you know I think there is a good story to tell around freedom, but it just feels to me like you don't actually hear many really strong voices for being allowed to do what you want to do to the extent it doesn't hurt other people. Why do we find it so difficult to argue for freedom in today's day and age? um I think there is. a a growing climate of opinion against freedom, really, and not just in this area, but you we've been talking a lot in recent days about freedom of speech, which seems to be going out of fashion. All these things are chipped away at incrementally. There have some been some exceptions. You started off with the reference to abortion. you know Abortion seems to be the only thing that you can say
00:06:38
Speaker
yeah My body, my choice, everything else, it's my body, the government's command. And and things like gay rights, you know that something that has just come on leaps and bounds on of the great libertarian success stories of the last 50 or 60 years. But when it comes to this health stuff, it seems to be played by different rules. um There are a lot of people who seem to genuinely believe that so-called unhealthy lifestyles put a direct burden on them as taxpayers, particularly through the health service, um which for various reasons I've gone into many, many times before is is generally not true. But if people are persuaded that they have a financial stake in other people's behaviour, then it makes them more likely to interfere.
00:07:13
Speaker
in other people's behaviour. And also, yeah generally speaking, you're dealing with minorities, and most people drink, and obviously most people will consume ultra-processed foods, but most people do not smoke, most people do not vape, most people don't even gamble except on the on the lottery.
00:07:29
Speaker
And so it's very easy for these kind of policy fields to turn into a bit of a circular firing squad in which the majority keeps having a go at minorities because it doesn't directly affect them. And you need to see the bigger picture. really yeah The slippery slope is obviously a very real thing. If you you look over the last 20 or 30 years, every warning about the slippery slope has been proven to be correct.
Addiction vs. Liberty Debate
00:07:51
Speaker
And so although you may not necessarily, for example, smoke yourself,
00:07:54
Speaker
If you see tobacco being put in plain packaging and, but you know, having incredible excise tax put on it, and ultimately being prohibited, you as a consumer of whatever it may be, casinos, sugary drinks, whole-meal bread, which is apparently ultra-processed food, um yeah you should be concerned the direction of travel here. You know, freedom, I think, is indivisible. You're right, there aren't enough people making the principled stand against this or talking about the the economics of it as I try to do. Yeah, I wish there were more people like me fighting the battle. I can only assume that, like I said before, they they don't have the resources. I'm fortunate enough to work for a think tank. And maybe they're just battling other things.
00:08:33
Speaker
In 2017, you released a book called Killjoys, where you basically took that first principles argument for liberty. and In doing so, you actually looked at a few of the key classic arguments for what the nanny status put forward to regulate what are at the moment still legal activities like eating sugary food or drinking alcohol or for the moment smoking cigarettes.
00:08:58
Speaker
I want to take a couple of them and tee them up for you to to knock them down. The first one is with each of these, but particularly with things like drugs and alcohol, we are dealing with addictive substances. That means therefore that your agency is limited. And if you're a real addict, some would argue you don't have agency, you don't have the ability to make free choice or make make free choices. So it's up to the government to step in and compel behavior change. How do you respond to that argument?
00:09:27
Speaker
I think I give it a bit of credit in the book in that, you know, what what we want as free market liberals is for people to be making informed and rational decisions. And to some extent, addiction is going to affect the rationality side of that. I'm not someone who denies that addiction exists like Peter Hitchens. I am happily addicted to nicotine, for example. and The question is,
00:09:50
Speaker
you know What is the greater infringement on liberty? Is it being so-called addicted, which actually is quite hard to define and has been overextended to things like sugar? Or is it being banned from buying it completely? It seems fairly obvious to me that you are less free if you are banned from buying something completely than if you are addicted. The reality is in the UK, of all the people alive who have ever smoked, 70% of them no longer smoke.
00:10:13
Speaker
So I'm not saying that there is no, you know, there's no difficulty in quitting, although some people don't seem to have any problem, but clearly it is not an insurmountable mountain. yeah I was on the TV the other day with, I think it was Jeremy Karl and Deborah Arnett, the head of Ash, and the three of us, we all were used to smoking. None of us do anymore. And they were saying, well, we must buy it because it's so addictive. No one could ever quit. And we've we've got to stop people taking it off in the first place. you know I quit by by by switching to
Gambling as a Public Health Issue
00:10:43
Speaker
Vapes. I think Jeremy and Deborah just quit. So I don't see it as a sufficient argument
00:10:47
Speaker
for very heavy-handed policies, but which ultimately, when you're talking about sin taxes, and very often the first thing that politicians go for is, let's put a big tax on this. That seems to me, if you really believe these things are incredibly addictive, that seems to be more exploitative than anything else. If you really think people aren't going to give up, the why yeah why are you putting huge taxes, particularly given that you know that most yeah the number of people consuming these products, they're disproportionately in the the fora or you know middle-income groups in the first place. So I accept the point about addiction. I think it has been overextended enormously. and Obviously, people find it quite a persuasive argument. It was never really used, actually, even in tobacco control until they um until the There seems to have been an incredibly powerful driver ever since. So naturally, people are ah keen to say, you know but at the moment, for example, they're they're trying to hugely exaggerate the number of problem gamblers in Britain.
00:11:40
Speaker
um to make gambling a public health issue, and they talk a lot about how how alcohol is addictive. I think the concept of addiction can be over-applied. I think there's some truth to it in that it doesn't yeah you're not fully rational, as it were, if you really are addicted to something, but yeah there's lots of ways in which people are less than rational. It doesn't necessarily justify the coercion. That's the question. You can accept there might be um some limitation or free will, but you then go to say, well, what what are these people putting up as a solution to that? And the solution they're putting up are actually much more restrictive and free. You said there that activists have been trying to get gambling, rate problem gambling, redefined as a public health issue rather than a mental health issue.
00:12:24
Speaker
What's the rationale there? Why are they doing that? Well, it's interesting, isn't it? I think because I mean, gambling really isn't a health issue, let alone a public health issue. It is a it's a leisure activity. And insofar as people get themselves into trouble with it, it's by losing money, you the harm.
00:12:39
Speaker
is spending more money than you can afford, which of course you can do with all sorts of other leisure activities as well. I find it quite interesting that it's being presented as a public health issue because it confirms what I've always suspected about these people, which is that they are basically just moralists.
00:12:55
Speaker
yeah And if you look at what they're going after, there's not many other things they're going after that aren't mentioned in the Bible or the Quran as being vices. And they're not presented as being necessarily public health problems in in the religious texts, but the modern day.
00:13:10
Speaker
ah zealots are not coincidentally going after exactly the same kind of things, you know, gluttony, booze, gambling and and so on. So yeah, it's clearly not a public health issue. They want to treat it as a public health issue, partly because a mission creep gives them another thing to go after. There's a huge amount of money there, potentially, when the government in the UK introduces a sort of windfall tax on the gambling companies. um So there's lots of people trying to get their snouts in the trough there.
00:13:37
Speaker
And it also
Woke Ideologies and Public Health
00:13:38
Speaker
means that they can say, let's treat gambling as a public health issue. And whenever they say that about a problem, you mean you know, it's just going to mean we're going to start banning advertising, we're going to put the tax up, we're going to put labels on it, and we're just going to go down Tobacco Road again. You know, these people are so unimaginative. They treat vastly different problems with exactly the same tools, because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I want to pick up on the way that you frame the people who try and make these incursions say in gambling, for example, as moralists, as zealots. Now, I've heard an analogous argument that with the decline in religion in Western countries, particularly in, say, the UK and Australia, you've seen a correlating rise in woke ideologies because people need to have something to believe in. And the loss of, say, the decline in Christianity in the UK has seen a corresponding rise in maybe more troubling beliefs, you know, whether it be the gender stuff or racial identity politics or whatever.
00:14:34
Speaker
Do you think there's a similar point being made here that as we've seen a decline in religion, there is a corresponding rise in just other forms of slightly more warped, puritanical morality? Or am I drawing too long ago? Yeah, I mean, clearly there are similarities. You know, there's often very obvious similarities and the kind of iconoclasm of some of these protests over the last few years and pulling down the statues and something is very reminiscent of the more violent parts of the refer Reformation. um So yeah, there there are yeah And even the trans stuff is kind of similar to trans-substantiation and it's kind of just a strange, you know, spiritual beliefs, almost. And also there's the thing about, you know, if you don't believe in in heaven, then firstly, you need to make heaven on earth. And secondly, you need to make sure you live as long as possible because you don't have immortal life.
Life Extension vs. Quality of Life
00:15:23
Speaker
And you get both of those things, I think, in the modern public health industry. The absolute focus on longevity is being the be all and end all with very little reference to quality of life.
00:15:35
Speaker
So it really is just about we must extend life expectancy and must keep extending and keep extending as long as possible and anything that, you know, kills you has to be got rid of. You know, this idea that you can eradicate non-communicable diseases is absolutely bizarre. I mean, if you are healthy and live long enough, you are guaranteed to die of a non-communicable disease. and We don't want people dying of communicable diseases. and We don't want people dying from violence or accidents, which in practice are the the only alternative. You will probably die if you die, you know, how yeah people used to say dying in your sleep, dying a natural death, that's kind of gone out the window. There has to be a cause of death. And usually if you just die in your bed, in your sleep, you will be dying from heart disease, which of course is a non-communicable disease, which is connected to a bee, steam, to smoking, into various other things. And therefore the solution to people dying at 110 in their bed is to clamp down further on ultra-process food.
00:16:30
Speaker
this mentality came out really clearly and perversely during COVID where there was this just sense that people wanted to extend lifespan at all costs and the idea of quality of life was a secondary priority. And I just don't think that's always been the case.
00:16:45
Speaker
I talked about how kind of governments and agencies now are more interventionist than they ever have been, but also from a personal level, on the individual level, it feels to me like the way that we as individuals think about freedom and liberty is also very different to say what our grandparents who went to war to protect those principles would have thought about it. Do you think that's also fair? Well, the COVID experience was horrendous, a but also very interesting as a reductio out absurdum experiment in in in public health So in this instance, you actually did have an infectious disease. you know And as I say in Killjoys, you know there there is a justification for government action, potentially, when you're dealing with an infectious disease spreading around. If somebody walks into Heathrow Airport with a bowler, you wouldn't. yeah even as a fairly bold libertarian, you wouldn't necessarily say that it's fascist to be putting them in quarantine or something like that. right So infectious diseases do require a government response. That's what public health was supposed to be. Public health is supposed to be about protecting individuals from these kind of collective problems, and which sometimes does require collective action, fair enough. And so I wasn't against some of the stuff that was being done by the government during
COVID and Government Overreach
00:17:54
Speaker
COVID. It was just a question of degrees, you know, and probably most people have, you know, everyone probably has a different idea about what an appropriate response would be, but probably most people don't think that zero should have been the appropriate response, right? Even if you were just talking about the development of vaccines, which fortunately got us out of it relatively quickly. But yes, there was this, yeah let's face it, most of the people are dying of COVID were over the age of 80. And I don't want them dying of COVID, which is a horrible way to go. But nevertheless, you know to how far are you going to go to it try and extend again to try and extend
00:18:29
Speaker
ah human life and how much liberty prepared to sacrifice and how much quality of life. yeah I think now looking back on COVID, we can see all sorts of social harms. you know Drinking, for example, yeah the number of alcohol-related deaths really spiked pretty high across most of the world during the lockdowns.
00:18:47
Speaker
and hasn't gone back down since. And we've seen a lot of damage to to kids. A lot of kids have never gone back to school. yeah All sorts of these social problems. But let take the take the alcohol-related deaths, right? Now, that seems it seems fairly obvious to me that a large part of that spike in alcohol-related deaths is due to people drinking themselves to death because they're so depressed by buy the lockdowns. And yeah, during COVID, we we lost track of any kind of trade-off.
00:19:13
Speaker
between quality of life and quantity of life, if you if you like. As I said, I wasn't against even even having a lockdown for three to six weeks, but very quickly in the first lockdown, it turned into a zero COVID mentality, which yeah underlying it was this idea that we must prevent all deaths from this particular disease. And you yeah you were getting into the end of June 2020,
00:19:37
Speaker
And the BBC every day was saying, another eight people have died of COVID. And it's like, well, really, I'm sorry, but so what? Eight people? At some point in the pandemic, it was 1,500 people. It's like most of the people dying that day were from COVID. That's a problem. You've got the hospitals as well, and that's a problem. But it soon morphed into this idea that A, we can eradicate a disease, which we can't, and B, that nobody should be dying during a pandemic. And if they do, it's the government's fault.
00:20:06
Speaker
It's not not nothing to do with any kind of personal responsibility or just bad luck. It is directly the government's fault to control how many people are getting a disease and dying of it.
The Impact of Advertising on Consumer Behavior
00:20:14
Speaker
Second big argument that you aim, take aim at is effectively that advertising brain washes us. so that Us food companies and alcohol companies have this incredible power to advertise, which then effectively changes our behavior.
00:20:29
Speaker
How true is that? How powerful is advertising for food and alcohol and cigarettes and all that sort of stuff in actually changing the way that we operate or doing bad things or unhealthy things? The only people who say advertising is powerful are the people in the advertising industry and people who hate advertising. It's pretty obvious to everybody else, including most companies, advertise that advertising is a way of keeping your name out.
00:20:55
Speaker
And if you stop advertising, people do start to forget about you. There's loads of beer brands, for example, from from when I was young, which don't advertise anymore, did at the time, Hofmeister and Stones and Harp and so on. I think these beers are probably still going, but they don't do as well because they're not advertising anymore. um Are people drinking?
00:21:16
Speaker
less beer as a result of that advertising. As it happens, actually, people are drinking less beer, but that's not the reason. People are just drinking different things. What people are actually drinking more of is wine, which is very rarely advertised. So yeah, I mean, it's pretty...
00:21:28
Speaker
clear from the economics literature that advertising just shifts brand loyalty around, just i mean just controls market share, doesn't control the overall size of the market. And that actually is why economists aren't very interested in advertising. There is plenty of economic research about advertising, but it's never been of great interest to economists because it doesn't really have any actual overall effect on the economy.
00:21:49
Speaker
economists aren't really bothered which brought which which firms are taking the money. They're interested in the size of the overall market, how that changes over time. They're not particularly bothered whether people are drinking Budweiser or stones. Now, people in public health just refuse to believe this, and they always come up with this idiotic lie, which is, well, they wouldn't spend so much money on advertising if it didn't work. Well, that's true, but you're not understanding what work means in this context. Work means in this context that if Pepsi stop advertising, Coca-Cola is going to sell more cola, and vice versa. And so one of the only issues economists have been interested in with regards to advertising actually is whether it's inefficient, because it doesn't make much difference to the overall market. And in a way, it will be more efficient if everybody stopped advertising. If Coke and Pepsi stopped advertising, it be it would be more efficient. They'd make more money, basically, or the price would would come down. The problem with that argument is that
00:22:39
Speaker
it ruins the market. It it raises a massive barrier to entry, so and anybody who wants to compete with Coke and Pepsi can can really no longer do so in practice, which is exactly actually what you find now in the cigarette market.
UK's Smoking Ban and Prohibition History
00:22:50
Speaker
I'm always fond of saying that in America at least, I think maybe worldwide, but certainly in America, throughout the 20th century every decade had a different biggest selling brand of cigarette.
00:23:01
Speaker
It was always a different brand. The was Murad, I think. And then then in the 1910s, it was Camel. And so people keep launching new cigarette brands. And that all stopped from the 70s. Marlborough was number one in the 70s. And it's been number one ever since because advertising restrictions have made it difficult for anybody else to compete. Now, public health people might not care about that. I don't care about it. particularly. But it does kind of demonstrate the point that advertising serves a useful function in ah in in business in that it allows people to compet compete. But the idea that advertising per se has an effect on overall consumption really isn't true. There's lots of evidence to back me up on this. um because We know this because we do see bans on on products from time to time in different countries, particularly on alcohol, and it doesn't make any difference to overall alcohol consumption, let alone
00:23:49
Speaker
to alcohol-related deaths, which is what public health people are supposed to be concerned about. take the mention of cigarettes as a segue i want to do a deep dive across the uk on the state of play of some of the public health bug bearars from alcohol and gambling, but I will start with smoking. and I'll start on the political side because watching this to me was actually immensely depressing towards the end of last year, where we reached a point where in conservative politics in the United Kingdom, where they caner the last act one of the last acts of a conservative government was to try and ban cigarettes.
00:24:28
Speaker
when we're at a point in this country where there are so many systemic problems and so many classical economic problems that a right-wing party could be going after, their policy initiative that they wanted to push was the banning of cigarettes. How did the right in the United Kingdom reach that point? Well, it was soon, wasn't it, really? I don't know if it was the collective right, but there wasn't a lot of resistance to him. Although, to be fair, there was a reasonable rebellion in parliament. I can't remember how many politicians voted against in the free vote. I think it was around about 100, so it wasn't negligible. But it really should be more than that in the Conservative Party. And you would hope that the Liberal Democrats would be against it, but of course, that ship sailed a long time ago. The ship of liberalism in the Liberal Democrats. George Galloway, I think, voted against it, interestingly enough. But yeah, it was depressing that Sunak thought that this is something that
00:25:17
Speaker
should be his legacy. um I think it's a hangover, really, of the original smoking ban, the indoor smoking ban under Blair, which Blair very much saw as his legacy when he was trying to get people to forget about the Iraq war. And unfortunately, it does seem to be in the case of governments of different stripes in the UK and around the world, that if you want to get a bit of favorable publicity, just give smokers another kicking. And it seems to work very well for quite a long time. And and the smaller minority that smoke has become, the easier it gets to, the easier it becomes to do that. yeah The most depressing thing I think was the almost total consensus across.
00:25:52
Speaker
politicians and pundits that this was obviously a good thing, something that no one seriously considered until a year or two earlier. And even then, that had largely been ignored or laughed at, suddenly became the obvious thing to do. We're just going to do this thing nobody else has ever done before, or not in the modern era, obviously. And when it has been done prior to the modern era, it's always been a disaster. You've got in Australia at the moment,
00:26:14
Speaker
fire bombings happening in tobacconists on an almost daily basis. I think there have been about 90 in Victoria ah in the last 18 months or so due to a tobacco turf war, which yeah the Australian media can no longer ignore, and even the ABC.
00:26:29
Speaker
which is to the left of the BBC and is very keen on all this kind of stuff, can no longer ignore that these tobacconists are going up in flames because the tobacco and vape market is now largely controlled by criminal gangs. That seems to me the kind of evidence that should be informing a policy like this. It seems to me that the long history of prohibition should be the evidence informing a policy like this, rather than some ludicrous modelling from the Department of Health.
00:26:53
Speaker
which has actually been used in the impact assessment. So it depresses me how little people care about this particular policy. I think it's partly because a lot of people don't understand it, quite honestly. I think all the people here is, well, we're not going to let 15-year-olds smoke. Everyone's against 15-year-old smoking, and they just find it hard to believe that in 10 years' time, those people are going to be 25-year-olds.
00:27:13
Speaker
So I think the people don't really care about it very much. The people who are affected by it aren't going to complain because they're under 18 and not smoking and they probably intend to smoke for the most part. And so it's quite a sneaky way of bringing about prohibition.
00:27:26
Speaker
which will be sped up. I mean, the next thing for Westruiting, of course, will be, well, yeah, Sunak wanted to ban ban this gradually. I'm going to ban it suddenly. You mentioned modeling there, and I want to pull on that strand a bit more. This is a choose your own adventure question, but what are some of the common tricks and that these sorts of agencies and health departments play to manipulate data and use data to make their point or to make their case?
Public Health Modeling Flaws
00:27:53
Speaker
I know it's ah it's a so favorite topic of yours when you're talking about the stuff.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, well, more and more of this stuff is just based on modeling. And there's nothing wrong with modeling, per se. I actually produced a paper for the IAA very recently, which we used some modeling. To be fair, we used some modeling to highlight how silly modeling is. But, you know, economists obviously do a lot of modeling, and I think most people know that it's usually rubbish. The Bank of England does modeling, the OBR does modeling, it never It really bears any relationship to what happens because some things are impossible to predict. That's all it comes down to. And I don't agree that yeah know a model is better than nothing if you really can't predict what's going to happen. But in public health, you increasingly got modeling used not just as a kind of illustration of what might happen under certain circumstances, but as a prediction of what will happen. And again, you saw this during Covid.
00:28:42
Speaker
in which these dreadful and obviously wrong scenarios as they called were presented and there was this weird sort of pedantic argument about what a scenario is versus a forecast and what a forecast is versus a prediction. I mean obviously this stuff is these are all conditional predictions they're conditional on certain things happening or not happening and so the Covid model in the middle of 2021, as Boris Johnson was getting ready for Freedom Day, was based on if Boris Johnson goes ahead with Freedom Day, this is what's going to happen. It was pretty um ambiguous. And I think it was something like, we're going to have half a million cases a day, something like that. And Freedom Day came in, the Euros had just finished and that was actually the the obvious thing to base your prediction on, the fact that the Euros are finished and people won't go out and socialize so much. And sure enough, it was the Euros that that saw the peak in um in cases of missions deaths and so on.
00:29:34
Speaker
And the model was was totally wrong. So you get this modelling in public after use as a substitute for real evidence. It's taken seriously by politicians and journalists who really should know better. The classic case was minimum unit pricing and alcohol, where the entire policy really was based on modelling. I and others pointed out that some of the assumptions in it were simply wrong. There was just no way these assumptions could be justified. And nevertheless, policy went through. We're now five or six years down the line and it's pretty clear.
00:30:01
Speaker
I think that um the people like me were were correct in that we said, yeah, you probably reduce alcohol alcoholt consumption in a little bit. but it won't be amongst the heavy drinkers because Ed is going to find money for for booze. yeah Just the man in the pub could literally tell you that, but the academics in Sheffield University couldn't work that out because I guess they they lack that common sense or they don't have the incentive to develop that kind of common sense. And so after the fact, when this policy has blatantly flopped and you've got alcohol-related deaths at a 14-year high in Scotland, they did some retrospective modelling and they say, well, if it hadn't been for minimum pricing, it would be even Even worse, they did the same thing with the sugar tax, where obesity went up and tooth decay went up and they said, well, it would have gone up more if it hadn't been for the sugar tax. Now, of course, you can't disprove that because it's based on a on a fantasy counterfactual. But one of the problems with that approach is it does make it literally impossible to ever demonstrate whether a policy has failed.
00:30:54
Speaker
yeah Because it doesn't matter if the problem gets worse, you can still say the policy has succeeded. I think the policymakers, when they are told that a problem is going to get better if you introduce this policy, are assuming that there will be fewer cases or fewer deaths once a policy comes in. right Going back to the COVID vaccines, if the number of deaths or the percentage of people getting COVID had increased or indeed stayed the same when the vaccines came in,
00:31:18
Speaker
I don't think anyone would have had a problem in saying that the vaccine didn't work. But it didn't. You look at the graph, it's very, very clear the vaccine effect is extraordinarily powerful. And you saw far, far far fewer cases and deaths and hospitalizations after the vaccine and because of the vaccine. Now, that was a successful genuine public health intervention. And these people in public health present things like plain packaging and minimum pricing and sugar taxes as being similar in power to ah to a vaccine. But yeah the evidence is just completely different.
00:31:47
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. And you know so much of the time it is actually coming up with an answer and then using the model retrospectively to justify your answer. And I think people believe it. So the casual observer believes it so often.
00:31:59
Speaker
because they don't understand that models are a series of assumptions that are easily just plucked out of thin air. bob they don't know But it looks scientific. Yeah, it's very difficult to actually rebuild these models or even work out what assumptions are being put into it. But they are very misleading and they're presented in a very misleading way. I was on the radio last year talking about minimum pricing. The The Scottish government had put a press release out saying that alcohol rights and deaths have fallen by 13% since minimum pricing. Now, you only have to look at the graph of deaths, alcohol rights and deaths in Scotland to see that they went up by more than 13%. But the presenter of the show I was on, the Scottish equivalent of the Today programme, I think, had obviously interpreted the phrase deaths fell by 13%, meaning that there were 13% fewer deaths than there were before. and it took
00:32:48
Speaker
quite a while for me and somebody else to persuade her that this is not actually what it meant. And when she realized that she'd been hooked with her, she was quite unhappy with the with the temperance person who was on the show.
00:32:58
Speaker
And rightly so, you know, this is very, very misleading stuff. And it's fine for you to say, well, amongst academics, we all understand what this is, and it's all based on the counterfactual and various assumptions. But if you press release something saying, deaths fall by 13%, or cases of obesity fall by X thousand, people are naturally going to think there are fewer cases than there were before. right And it's pretty obvious that's how people are going to interpret it. So if you are genuinely concerned about misinformation, maybe you should word your press release a little bit better. The war on cigarettes is is probably lost now on the libertarian side. ah You are happily vaping away during this interview though.
Shifts in UK's Vaping Stance
00:33:36
Speaker
What's the the state of play when it comes to vapes and the public health lobby's attempt to ah to treat them, I suppose, more and more like cigarettes?
00:33:44
Speaker
Well, we've been fortunate in Britain for some reason in that we've had a public health establishment that swung in favour of e-cigarettes. It could easily have swung against them. There just happened to be a few people in positions of power who could see that the benefits and they were pragmatic about it. Obviously, Australia has been completely the opposite. Several other countries have been very hostile to them. Most countries have been yeah haven't really cared a great deal. But they've been very happy to introduce little prohibitions here and there. Things are definitely going backwards, even in Britain now, ah both in terms of public understanding, which is to say that now most people believe that vaping is as bad or worse for you than smoking, which is an incredible failure of public health messaging. that People are so profoundly ignorant about that. But also in terms of policies,
00:34:28
Speaker
And so along with his generational tobacco ban, Sunak promised that he was going to ban disposable vapes, he was maybe going to put tax on vapes, he was going to ban e-cigarette flavours. It's the banning e-cigarette flavours more than anything that the prohibitionists want. Because to people who don't vape and don't understand the the category, all you're doing is you're just making some minor adjustments. It's just a minor regulation, you're not going to have certain types.
00:34:53
Speaker
of flavors that supposedly appeal to young people. But what you end up with in practice is just so-called tobacco flavor, which in my opinion is horrible. It doesn't taste anything like tobacco. You'll never get a vape that tastes like tobacco. It's impossible to do. And why would you particularly want to have that as the thing anyway? And sometimes they allow menthol, but very limited range. And again, there's plenty of good evidence that most vapers, whether young or old, prefer their fruity flavors.
00:35:22
Speaker
They have to be fruity. You can't really have savory flavors. you know if you're not If they have any flavor at all, they have to be kind of fruity. And believe it or not, adults actually like fruity flavors just as much as children do, and if not more so. And if you ban these flavors, then people who are already smoking, who are very happy smoking, most of the time as I was, they'll just carry on smoking. and If you can't give them something that's an appealing substitute, then they're going to carry on smoking.
00:35:48
Speaker
And from a public health perspective, the the target has to be smoking. Now, i don't I'm not in favor of trying to eradicate smoking. I don't think it's any of the government's business, but that is the public health lobby's position. So they should at least be consistent on that and and you encourage all sorts of other safe nicotine products, not just the vapes, but the nicotine pouches are probably even safer, the heated tobacco, which seems to have significant health benefits. All this stuff should be encouraged with the aim of wiping out smoking,
00:36:17
Speaker
through the free market. you I don't mind wiping out smoking through the free market. If it can be shown that there are ah yeah that all smokers will happily migrate to a different, safer nicotine product, then yeah I don't mind if smoking disappears. I don't think that's necessarily true, but I think you could certainly get smoking down to a very low prevalence and through saving nicotine products because people like me very committed happy smokers just switched to vaping years and years ago just because it's I don't I don't find any difference you know and now I'm never tempted to have a cigarette so I'm very happy vaping so the public health lobby in this country has been okay on this so far but I think we're going backwards because of the panic about you vaping and you've got growing numbers of people who've never smoked a vaping but that was always going to be the case
00:37:05
Speaker
yeah There have always been non-smokers who took up cigarettes, obviously, like in very, very large numbers, with much of history. It would be weird if none of them took up vaping, but all it appears know yeah all appears necessary to justify a further clampdown is for anyone who's never smoked, particularly if they're under 18, to try vaping, which seems to me an impossible you know, bar to cross. And so, because non-smokers, and in particular people under 18, are getting hold of vapes, which they shouldn't be, and it's already banned to sell vapes to under-18s, but like everything in this country, politicians are much happier legislating than they are enforcing the law. Because people under 18 who, let's face it, would probably have smoked otherwise, are vaping, the rights of adults to have, you know, a disposable vape or a flavoured vape are now hugely under threat.
00:37:57
Speaker
I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding was the main health risk of smoking was the smoke you don't have when you're vaping. What do we actually know about the health impacts of vaping? Well, the vape was invented 21 years ago. The guy who invented it is still alive. You know, I've been using it for 12 years. I'm still alive and feel a lot better than we did when we were smoking. There hasn't, as far as I know, been a single recorded case of the death from vaping.
00:38:24
Speaker
and very, very little evidence of harm, except for the old battery exploding, which you could say the same about for, you know, electric vehicles and e-bikes, and it's a basic regulatory issue anyway. I think people on the pro-vaping side have been actually rather tolerant of the anti-vapers claims that there's no evidence about wanton, you know, health risks. There have been a lot of people using these products for 10, 15 years now.
00:38:47
Speaker
I'm happy to you know hand myself over to medical science if somebody wants to inspect me and see if they can find somebody wrong in my lungs. Obviously, it's not impossible. But you could say the same about anything. It's only been around for 20 years. okay We don't know the long-term effects of 5G and iPhones. as ah And there are a few cranks out there who will say exactly that. We don't know long-term effects of the vaccines. That was a great argument, wasn't it? From the anti-vaccines during the pandemic. We don't know the long-term effects. Well, yeah when it comes to vaccines, actually, long-term means six months.
00:39:17
Speaker
And when it comes to something like e-cigarettes, one of the lines that's often used is, you know we we we didn't find out for 70 years after the invention of the manufactured cigarette, that smoke cigarette smoking was bad for you. Well, firstly, we actually had a pretty good idea. They were referred to as coffin nails quite early on. People talked about tobacco heart during the Boer War. So there was a suspicion, certainly, that smoking was was left less than entirely healthsome. But the more important point is, if if the cigarette was invented today,
00:39:47
Speaker
we would know almost immediately that it was very bad for you, because science is much more developed now than it was in the 1880s. So we have enough knowledge of how the human body works. how things like combustion work and boom I isolate certain toxins and chemicals. We would know in a very short space of time that cigarettes were bad for you without having any long-term epidemiological evidence. So the question is, what can we tell from e-cigarettes by just looking at what they are? what we we can We can do animal tests, we do animal tests, we can check people's pulse, we can check you know people's lung function, all kinds of things. And we have done that. The evidence is out there. The idea that we just don't know anything is just it's just a lie. There's plenty of evidence looking at this. The best estimates are that the cancer risk is less than 1% of what it is from smoking. The famous Public Health England estimate is that they're at least 95% safer. That has been criticized as being based on a bit of a flat finger in the air, let's have a guess. But it's just actually, it's just based on the fact of like, what is it about these things that are going to kill people?
00:40:44
Speaker
right As you say, there isn't any smoke in it. There's no carbon monoxide in it. These are the two big things that that kill smokers. Yes, there are certain chemicals, all of which are generally regarded as safe when they're put in food. What are the long-term effects of inhaling? Well, yeah, far fine. We don't know. But there is a long list, actually, of banned substances that can't be put in vapes because they're suspected of possibly having yeah the at least the potential of causing harm. So look, they are obviously much, much safer than cigarettes. um So if smokers switch to them and
00:41:19
Speaker
smokers are still the overwhelming market for e-cigarettes. That can only be a good thing in terms of public health. If people who've never smoked but would have smoked if vapes haven't been around vape, then that's a good thing for public health. And if there's a few adults who choose to use vapes who've never smoked, that's really up to them, right? They're allowed to smoke, so I think they should be allowed to vape.
00:41:38
Speaker
and now but Let's move to the evils of of sugar and fatty foods.
Addressing Obesity: Policy vs. Innovation
00:41:44
Speaker
We are getting fatter and fatter. Why shouldn't the government step in and save us from ourselves? Well, for a few reasons. I mean, one, one exactly is why is exactly is this a matter for the government? right There's lots of things the government could step in for to help us realise our unrealised self. But why is our waistline you know one one of those things? I genuinely don't care.
00:42:09
Speaker
how fat other people are. I'm mildly concerned with how fat I am, but that really is down to me. And I can actually do something about it, which I really don't think the government can. So there's the philosophical question of why is the government getting involved in this, and people will use this cost of the and NHS argument, which doesn't say it's relations. But then you've got the pragmatic argument. What is actually what is it going to do about this?
00:42:32
Speaker
And I'm very often asked on the radio when I'm slating the latest public health ruse about how to tackle obesity. I'm always asked, well, what would you do? And I say, well, I don't know, because I've never seen a policy that works. yeah I haven't come up with any of my my own, but I looked at the policies that have been proposed, yeah some of which have been tried in the real world. I've looked at the advertising bans, I've looked at the sugar tax in Britain and elsewhere.
00:42:57
Speaker
looked at the reformulation program. These things patently haven't worked. If you have the traditional view of working as in obesity rates being lower after the intervention than before, they haven't worked. So I don't know how to do it. I guess rationing would work. Maybe forced exercise would work. Probably a genuine fact tax in which people with a BMI over a certain level had to pay more tax. Probably that would work.
00:43:21
Speaker
But fortunately, the public health lobby is not yet quite so draconian. They're going to suggest those things. But in all seriousness, the kind of things that would really have an effect on what people eat and how fat they are in a relatively free society where people are relatively affluent would be so authoritarian and draconian that even the bigoted general public of our current day would not put up with it.
00:43:46
Speaker
How effective are things like public education programs or getting Olympians on TV telling kids to go out for a run? How effective are those sorts of things normally? I don't know. I mean, doctors tend not to smoke and they, I think, tend to be of a lower average weight than the general population. So they're well informed educated people. So you can argue that you Education does work. On the other hand, nurses are less so, and they're probably just as aware of the risks. but People in public health are very keen on saying education doesn't work, which is kind of ironic, saying most of these people are academics. You would think they would have a bit more faith in that and their fields. But also, well, firstly, this stuff is really hard to it's really hard to test whether it works. And funnily enough, people in public health don't tend to do the imaginative modeling when it comes to government education programs, let alone industry education programs, which I despise.
00:44:40
Speaker
um But also I would say education has barely been tried in this particular area. There have never been any punchy adverts giving people solid advice on on what to eat. There was a change for life program which was pretty limp.
00:44:54
Speaker
And I think part of the problem is the government genuinely doesn't know what to advise, because dietary fads come and go. The most recent one being ultra-processed food, but before that it was sugar, and there's low carb, and there was low fat, and there seems to be a genuine sense of confusion amongst the general public about what to eat. So I don't think education has been tried particularly well. I'm not sure people know even how many calories they're supposed to consume. let alone how many calories are necessary in the food they eat. I know, I think there is latent demand for this kind of stuff, for sure. You know, one of the things about obesity that differentiates it from smoking
00:45:27
Speaker
is that with smoking, you can smoke and smoke and smoke for decades and thoroughly enjoy yourself. And then suddenly you get very ill and then kind of too late to do much about it a lot of the time. Whereas a people with obesity, most people not wanting to be fat will be wanting to lose weight for for those decades. It's not like they're suddenly just going to have this, you know, like something at cancer. and which Oh God, I wish I hadn't been fat all my life. So most people just on aesthetic grounds don't want to be fat. So they are keen to have advice. And that's why the diet book industry is a multi-billion pound industry.
00:45:57
Speaker
Um, whether this stuff works or not, it seems to me that certain people find different diets that work for them. And perhaps there isn't a one size fits all policy, in which case having a national public health campaign isn't going to work anyway. You looked into these next generation of weight loss drugs, like Ozimpic and Mount Jaro and how they may impact this broader conversation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and these aren't proven to work. I mean, it's remarkable how effective they are. And then we know this from randomized control trials.
00:46:27
Speaker
that public health interventions generally in this area don't require anything more than modelling, as we've already discussed, let alone a randomised control trial. So these things really work and they're having an immediate effect. They're obviously quite expensive at the moment, but eventually they'll be off patent. But it's been very interesting to see the response from people in public health towards these drugs. They feel it's kind of cheating. There's been a lot of um a lot of articles in The Guardian in particular saying this lets the junk food industry off the hook.
00:46:53
Speaker
Well, we can't have that, can we? you know So the anti-capitalist element came out quite strongly um with the with the drugs, but A, being know letting the junk food industry off the hook, and B, being this is big pharma making lots of money out of people being fat. um And so, yeah, it's been interesting to see how they've responded to the first atiabisti intervention that genuinely does work and can pass that hurdle of the randomized control trial. So we should see. I mean, it's not going to be the answer for everybody, I don't think. And it probably won't be a good idea to have 60% of the population injecting themselves with semaglutide. But it is definitely a very promising avenue that kind of makes the other public health stuff redundant, because it just doesn't work. and It's expensive and it imposes costs and on the population. um Whereas semaglutide is something, it's an individual's choice. you know
00:47:46
Speaker
Take it if you want to, but if you do, the chances are you're going to lose quite a bit of weight, which is cool. I noticed that response as well, and I think it highlights the puritanical quasi-religious instinct of these people, in that in order to change, there must be suffering.
Public Health's Biases Against Easy Solutions
00:48:01
Speaker
You need to go out and flog yourself on a run, or you need to eat broccoli every day. The idea that you can forgo the suffering but still get the end outcome, I think for them, in part, misses the point. but it It's very much the same with vapes, right? thing People think, oh, vape, that's cheating. Sometimes people say to me, when are you gonna really give up?
00:48:19
Speaker
So I haven't smoked for years, what do you mean? When are you going to give up the vape? Why do I need to give up the vape? Or are you still addicted to nicotine? I can't, I'm happy being addicted to nicotine. It's kind of like nuclear power as well with the environmentalists, you know, the climate change people. and They don't really want nuclear power even though that's obviously a solution because it doesn't involve destroying capitalism.
00:48:37
Speaker
Similarly, the vape vapes are a solution to smoking, but it doesn't involve destroying the tobacco industry. And semi-glutide likewise with ah the so-called junk food industry. So you really see who people are when you when they get presented with an actual solution.
00:48:51
Speaker
I want to finish with ah the great British and Australian love of pints. Does the UK have a problem with alcohol? Every society that has alcohol has a problem with alcohol to some extent. The question is, do countries that have very heavy regulation of alcohol do better than those which don't? And the answer seems to me to be no. Again, there there is evidence showing that. And so it's not a question of do we want to have a problem with alcohol or do we want public health to have a free reign? the question is well it's not a question really it's more a state because it's like yeah yes as so long as people are drinking you will have some people who drink themselves to death and hopefully that's quite a
00:49:31
Speaker
a small number. But again, what what do you do about that? you know there is There is something that works with with alcoholism, which is, ah by the way, a word that public health people don't like to use for some reason, because I think it makes it sound as if it's an an individual issue, whereas, of course, they see all these things as society societal issues. and What works with with alcoholism is is treatment, is is rehab, is face-to-face treatment, brief interventions, you know things in which individuals are dealt with by other individuals as individuals.
00:49:59
Speaker
not the whole population approach, which is so popular with the neo-temperance lobby. So in in summary, the neo-temperance lobby, the public health lobby, they just think that the solution to people dying from alcohol is to get everybody to drink less.
Alcohol Consumption and Health Benefits
00:50:13
Speaker
If they want everyone to drink less, the idea is this somehow has some sort of trickle down effects, which leads heavy drinkers to drink less as well, for reasons that they've never really been able to explain. And happily enough from their perspective,
00:50:27
Speaker
The way to get everyone to drink less is to do things that they've always wanted to do, which has been ban advertising, restrict licensing laws, put the price up, bring in minimum pricing, have all these things that have an effect on everybody. But that's kind of the point. that's ah It's a feature rather than the bug, the fact that you have a yeah know there are unintended consequences for moderate drinkers because they should be drinking less as well. And ideally, nobody should be drinking at all, which is why they're so very resistant to the evidence showing the the health benefits.
00:50:52
Speaker
of moderate drinking. So again, there are things that work with alcohol. They're expensive. They require, you know, the medical profession to get their hands dirty and deal with people who are often going to be quite difficult to talk to and maybe be very resistant to advice and very often ignore your advice. But it really is the only thing that's ever been shown to work. And it in fact, it is one of the reasons why we saw this spike in alcoholism deaths during the pandemic, which actually coincided with a decline in overall But capital consumption fell in 2020 and 2021 compared to the previous years. But the number of people dying from alcohol rose very sharply. And partly, as I said before, I think that's because people were just depressed and lonely. And so the heaviest drinkers just drank even more. But also because the heaviest drinkers couldn't access treatment. um This has been acknowledged by people like the the British Liver Trust. So they couldn't get that face to face.
00:51:47
Speaker
treatment that they needed due to the lockdowns and and and they died as a result. So the lockdown actually, and I wrote a whole report about this for the IA. is a very good illustration of why public health lobbyists are wrong about alcohol. um that Reducing per capita consumption on its own is not going to do anything, any any good, and there's no reason to think it would do. ah It's the small minority of people who are drinking very, very heavily for various, usually psychological reasons, that need need help, you know help the people who are asking for help, and and and treat these people who, realistically, yeah
00:52:23
Speaker
They're not drinking a lot because they see adverts for Heineken. They're drinking a lot for various personal reasons that are going to require some kind of therapy. And the same is true also of problem gambling. You know, you're not going to reduce the problem gambling rate by banning gambling ads or tinkering with the stakes that people can play on online slot machines. And something like co cognitive behavioral therapies is actually very effective. But again, it costs money and it requires people to do a bit of work rather than just lobbying and campaigning and doing things that they find fun. What do you make of this line that you often hear from the neo temperance lobby that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption?
00:53:01
Speaker
Well, it's just a rhetorical lie, really, designed to um justify them treating alcohol like tobacco. The line that there's no safe level of smoke has been around for years. That was then followed rather dubiously by the claim that there's no safe level of secondhand smoke. You also hear the idea that there's no safe level of drinking during pregnancy, which is more contentious. But in each of those cases, what they actually mean is we haven't found exactly what the safe level is. Not necessarily that the slightest exposure is going to kill you, because there isn't. any evidence for that. But it's worked very well with tobacco, the idea that, you know, tobacco is not, obviously it's not a necessary of life, and it's never good for you, as far as we know, whereas alcohol actually is good for you in moderate quantities. there We've got 50 years of evidence of this. Yeah, most of it's epidemiological evidence, but that's no problem for the
00:53:52
Speaker
public health lobby when it comes to proving harms, we are told that alcohol causes 200 different diseases. That's all based on epidemiology and nearly all of it is weaker and less voluminous than the evidence showing that moderate drinking reduces the risk of heart disease in particular. Heart disease, stroke, dementia are all very much associated with with moderate drinking.
00:54:13
Speaker
And it's not because of misreporting by drinkers. It's not because of the sick quitters, the people who used to drink, having damaged their health terribly. um That's all being tested to destruction. So far as epidemiology epidemiology, epidemiology can prove anything. It is proven that their health benefits are moderate drinking. But this is anathema to the public health lobby, because they are the second one to treat a light tobacco, and they can't. um so one is There is a perception that this is part of a healthy lifestyle, not just part of a healthy lifestyle, but actually makes your lifestyle healthier if you consume the right quantity of it. Now, for people like me, ah both as libertarians and as drinkers, the moderate
00:54:57
Speaker
yeah the benefits of moderate consumption are neither here nor there. Firstly, because I'm not a moderate consumer, I'm a heavy consumer. but And secondly, because as a libertarian, I defend people's right to drink on principle in the same way I defend people's right to smoke. So I'm not particularly interested in the benefit the health benefits of drinking. I'm much more interested in the social benefits of drinking, which is why people actually drink. And and and that's what needs to be emphasised in this war on fun. But it is very interesting, I think, that the the public health lobby are obsessed with trying to debunk the benefits of moderate drinking. And you have to ask yourself why that is. And it's not because it's an open scientific question. If this was about anything else, it would be considered a settled issue. a It's for political reasons. It's because they want to gun for alcohol and treat it like tobacco. And they these people have said that.
00:55:50
Speaker
explicitly and in so many words, many, many times. So, again, drinkers, if you're watching, this is why you need to defend other people's liberties, because the slippery slope is is very real.
00:56:02
Speaker
I think there are a lot of drinkers and and a lot of people more generally out there who whinge about the nanny state, but there are actually very few people who are doing the hard work to fight against it. Chris, you're certainly one of those. There is a link in the show notes to your website where you can access all of your articles and your books. We also have a link to Last Orders, which is a fantastic podcast from Spiked. Keep doing what you're doing, and thank you for coming on the show. Thanks very much, Will. Cheers.