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Raging against the nanny state, with Chris Snowdon
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The nanny state is on the march across the West, propped up by weak leaders taking their cues from a small group of tedious, moralising activists. It's time they were exposed. Enter the '25 Nanny State Index, compiled by the Institute of Economic Affairs' Chris Snowdon.
Will and Chris discuss why 'nanny-stateism' is on the rise, how the UK compares to Europe, and which country wins the ignominious award for Europe's most miserable nanny state.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Read The '25 Nanny State Index here.
Listen to Last Orders here.
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Transcript
Introduction & Concerns on Nanny State Politics
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will. I'm Will Kingston. If you're like me, you may have this nagging feeling that the nanny state is on the rise, that those small little joys of life are just being chipped away at by weak leaders influenced by puritanical virtue signalling activists.
00:00:40
Speaker
Thankfully, someone has done the hard work of quantifying that nagging feeling. That person is the great Chris Snowden from the Institute of Economic Affairs, who has released another annual edition of his Nanny State Index.
Are Nanny State Politics Rising?
00:00:53
Speaker
Chris, welcome back to Fire at Will. Great feedback, Will. How's it going? Yeah, i'm good, mate. Good to get that plug early. Let's start, before we get into the nitty gritty of that index that you just put up, looking at, I guess, a premising question, which would be is nanny state politics and a culture of nanny statism on the rise?
00:01:14
Speaker
And if so, what are the cultural and political factors that you would put that down to?
Reasons Behind Nanny State Policies
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely on the rise. Even the countries at the bottom of the the list, which are the freest ones, have been getting gradually worse.
00:01:25
Speaker
So yeah, across Europe and much of the Western world, and particularly the Anglosphere, you're seeing more and more of these petty prohibitions and and restrictions on people's basic kind of central liberties. I think there are a few reasons for that, but one of them that stands out to me these days is the think have we've got places like Britain, which are increasingly failed states.
00:01:47
Speaker
the the The government is unable very often to enforce the law even on things like tobacco and the vapes, you know, but but but but you know across range of policy areas. We've got an epidemic of shoplifting. We can't control the borders. We can't seem to build and enough houses or enough um nuclear power stations.
00:02:07
Speaker
And you've got a huge amount of judicial activism stopping the the government doing what it's trying to do, even when it wants
Public Acceptance of Nanny State Policies
00:02:14
Speaker
to. And so I think that these kind of quick wins for politicians are quite appealing, that they can do something that's quite noticeable, gets a bit of media coverage, which popular with at least a significant minority of the public, if not the majority.
00:02:27
Speaker
They can signal virtue insofar as they're showing yet again that they disapprove of smoking or drinking or obesity. doesn't really matter to them if the policies don't work because it can move on to something else.
00:02:38
Speaker
So I think for political pygmies, The kind of hollow men that we that we have running many governments, and including certainly the UK, this kind of stuff is appealing because they can get it done.
00:02:52
Speaker
And it's easier to meddle with the lives of ordinary people than it is to tackle genuine criminality. Yeah, I agree with that. And that's, I guess, a top-down analysis. This is being subjected upon the people by inadequate leaders. But there's probably a more depressing slant that I'd want to put to you.
Skepticism About Public Support for Nanny State Measures
00:03:11
Speaker
and I see this whenever I go full-on libertarian on GB News, for example. you know The latest was when I was arguing against the disposable vape ban in the UK only a couple of days ago.
00:03:22
Speaker
And I'm always really surprised at the amount of people, and most of them would be centre-right or right-wing viewers, who are perfectly happy with these sorts of nanny state policies.
00:03:33
Speaker
And I think, again, if you go further back and you look at the response to COVID, the amount of people who are happy with lockdowns, it seemed like these sorts of nanny state policies are increasingly popular with people.
00:03:44
Speaker
Do you actually think, if you look at it more bottom up, there is similarly ah a sentiment that says we're actually quite happy having this level of state control? Definitely for a significant proportion of the public.
00:03:54
Speaker
And yeah COVID was ah was a good example of that. I think you have to treat some of these opinion polls with a certain amount of skepticism. i was writing this this week about a YouGov survey that found 59% of people want an outdoor smoking ban.
00:04:07
Speaker
That presumably is without the caveat that yeah your pub might close down if the pub has to ban the beer garden or ban people smoking the beer garden. But certainly on the face of it, a significant number of people want to do that. But then UGO polls also found in November 2022, long after the pandemic had finished by most people's measure, that 61% of UGO respondents wanted to bring back mandatory face masks, 20% to bring back the rule six. So you couldn't meet with more than five people at the time.
00:04:37
Speaker
I don't think that was representative, actually, of public opinion.
Effects and Trade-offs of Nanny State Policies
00:04:40
Speaker
And the fact that only about 1% of people on public transport were actually wearing face masks suggests that it it wasn't. So, look, I think support for this stuff is maybe pretty wide, but also quite shallow. Is that just down to survey design?
00:04:53
Speaker
I think in in the case of YouGov, it's is down to the kind of people who do YouGov surveys. You get paid to do YouGov surveys, but you get paid a pittance. So you have to do a lot of them and pretend to have opinions about a whole load of things.
00:05:04
Speaker
And it does partly depend on survey design as well because YouGov did a very similar survey the very next day Asking the question slightly different, not in ah in an eating way as if to you ah deter people from supporting an outdoor smoking. But just said, do you think there are too many restrictions on smoking? Too few are about about right.
00:05:22
Speaker
And the plurality said there were about right and only 32% said there were too few restrictions. So yes certainly yeah, surveys are easily, you know, it's easy to manipulate. ah results from from surveys, for sure.
00:05:35
Speaker
But, I mean, to get back to your main question, yeah, look, there's no denying that a lot of people have strong views about these things, or at least all authoritarian views. I think that these views could be swayed, and that's what I try to do, but you've got a huge amount of media attention and political activity going in the opposite direction. and People like me are kind of a lone voice trying to explain what the actual effects of these policies are, the negative consequences of them.
00:06:02
Speaker
And I think if people understood what the ring or trade-off is here, they would go, actually, I don't really care if people are using disposable bags. mean, the obvious trade-off with a disposable bag thing is that people go back to smoking, which people, I think, hate a lot more than they hate vaping.
00:06:17
Speaker
And the problem with anti-smoking legislation is that we we have in Britain a very, very large black market. The government is losing tobacco duty revenue. This is not a tobacco industry scare story. You you know this in Australia better than anybody.
00:06:30
Speaker
What happens if you over-regulate things? And so yeah there is ah another side of the the story here to be told, which is not being told enough. So in a way, it's not surprising if you have government-led hate campaigns, as you have had against smokers for decades, and if you have endless propagan propaganda the media about things like, you know vaping causes popcorn lung, it's worse for you than smoking, then sure, people are going to say, don't mind vaping, I'm going to you restricted as much as possible.
00:06:59
Speaker
think that reflection on trade-offs is really interesting because if there's one thing which has been demonstrated by both the nanny state policies of recent times like vapes and cigarettes and drug regulation and soft and and fast food regulation,
00:07:16
Speaker
plus the COVID stuff, it's that politicians either seem incapable or unwilling to look at things in terms of trade-offs. And politics is all about trade-offs. So you look at lockdowns as a crude way to lower transmission of a COVID virus, and you don't look at the mental health impacts of, for example, lockdowns.
00:07:34
Speaker
You don't look at black market implications of banning, for example, disposable vapes. So my question would be, when you're speaking to politicians in Westminster, how do you advise them on how to make or to communicate the concept of trade-offs in a way which is you know has cut through with the public?
00:07:49
Speaker
Well, I don't speak to that many politicians that live in London. yeah If I did, i would, I guess I'd say what I do in in my articles and on Twitter and my platforms, so speak, um yeah yeah just look at the evidence, look at the real world evidence. you know A lot of public health so-called evidence is just modeling and you can obviously prove anything with a theoretical model.
00:08:12
Speaker
And it's remarkable how much theoretical models for things like minimal alcohol pricing and the sugar tax are taken seriously. And then when these policies don't work, they do another theoretical model, modeling the actual data in a way that makes it look like it did work when
Nanny State Index and Health Outcomes
00:08:26
Speaker
it didn't.
00:08:26
Speaker
yeah When I say real-world evidence, I mean look at case studies, look at countries that have introduced these kind of tactics and regulations. How are they getting on? Does the UK have a lower rate of obesity since it brought in the world-leading sugar tax, for example?
00:08:43
Speaker
Does Australia have a massive black market since it decided to have the highest tobacco duties in the world? What does that black market look like? How many firebombings of tobacconists have there been in the last two years?
00:08:55
Speaker
These are the things that should really concern policymakers, what actually happens in quite similar countries when you bring in very similar regulations. So this has been going on long enough now that it's not about libertarians warning about what could happen. It's about showing politicians what is happening.
00:09:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's well said. Well, it's interesting that you say, like look at the evidence, look if these things actually work, because the start of the index, very helpfully, before you go into a country-by-country analysis, is just, is there any evidence that nanny state policies across Europe have worked?
00:09:27
Speaker
Tell me, how did you actually come to, or what was the conclusion, and how did you come to that conclusion? Well, so what we've got in the index is basically four different components. You've got alcohol there. You've got safer nicotine products, mostly vaping, but also some other things there. You've got food and soft drinks, and you've got smoking, basically tobacco or smoking.
00:09:47
Speaker
And each country gets a score. The higher the score, the less liberal the country is. But, of course, if if you're a public health person, you can use this index and you can call it the public health index. And rather than, know, use a pejorative term, nanny state index, call it public health index. It's the same information.
00:10:05
Speaker
The information itself is is totally neutral. This is just ah you a, you know, a catalogue. and a record of the kind of taxes and regulations that public health people want. So they should be very happy with Turkey and Lithuania because they're at the top and they should be very disappointed with Luxembourg and burton Germany at the bottom.
00:10:21
Speaker
But having got this score of either how nanny-stated each country is or how progressive they are in public health terms, if you're a public health person,
00:10:31
Speaker
You can then chart it against outcomes. So you can see whether the countries have the most draconian anti-smoking regulations and taxation have a lower smoking rate, and they don't.
00:10:43
Speaker
There's just no correlation whatsoever. Similarly, do the countries that clamp down the most on alcohol have a lower per capita rate of alcohol consumption? No, they don't.
00:10:53
Speaker
And overall, do the countries which have the highest 90 state index scores have the lowest life expectancy? And again, no, there's there's no correlation. There never has been. Ever since we started doing this back in 2016, countries move around on the on the table.
00:11:07
Speaker
Fortunately, otherwise it'd be little point doing it. But it doesn't make any difference to the fact that and there is just no correlation against any of these outcomes. And so on the face of it, just on the kind of on the macro scale,
00:11:19
Speaker
these things are not working. So my question on that would be public health officials aware of that information, like that information that there is no correlation between life expectancy and trying to cut down on or trying to say further tax nicotine and alcohol is fascinating.
00:11:36
Speaker
Do they know this and it is just a very cynical way to put more aggressive taxes on people to raise revenue? Or are they genuinely oblivious to how ineffective these policies are?
00:11:48
Speaker
I think they're probably genuinely oblivious because there are a whole load of studies published in public health journals that using modeling techniques or other kind of quasi-experimental techniques that say these policies should work and therefore they do work.
00:12:07
Speaker
There was a study done going back to minimum alcohol pricing in Scotland, another world-leading policy, supposedly when it was introduced since 2018, eighteen Every part of the official evaluation showed that this policy had been a flop, and it had been a flop in quite a predictable way, and that people well yeah who were heavy drinkers were not cutting down on alcohol. They were cutting down on other things in the budget, and there were various negative consequences.
00:12:33
Speaker
But above all, it was plainly obvious that alcohol-related deaths had risen in Scotland, already at a high rate, but had gone up. And so this study comes out saying, well, we've modeled this data and although it might look to the naked eye like things got lot worse, actually things have got a lot better because had it not been for minimum pricing, there would have been even more deaths.
00:12:54
Speaker
They reported this has been, what essentially the model showed was that there would have been 13% more deaths had our had minimum pricing not been introduced. And of course, the way it was reported was alcohol-related deaths fall by
Critique of Public Health Policy Standards
00:13:08
Speaker
13% in Scotland at the ah which is just a lie, but it's a lie that's repeated constantly. It was repeated in The Guardian just on Monday because people don't understand the difference between modeling and, I guess, real-world evidence.
00:13:21
Speaker
But you can hardly blame them for that because if you've got researchers going out on the radio saying alcohol-related deaths fell 13% after minimum price, and they're going to take that literally, how else is a normal sp person supposed to take such a misleading statement?
00:13:33
Speaker
So um I think they do believe that these things work, or in the case of obesity, they think they they sort of work, but you need to do more of them, right? So they have what they call the whole systems approach, which, I mean, good luck trying to find a serious definition of the whole systems approach. It basically just means none of these policies work on their own.
00:13:53
Speaker
None of them will reduce obesity by even a fraction of 1%. But somehow, if you pull them all together, they become more than some of their parts. And at some point in the future, this will change the food environment and and obesity will go down.
00:14:09
Speaker
I mean, this is just this is just the spiel of a snake oil salesman, isn't it? You know, you couldn't get away with this in actual health, you know, in actual medicine, which public health is supposed to be an arm of.
00:14:22
Speaker
You couldn't get away with just chopping someone's, you know, arm off and then say, okay, we're going to chop your leg off and see if that works, and we're gonna take your spleen out. yeah you you You've gotta have proper evidence in healthcare in order to get a drug passed by National Institute of Care and Excellence, or get a treatment.
00:14:41
Speaker
ah approved It has to work. It might not have to work all the time, but it so certainly should have a good chance of working. And this stuff, which affects a far greater number of people, albeit to a lesser extent, doesn't have to meet that kind of bar. yeah know the the The bar of evidence-based medicine doesn't really exist in public health.
Role of NGOs and Government in Nanny State Policies
00:15:00
Speaker
It's all based on vibes and what people hope might happen.
00:15:04
Speaker
That reference to Snake Oil Salesman reminded me of one of the great themes that you bring up on the Last Orders podcast, which is the role that NGOs and quangos play and the huge amount of money that sits behind them in pushing these sorts of agendas.
00:15:22
Speaker
This is a broad question, obviously, but explain how that works and maybe give me a couple of your favorite dodgy NGOs that push these sorts of initiatives. Well, there are loads at the EU level, although now the European Commission is actually clamping down a bit and saying that money that NGOs get from the European Commission cannot be used to lobby MEPs, which most people would think would be like in the contract already.
00:15:48
Speaker
But on on the contrary, in the contract until very recently was a specific clause saying you must use money to to lobby MEPs. It's extraordinarily corrupt. And it's not quite that blatant in Britain.
00:16:01
Speaker
But it does happen a huge amount, particularly actually in the devolved governments. I mean, action on smoking health is probably the classic example of this. It's been funded by the government since it was formed in 1971 because there weren't any anti-smoking groups. There weren't any grassroots anti-smoking groups.
00:16:15
Speaker
There aren't any grassroots anti-obesity groups, anti-food groups, anti-soft drink groups, or anti-gambling groups. They're all funded. by the state to a greater less extent. Sometimes you get some eccentric millionaire or billionaire put some money in and sometimes they find a large charity like Cancer Research who will hive off a little bit of their donors' money towards a pressure group, presumably without the donors of that large charity actually knowing about it.
00:16:40
Speaker
Whatever the source of income It's not coming from the general public, right? So in what sense really are these groups civil society? They wouldn't be able to survive if they didn't have elite sources of income, mostly from the state.
00:16:56
Speaker
And that is a problem for various reasons. Firstly, this creates this natural imbalance, right? In that consumers are not getting any funding from the state and politicians aren't even listening to consumers.
00:17:07
Speaker
Lobbying costs a lot of money. You just have to get a meeting with a politician. It costs a train fare, really. But politicians could ask to speak to some consumers and say, hey, you're a smoker, you're a drinker, you're quite happy being a smoker and drinker, what can we do for you?
00:17:21
Speaker
But they never do that, let alone give them millions of pounds so they can go out and campaign. So that's an imbalance to start with. But also it's a kind of permanent imbalance. It creates permanent disequilibrium because If you're a grassroots campaigner for a particular cause, once you've succeeded in that cause, you're probably going to be quite happy to go back to your day job and stop having to spend all this money going to London with your placards and speaking to politicians and going on the media.
00:17:49
Speaker
If, however, you are a state-funded professional activist, it's your job, right? you can You can never claim success. You always have to find new dragons to slay.
00:18:00
Speaker
And if you combine that with a natural... mission creep that you often get with fanatical pressure groups, you've got something that's never going to end. So the you know the problem with governments funding your campaign groups is it means there is no end to the campaigning because it puts the campaign groups out of work.
00:18:19
Speaker
And so they have to go far beyond their original mission and become more and more extreme. in order to justify getting more money. And that requires, in practice, continually creating fear and and scaremongering about issues because you can never accept the things that things have got better, even though you said they would get better if the politicians did X, Y, and Z.
Classism and Nanny State Measures
00:18:40
Speaker
that's why the slippery slope argument, which is sometimes referred to as a weak form of argumentation, actually is very relevant in the case of non-Eastate politics.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yes, exactly. All the incentives are there for the the slippery slope. On top of the the basic reason slippery slope happens, which is you are setting a precedent. People talk the slippery slope as a fallacy, and obviously it can be.
00:19:02
Speaker
There's nothing inevitable about going from a to B and then suddenly ending up at Z. But again, if you look at the real world weapons, it's very clearly a thing. That is because it sets a precedent. And if you just use the phrase setting a precedent rather than slippery slope, people wouldn't find it at all weird. There's nothing fallacy about crossing the Rubicon.
00:19:21
Speaker
and You know, it's it's a well-understood thing that once you say, okay, now the government is doing this kind of thing, we're normalizing and the government to these kind of freedoms that we never used to do, naturally you're going to get people saying, okay, if we're doing that now, I'd like to ban this and this and this.
00:19:39
Speaker
There's another thought that's crossed my mind here as you've been talking about the makeup of these sorts of activist groups who are no doubt university educated, largely relatively well off liberal elites to use that term.
00:19:50
Speaker
How much of this is just old fashioned class warfare? The majority of smokers that remain in society today are disproportionately lower working class people. A lot of these sorts of vices would be seen as working class, poor man's issues.
00:20:05
Speaker
How much of this just comes down to classism? A lot of it, I think. I think that the the modern public health lobby is just the latest reincarnation of the Victorian moral reform movement, really.
00:20:17
Speaker
ah You can see that across basically all the areas that I write about, all the areas in the Nanny State Index. If you look at, you mentioned smoking, yeah, yeah but people in white-collar work are like a third as likely to smoke as someone in in blue-collar work.
00:20:35
Speaker
And where everybody smoked, not everybody smoked, but when when smoking was evenly distributed across the classes, as it was until about the 70s, there was effectively no anti-smoking legislation. What happened was it became increasingly a working class hobby.
00:20:51
Speaker
I want to call it vice. And of course, the numbers dwindled. And it's much easier to bully people if there's not that many of them. And they are fairly disenfranchised from the conversation. So you're going to have people in Westminster who not only don't smoke, but don't know anyone who does.
00:21:07
Speaker
And that makes it much easier to other people.
Do Nanny State Policies Save Healthcare Costs?
00:21:10
Speaker
If you look at alcohol, alcohol has broadly gone kind of untouched compared to tobacco over the years, although that is starting to change.
00:21:19
Speaker
The obvious example the exception to that, course, is minimum pricing, which is a brilliant way of increasing the price of alcohol that people who are poor drink, while leaving the wine and champagne richer people drink completely untouched.
00:21:33
Speaker
doesn't even bring any money from the government, but it does make the life of people. I'm not even poor, but poor to average anchors, right? its how do we So to explain that, minimum pricing is not done on a per-alcohol category basis.
00:21:47
Speaker
It's just done across alcohol in general. Yeah, 65% of units it is now. Right, so so the the the increase goes up for the same for that bottle of champagne as it does for six packs.
00:21:59
Speaker
Right. So if your bottle of wine is already £7, the minimum price is now something like £6.50. So it's still £7. So it doesn't put up the price of stuff that I'm not saying it's yeah very high end, but kind of above average price.
00:22:13
Speaker
Whereas just a normal four pack of beer will go up in price. doesn't affect pubs, doesn't affect restaurants. So yeah, definitely there's a class angle to that.
00:22:24
Speaker
Anti-gambling pressure groups. I mean, they're going after the machines and bookmakers, which overwhelmingly work in class areas. In fact, they complained about you know clustering of betting shops in working class areas.
00:22:35
Speaker
There's a lot of that goes on. And food. I mean, there is obviously a growing desire to climb down food in the name of obesity. But these people have found it quite difficult to clamp down on the stuff that they're unlike, which is pretty explicitly just normal working class grub, as it were, processed food, you know, convenience food.
00:22:56
Speaker
They found it scientifically quite difficult to do that because When they were using the category of ah HFSS, high in fat, sugar, and salt, it turns out that a lot of, you know, food that middle class and rich people eat is very high in sugar, salt, or fat. And so you can get things like butter and olive oil caught up there. And then, oh, that's not right. We didn't mean that kind of stuff, you know.
00:23:21
Speaker
And so then we've gone to ultra-processed food now, which is more explicitly just food made by big corporations and sold in supermarkets to the masses. So yeah, there's a huge class element to it. In fact, most of the conversation about health inequalities, which you've probably come across from time to time, health inequalities, the argument for you know reducing health inequalities,
00:23:43
Speaker
It's really about trying to impose the lifestyles of the upper middle class on everybody else. They're not trying to reduce health inequalities by making rich people less healthy, obviously. Although that would be one way to do it. And then chat typically when you People are trying to address inequality that generally level down rather than level up.
00:24:05
Speaker
They're not trying to do that. they They say, well, then what are the main drivers of health inequalities? And they claim that they are things like drinking, which actually people lower incomes do less often than the rich on average.
00:24:17
Speaker
Smoking, which obviously people lower incomes do a lot more. And obesity, which they kind of blame on the kind of food that they think ordinary people eat. which isn't nutritionally very much different to the food diet.
00:24:31
Speaker
cheeseburger and and chips at the Ivy is still going to have the same fat content as the ones at McDonald's. Another argument against health inequality that you often hear is an economic argument that says, well, there are more fat people in society as a result of unhealthy food.
00:24:47
Speaker
That puts more pressure on the NHS. As a result of that, that's unfair that people have to fund fatty's lifestyles. As a result of that, we need to regulate food or regulate cigarettes.
00:24:59
Speaker
How do you respond to that economic argument? Well, I mean, fundamentally, it's just not true, except in the case of alcohol, that there aren't really any net negative externalities from people being unhealthy in that sense. You know, the cold truth of it is that the government saves money so long as people die.
00:25:18
Speaker
fairly quickly as soon as possible lock and they retire, which smokers do pretty reliably and obeseity obese people probably do to some extent as well. So when you look at the actual economics of this, it doesn't stack up. Nobody wants to say it because you then you get accused of wanting to cull the elderly.
00:25:36
Speaker
But it's the elderly who are overwhelmingly treated by the NHS. People spend ah yeah about 50% of your lifetime healthcare care costs come in the last year of life. And that last year of life obviously can't be It can be delayed, but it it can't be wiped away. yeah It can't be prevented completely. yeah So what you have instead is people living longer, during which time they are taking money out and in pensions and having all sorts of other healthcare care needs.
UK's Position in the Nanny State Index
00:26:02
Speaker
And That is one of the reasons why, despite smoking, which is clearly the most dangerous of the lifestyle behaviors I write about, smoking has plummeted from more than half the population to close to 10%. But has anyone noticed the NHS budget falling by a mensure amount? It never will do because one of the ironies about so preventive health is that in the case of smoking, for example, smoking is a major source of cancer. But the fewer people smoke, the more cancer you get because actually age is a bigger risk factor for cancer.
00:26:33
Speaker
So again, people aren't looking this in the round. They're not looking at the trade-offs here. um Also, I would say that I think it's rather unfair to force people to pay for each other's healthcare care and then suddenly bring in a whole lot of rules about how you have to behave in your own life.
00:26:46
Speaker
If you don't want to pay for other people's healthcare, fine. yeah Go with an insurance system. Don't force people into socialized healthcare and then say, oh, by the way, you're not allowed to smoke and we're going to weigh you and you can't eat this and you can only drink 14 units a week.
00:27:01
Speaker
No, I'd rather yeah ah rather take my chances in a private system which would cover some of this stuff because it would be insurance-based. It's ironic because you get left-wing people above all making this bobgus argument about the cost of the NHS, but whereas they would run a mile from what would be the obvious solution to this, which is each person pays for their own health care based on an assessment of their w risk by an insurance company.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. Okay, let's go to the to the Nanny State Index specifically. Let's start with UK. So the UK, I believe, is seventh at the moment? Yeah. Puts them, what, towards the the bottom of the top third of the table. So they are one of the relatively higher Nanny State countries in Europe.
00:27:42
Speaker
Give me the high-level summary of what's happening in the UK in 2025 when it comes to nanny state policies. They've got the highest score for tobacco control because of very high taxes, plain packaging. yeah I mean, everything, every anti-smoking policy you can think of, the UK has got, including, of course, this upcoming generational ban, which will move it further up the table.
00:28:02
Speaker
I keep having to create new categories in this just for the UK. That's how bad the UK is. The food stuff equally, had to create categories for banning the sale of so-called less healthy food in certain areas of supermarkets, which no other country is doing.
00:28:17
Speaker
I'm going to have to create a new category for, already created a category for advertising, but UK is going to have by far the biggest score for advertising bans for food and soft drinks because there is a ban coming in just being pushed back to January next year that should be in place by the time the next index comes along.
00:28:34
Speaker
The only category does well... Sorry, just quickly, what's that ban for specifically? ah It's um so-called junk food advertising on TV and on the internet. So McDonald's won't be able to advertise on TV from next year in the UK?
00:28:46
Speaker
They're able to advertise anything the government thinks is less healthy. That's unbelievable. The that it's been postponed for three months is so that McDonald's can advertise their healthier food. The legislation is badly written and it basically just said if you make unhealthy food, you can't advertise.
00:29:03
Speaker
we're going to be seeing a lot of ads for those rubbish, shitty McDonald's salads, basically. I don't think they sell salads anymore. I think they they tried it, and it turned out people who go to McDonald's are not big salad eaters.
00:29:13
Speaker
So they had to eventually capitulate to consumer demand and go back to the burgers and the fries. So yeah, the only reason the UK is not much higher up, and it's pretty bad being at some, is traditionally it's been very good on vaping.
00:29:26
Speaker
Just kind of left it alone, really, normal consumer regulation. But that's all changing disposable products. Vape ban came in this month. There's a vape tax coming in next year, which is going to be a nightmare. And the strong possibility of some kind of regulation of packaging and flavors and goodness knows what else.
00:29:42
Speaker
Pressing, isn't it? but Because again, it feels to me to be so out of sync with the psyche of of the UK and and kind of where it has been historically. um One of the problems is politically, and you go back to that stupid smoking policy that was introduced by the conservatives. It was introduced by the well, nominally centre-right political party.
00:30:03
Speaker
but how big How much of this comes down to, because we know now that you know the left are authoritarians and they have been for some time, but it feels like that the right in the UK have completely given up on defending civil liberties.
00:30:16
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it it's the Conservative Party. you know It's not a Liberal Party. nice. Because of Margaret Thatcher and her influence, some people still think that they the Conservative Party is so in some way the party of free markets. And of course, they will say that every year at their conference, a leader will say they believe in free markets and then announce for about an hour a whole load of big government policies and state control and industrial strategies and all the rest of it. They don't believe it. They are conservatives, and not liberals. You know, there's a reason that higher, quote, and that's a set of cold, why I'm not a conservative.
00:30:51
Speaker
I wish that they were more fancierite and that the dwindling number of free marketeers and libertarians in the conservative party have more control, but they don't. And they certainly didn't under Rishi Sunak.
00:31:02
Speaker
There's also the problem that they have misguidedly been trying to reach out to what they think the centre ground is, when in fact it wasn't the centre ground. It was the centre ground on Twitter maybe, but it wasn't the centre ground in the country.
00:31:14
Speaker
and And as a result, massively blew 14 years in power, for which it doesn't look like the electorate are going to forgive them. Well, i sorry, I've got a question on that. Do you think the Conservatives are done? I don't know. i mean, they've managed to hang around for a long time and have always pulled it back.
00:31:31
Speaker
I wouldn't say they're done because I think way it depends on a lot of things, clearly. But even if you assume reform are going to somehow win the next election, are the public going to, you know,
00:31:43
Speaker
pick them within five minutes in the same way that they've hated labor within five minutes, you know? So I wouldn't say they're done, but I mean, i I know what I put money on them winning election the next 10 years, you know?
00:31:54
Speaker
Yeah.
Germany's Unique Nanny State Position
00:31:55
Speaker
More generally, going across the the table, the top countries, Turkey came out on top. What are the the content common themes that run across those those countries in the top third of the table, if you can if you can find some?
00:32:09
Speaker
The ones at the top are just bad on everything, really. Certainly bad on vaping and and alcohol. I mean, Turkey, course, Muslim country, not keen on alcohol.
00:32:19
Speaker
They have very high syntaxes relative to their very low GDP. Doesn't help their score. They ban vapes completely, which no other country in the index has done. And then you've got places like Lithuania and Finland, which are very anti-alcohol, but also very anti-vage. I mean, most of the countries actually, of the worrying things about doing it this year seeing how ah incredibly hostile governments in general ah are towards sacred nicotine products.
00:32:45
Speaker
Clamping down on nicotine pouches already in France, it's going to be a criminal offense, punishable by jail time. potentially, for possession of a nicotine product, not even selling it. Nicotine factories are basically safe. I mean, it's as safe as a nicotine product's ever going to get.
00:33:03
Speaker
These are these's the little things that you put up in between your teeth and your gum. They can't contain no no tobacco, cellulose and nicotine, but they're being treated much, much worse than cigarettes are.
00:33:14
Speaker
as are vapes. There's a lot of countries banning e-cigarette flavors because it's a just a clever way of essentially destroying the entire category. So yeah, places like Lithuania and Finland are bad on vaping, bad on alcohol.
00:33:26
Speaker
Hungary is really bad in terms of its cute taxes on food and soft drinks. Still has a very high rate of obesity, by the way. Ireland and the UK is bad across the board, and um but until recently it's been okay on vaping, but that's changing.
00:33:40
Speaker
and So yeah, it's a bit and ah it's better of a mix of countries at the top because you've got like a couple of pretty authoritarian autocracies in Hungary and Turkey. And the UK. And the UK.
00:33:51
Speaker
And you've got the Eastern European countries over time have been going up and up the the scale, unfortunately, mainly because they they've been really trying to calm down on on drinking but also on vaping.
00:34:04
Speaker
Then you've got, yeah, in Scandinavian countries, you can't expect to be a little bit paternalist, and indeed Finland is. And then you've got, yeah, then he got the British Isles, who, like I said at the start, Anglophone countries are particularly bad for nanny state behavior for whatever reason.
00:34:19
Speaker
And I think both for those would be top five next time, for sure. And then if we go to the other end, the the better countries, the best country on the list was Germany. Yeah, always surprises people that.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah, so riddle me this, because we are literally seeing at the moment some of the most oppressive speech laws in Germany that you could possibly imagine, whilst at the same time they seem to have the best nanny state po or anti-nanny state policies.
00:34:46
Speaker
How does that seeming contradiction work? It's on the face of it, it doesn't, does it? But that doesn't yeah politicians don't have to be coherent. The Germans actually have have always been more resistant to anti-smoking legislation than the rest of Europe, purely because Hitler was so anti-smoking and introduced quite a lot of anti-smoking regulation himself.
00:35:09
Speaker
Really hated smoking. It was under the Nazis that the phrase passive smoking, passive broken was coined. It's a beer drinking country, so they have very low taxes on on beer. They're pretty laid back about other kinds of alcohol too. They they haven't got any anti-food regulation. doesn't really seem to be on the the radar.
00:35:26
Speaker
I don't know exactly why they're a bit more liberal in this. I just don't think there's much of a conversation in Germany about it.
Need for Opposition to Nanny State Policies
00:35:32
Speaker
The final area of inquiry that I have is how do you actually fight back against this stuff? Or perhaps even the question before that, is it possible to fight back against this stuff? As you've said yourself, you've been doing the Nanny State Index for how long now?
00:35:44
Speaker
Nine years. Nine years. You've been in lifestyle economics for even longer. And over that time, no doubt, you've just seen this gradual erosion of people's liberties. yeah had had correct
00:35:58
Speaker
How possible is a fight back? And and then if so, like how do people who are civil liberty minded, if that's a phrase, how do you go about pushing back against this stuff? Well, there needs to be more people doing it, I guess is the answer.
00:36:12
Speaker
Ultimately, like I said earlier, i the support for this kind of stuff is it's wide but shallow. And politicians can easily be dissuaded from doing it if they think there is going to be any real cost to themselves, but both in terms of cost to the government or cost to their political prospects.
00:36:31
Speaker
A lot of this kind of thing used to be more of a badge of shame than a mark of honor. Now they say it's a mark of honor. They have various incentives to do it, including getting a pat on the back from the World Health Organization, which should be defunded completely.
00:36:47
Speaker
there needs to be more of the grass-well support, the vocal support from journalists and yeah anybody has any kind of voice just laughing at these people, really. You know, they they should be, you know, you Australians know a great word for wowsers.
00:37:02
Speaker
I wish we could introduce the word and in Europe. Wileser seems to be a great name for it because it treats them ah with a lack of seriousness and i don't deserve to be taken seriously. like What they say is often not just untrue but preposterous.
00:37:17
Speaker
Their policies are not fit for a free society. And it's important to call these people out and and don't take them seriously. Every time they try and move the over to Window,
00:37:29
Speaker
Raise attention to the fact that they're doing it. Raise attention to the fact that they're doing things they swore on a stack of Bibles they would never do. They swore there was no slippery slope. They swore it was only going to be smoking they were after. They weren't going to be using the same tools against other things. And now they very openly do that.
00:37:45
Speaker
So all you can do is is make some noise. And yeah what the IA tries to do across the piece is not lobby politicians, but change climate of opinion bit by bit.
Humorous Conclusion & Farewell
00:37:55
Speaker
And i you can't, I don't know how much I've done that, but I could always use the public health technique of saying if I hadn't been around, things would got even worse. Here's my model.
00:38:04
Speaker
Touche. Well, one of the the channels in which you do that is the wonderful Last Orders podcast for Spiked. The last question on that podcast every week is what is the one thing that you would ban in society if you got the chance, with the only caveat being it can't be something serious? so Yeah, well, I mean, I often chip in on this question myself on the Last Orders because I have an endless list of things that that're really infuriate me.
00:38:30
Speaker
Nearly all of them involve public transport or people just getting in my way. yeah i would just ban people from suddenly standing still in London's transportation pavements, ah particularly if they're carrying a a large wheelie suitcase, which right I would also ban unless you go on a holiday day for at least eight days.
00:38:50
Speaker
My other favorite one the other day was your rant about doctors and effectively getting rid of them in favor of a bottle of whiskey and just clamping down on a little piece of wood in your mouth. Yeah. Well, hopefully the day will come when AI gets to a state where we can, if not completely ban doctors, but certainly you make a lot of them redundant. I don't believe that day is that far off considering how much time doctors spend Googling things as it is.
00:39:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. And then we won't have to deal with these sorts of greedy pay increase requests. Chris, 90 state index is fantastic. A link to that is in the show notes, as is a link to the Last Orders podcast. I always love these conversations, mate. Keep doing what you're doing and swimming against the current.
00:39:28
Speaker
Thanks for coming on today. Thank you. it easy.