Christopher Snowdon

I often tell friends they should read up on the Lucy Letby case because it is not going away. People will be talking about it for decades, possibly centuries. Even if she confesses, some people won’t believe her. A working understanding of the events at the Countess of Chester hospital in the mid-2010s will soon be

Labour is weighing up a crackdown on people under 18 buying ‘no and low-alcohol’ drinks. On current form, this means Keir Starmer’s government will launch a public consultation, commit itself to a ban, endure weeks of mockery and abuse from the public and then perform a humiliating U-turn. But when the inevitable climbdown comes, what will be

Across Europe, Nanny’s influence is growing: there has been a steady erosion of liberty for those of us who like to eat, drink, vape or smoke. Leading the pack in the 2025 Nanny State Index is Turkey where the state’s penchant for control borders on fetishistic, banning vapes outright and taxing alcohol off the scale.

The alleged ‘success’ of Mexico’s tax on sugary drinks inspired George Osborne to announce a sugar tax for the UK in 2016. But the news that the tax has led to children being poisoned by drinking frozen slushy ice drinks suggests it – just like Mexico’s – could be doing more harm than good. Mexico’s

Why do single-issue campaigners oppose solutions to their problems? Once you become aware of ‘not invented here’ syndrome, you start to see it everywhere: climate change activists lobbying against nuclear energy, anti-smoking campaigners campaigning against e-cigarettes, anti-obesity campaigners complaining about weight loss drugs. There are even some anti-alcohol campaigners who want to clamp down on

Have you ever noticed that there is no pressure group for people who want the government to leave them alone? On the face of it, this is strange because a lot of people want the government to leave them alone and there seems to be a pressure group for everything. There are organisations entirely devoted

Part of me wishes that disposable vapes had never been invented. Until they arrived, it seemed like the battle for tobacco harm reduction in Britain had been won. The kind of people who want to ban everything wanted to ban e-cigarettes, but most people could see that they were a relatively harmless substitute for cigarettes

There was a period during the pandemic in 2020 when the pubs were open but you could only go to one if you sat on your own and had a meal. You were allowed to buy an alcoholic drink but once you had finished your meal you could not buy another one. There was also

When George Orwell’s publisher, Fredric Warburg, read the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four in December 1948 he wrote a rapturous report to his colleagues, saying that the book was ‘worth a cool million votes to the Conservative party’. He described it as ‘a deliberate and sadistic attack on Socialism and socialist parties generally. It seems to indicate a

The European Congress on Obesity is an annual treat for health journalists, because it guarantees a week of ready-made stories based on unpublished research announced at the conference. Although it only started yesterday, it has already produced such headlines as ‘Children who use smartphones at mealtimes more likely to be obese’ and ‘Children “bombarded by

A decade ago, left-wingers started using the phrase ‘zero hours contracts’ to refer to what had previously been known as casual labour or piece work. Once this pejorative term become widely used, Ed Miliband, then the leader of the Labour party, promised to ban them. Similarly, the phrase ‘no fault evictions’ was almost unknown to

The government thinks it has finally found a popular policy. Better still, it is a policy that it can implement, or at least legislate for. According to a press release from the Department of Health and Social Care, a ban on disposable vapes is supported by ‘nearly 70 per cent of parents, teachers, healthcare professionals