Christopher Snowdon is Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs
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In less enlightened times, an outbreak of a deadly virus was taken as a sign of God’s displeasure and would be accompanied by the persecution of an unpopular minority. It was less than a coincidence that the scapegoats tended to be those of whom the Church took a dim view: heretics, ‘witches’ (i.e. unmarried women)
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This week, The Guardian informed us, a study revealed the ‘scale of the British public’s denial about weight problems’. Data collected by the Association for the Study of Obesity found that ‘more than a fifth of Britons who think their size is healthy or normal were in fact overweight’. This apparent delusion has been attributed
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As we begin to learn best practice in the fight against Covid-19, it is notable that the handful of countries that have reduced the number of new cases to zero have used diagnostic testing and contact tracing on a large scale and have recommended the use of face masks. After two frantic months, the UK
Our bossy lifestyle regulators are making the most of this crisis
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Since this is the nearest most of us have ever got to living under the Blitz, I’ve been re-reading George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn. Written in London in 1940, it begins with the famous line: ‘As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’ The first part of
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All election campaigns see politicians exaggerate, stretch the truth and make promises they can’t keep. But if a report issued in early December is anything to go by, the 2019 general election campaign was a particularly dishonest affair – and one party was particularly guilty. On 10 December, Metro reported: Similarly, the Independent reported: Websites which make no attempt
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Is polluted air still a problem in Britain? When it comes to smog and pollution, most of us think about rapidly-industrialising city likes Shanghai and Delhi rather than London. Yet the research tells a different story: the Royal College of Physicians estimates that 40,000 deaths a year can be attributed to air pollution, and that
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Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner has promised that if Labour wins the next election it will use its first budget to ‘immediately close the tax loopholes used by elite private schools and use that money to improve the lives of all children.’ This slab of red meat went down well with the class warriors at
Illicit THC products are the problem
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James Cracknell, the athlete turned anti-obesity campaigner, was the subject of sniggering and derision in April when he said that North Korea and Cuba had got a ‘handle on obesity’. With impressive understatement, he attributed this to both countries being ‘quite controlling on behavioural trends’. It was a bad point poorly made, but in a
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I had forgotten how much I disliked cannabis until I found myself under its influence, in the rain, trying and failing to find Toronto’s Union Train Station so I could get to the airport and go home. The plan had been to enhance my mood for a long journey, floating back to the UK in
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On the evening of Monday 3rd June, The Spectator gathered a group of experts together for a dinner to discuss the challenge of bringing the UK’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. The dinner was held the night before the Spectator Energy Summit, with both events being chaired by Andrew Neil. With the permission
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You really can’t make this stuff up. With hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions fleeing for their lives, the failed state of Syria is being told by the World Health Organisation to concentrate on… plain packaging. In a statement last week, the UN health agency warned that ‘notwithstanding the current crisis in the country,’
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With alcohol consumption falling every year for over a decade it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the myth that Britain is in the grips of a drinking epidemic, but where there’s a will there’s a way. One method is to focus on whichever group is drinking the most. Even though everybody is drinking less,
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There is a perception – on Twitter at least – that vapers are angry and abusive. Ben Goldacre recently described ‘e-cigarette campaigners’ as ‘vile… obsessive, vindictive, abusive, and to an extent that is clearly dubious’. This inevitably led to a string of replies from bewildered vapers that may have confirmed his view, although the vast majority
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Every few years, Action on Smoking and Health draws up a wish list of all the policies it would introduce if it was king for the day. It then spends the next few years lobbying ferociously and watches with a satisfied smirk as every single one of their brainwaves becomes the law of the land.
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Action on Sugar, the bastard offspring of Consensus Action on Salt, has noticed that dried fruit contains sugar. As with every utterance from the pressure group, the BBC thinks this is newsworthy. Based on an unpublished undergraduate research project, Action on Sugar says that 85 per cent of fruit snacks’ contain more sugar than 100
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The man in the pub’s solution to the ongoing panic about legal highs is to ban them. ‘Ban ‘em all! S’obvious, innit? I can’t believe politicians haven’t thought of it already. Yeah, go on, I’ll have another…’ Here’s the thing. It is obvious and politicians have thought of it already. The reason that it never
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Bad ideas die hard in the world of ‘public health’, especially when the government can make money out of them. The shipwreck of Denmark’s notorious ‘fat tax’ should have served as a lighthouse for politicians for a generation. The negative consequences of the Danish experiment could not have been clearer. After levying a tax on all
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One of the many old temperance beliefs that linger on in the field of ‘public health’ is known as availability theory. Put simply, this theory says that if you make alcohol more available, people will drink more and there will be more alcohol-related problems. As a result, the temperance/public health lobby always wants shorter opening
