Harms or highs? Regulating narcotics, alcohol and nicotine
12th Oct 2015
Think of the children: the danger of infantilising adult society
Given the emotion, fear and anger that surrounds this issue, the ideas discussed above represent an immensely challenging agenda for anyone holding office, even though a vast prize is there to be won for the leaders who will eventually make it work. The arguments against prohibitions and for enlightened risk-based regulation are extremely strong. However, opponents of this direction in policy thinking have what they consider a potent force majeure argument that overrides all else: ?think of the children?.
Of course we should think of the children. But we should not let adult society be bent out of shape by excessive attempts to control the behaviour of young people or to isolate them from adult life. When it comes to recreational drugs, we should recognise that many young people grow up with a risk appetite, are hostile to authority, seek adult experiences to bond with each other and so on. Just as the availability of contraception for teenagers may appear to condone teenage sex, it offers a better strategy than abstinence only ?true love waits? lectures followed by inevitable teenage pregnancies.
Read more and see the graphics.
Why adults do not need nannies
People in love with their own expertise should not be taking the personal decisions of the rest of the population.
9/24/2015
by David Leyonhjelm
Over the last few weeks I have learnt two things. First, a lot of people dislike the nanny state. The incredible popularity of the Senate Inquiry into it ? both in the media and among the general public ? is testimony to that.
However, it is also clear that lots of people are confused what the term “nanny state” means, even among those who ought to know. At its core, nanny-statism involves enacting laws and enforcing policies that interfere with or manage personal choices, when the only consideration is the individual’s own good.
The Senate inquiry into personal choice and community impacts, of which I am chairman, has adopted “nanny state” as a short-hand phrase to describe its focus. Why does this inquiry matter?
I am a classical liberal, like John Stuart Mill. And it is John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” that is at the core of the political philosophy I espouse. It states, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”.
The harm principle is distinct from public health interventions that address public problems, such as product safety, sanitation, vaccines and water quality. Those are not nanny state laws, as they are not directed at making individuals live their lives according to a certain set of rules or to a certain standard.
A good example of nanny state intervention can be seen in the case of obesity. If you eat too much and get fat, that is your problem. It may be unwise and we can disapprove of it, but it is not the government’s business whether you eat too much and get fat. You are the one affected, and the costs you incur are private.
We should also stop using the phrase “obesity epidemic”, because obesity is not catching.
NANNY STATE CONFUSION
Some will argue that those who harm themselves as a result of poor choices cause the rest of us to pay more via our socialised health system. That is true, but it does not need to be the case; some countries have health systems where the costs are covered via insurance with premiums adjusted according to risk factors. And once we start telling people how to live based on this argument, where does it end? Do we want to make it a crime to eat chips, or not to exercise?
The confusion of nanny state issues with non-nanny state can be seen in relation to speeding. Typically this is not a nanny state issue because speed limits have the aim of protecting others from harm. However, that might not be the case when enforcement of speed limits occurs on an isolated, empty road.
A related problem emerges when people confuse the sort of regulation needed to protect children with regulation intended to protect adults from harming themselves through personal choices.
The nanny state inquiry is not about children, and attempts to make it so are a strawman. No one disputes that children must be treated differently from adults. While I prefer decisions about children to be left to parents, without state interference, there are circumstances ? like child abuse ? where the state must become involved.
Public health advocates also purport to speak on behalf of the poor, less educated and less sophisticated. This looks superficially compassionate, but it is not. It is arrogant and elitist, and assumes moral and intellectual superiority.
Its effect is to hector people about unhealthy lifestyle choices, often coupled with the coercive use of state power to manipulate their purchases. This takes an economically destructive form when it results in regressive taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, which hit the poor hardest.
And there is a fundamental aspect to this issue. Every time people in love with their own expertise ? including many public health advocates ? seek to regulate what people buy or how they spend their time or what they put in their mouths, they forget that the people who shop are the same as those who vote.
If we can trust people to vote ? a difficult and demanding choice with profound consequences ? we can trust people to know what to eat, to drink, to buy, what video games to play, and whether or not to smoke. At its core, nanny statism is a threat to universal franchise.
David Leyonhjelm is Liberal Democrats Senator for NSW
The big fat myths of our ‘obesity epidemic’
Childhood obesity is falling. Adult obesity is flatlining. And it’s longevity that really costs the NHS
6 June 2015
Christopher Snowdon
LISTEN HERE.
Douglas Murray and Christopher Snowden discuss whether the NHS is too bossy
Like all failing projects, or popular cults, the NHS needs scapegoats. Britain’s health service is plagued by an endless stream of deviants who are a ‘burden’ on its resources. Otherwise known as patients, they are the drinkers, smokers and fatsos who, we are told, will bring the NHS to its knees unless lifestyles are regulated by the state.
Smokers were a useful scapegoat for a while. Now it’s the obesity ‘time bomb’. As Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, recently put it, ‘The new smoking is obesity.’ He claims that fatties will cost the NHS far more than the £8 billion he wangled out of George Osborne before the election.
Much of the fear about obesity rests on the belief that it is a spiralling epidemic. Properly defined, an epidemic is a temporary outbreak of contagious disease in a specific community. The gradual rise of corpulence in Britain in recent decades is neither fleeting nor infectious nor localised. The term ‘epidemic’ has been adopted to stoke the illusion that being fat is an issue of public health requiring government action when it is really an issue of personal health and private behaviour.
Whatever we choose to call it, obesity is not spiralling. Rates of childhood obesity are in fact falling. Adult obesity is flatlining. So the hysteria can only be maintained through predictions of a future catastrophe. In 2006 a Department of Health report predicted that 28 per cent of women and 33 per cent of men would be obese by 2010. The fateful year came and went with obesity rates of 26 per cent for both sexes.
In 2007 the Government Office for Science issued a report predicting that ‘by 2015, 36 per cent of males and 28 per cent of females will be obese’. At the last count, the rates were 26 per cent and 24 per cent respectively, which is to say that they had fallen slightly since 2010.
A few weeks ago campaigners had the good sense to make a prediction for the more distant future when they claimed that three-quarters of Englishmen will be overweight or obese by 2030. Considering that there has been no rise in this category since 2001, this seems as unlikely.
If Britain does not feel as if it is in the grips of a fat epidemic, these wild predictions are designed to make us believe that it is only a matter of time. Since obesity is linked to a number of diseases, it is easy to believe that fat people take more than their fair share of NHS resources. But this is a fallacy. Without question, some people wind up in hospital for ailments that can be attributed to their girth, and there are costs attached to such admissions. But it is equally obvious that if someone does not die from one cause they will die from another. The real question is whether the diseases that afflict slim people are less expensive than those that afflict the obese. The evidence suggests that they are not. Moreover, slim people tend to stay alive long enough to endure cataracts, broken hips, dementia and all the other blessings of old age that place a strain on the NHS.
In a 2008 study of lifetime medical costs, Pieter van Baal and colleagues found that obese people cost the health service less than the ‘healthy living’. Smokers cost even less. In that sense, obesity is the new smoking. Like smoking, it saves the state billions of pounds in unpaid healthcare and pensions. This has been established in numerous economic studies over several decades, but nobody wants to admit it, least of all those who run the NHS.
It is longevity, not premature mortality, which places a burden on public finances. If the NHS ever collapses, it will be because we are living too long. When the NHS was created, life expectancy was 68. It is now 81. Despite all the ‘time bombs’ and ‘epidemics’, life expectancy is predicted to be 87 by the end of the next decade. The day may soon come when the average citizen spends more of their life in education and retirement than they do in work. This may well be unsustainable, but it is not the fault of drinkers, smokers or fatties. No one is doing more to save the NHS than them.
The Advance Notice of the Labour Manifesto
January 16, 2015
I don’t know how many readers will be aware of Labour’s statement about what they intend to put in their manifesto about Public Health. It takes the form of a PDF document, and here it is:
http://www.yourbritain.org.uk/uploads/editor/files/Public_Health.pdf
I haven’t actually read it yet, but Dick Puddlecote has taken it apart, and you can read his ‘take’ on it here:
http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/todays-labour-health-recipe-reheated.html
Or you could read Snowden’s opionion here:
http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/labour-officially-declares-war-on.html
For a bit of fun, you could also read the Telegraph’s opinion:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11346357/Labour-targets-Frosties-and-jelly-babies-in-public-health-campaign.html
Very briefly, the statement says that Labour will squeeze smokers, drinkers and fatties until they squeak, and all this squeezing will, of course, be ‘helping them’ to give up their bad habits and, of course, has no other intention than to ‘protect’ children, which the State ‘has a duty’ to do. By around the year 2050 (it used to be ‘by the year 2000’), all Britons, except the Elite, of course, will be as fit as fiddles and able to work until they are eighty before they can claim their State pensions.
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The whole thing is clearly hogwash. So much so, that it is reasonable to ask why it has been produced NOW rather than as part of the actual Labour manifesto in due course. Why NOW?
I smell a trap.
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For all intents and purposes, the coalition is dead. It is as dead as Monty Python’s parrot. It is deceased; it is no longer with us; it has passed away; it has been reunited with its maker. From now on until May, it is every party for itself, and every MP for his/her own survival. This means that whatever might embarrass the Tories is to be promoted to the greatest possible extent by both Liberals and Labours.
In this specific incident, it seems to me, there is a repeat of the trap which was set in the Lords when the ‘Children’s Protection Bill’ (I paraphrase) was hijacked by Labour peers under the noses of the Tory peers batter smokers again and again with the ‘no smoking in cars’ trick and the ‘plain packaging’ trick. The Tories fell for it hook line and sinker. They were properly stitched up. Merely to save face, the Tories had to forget their principles (Cameron said that he did not want to invade parents’ ‘space’) and surrender. By ‘surrender’, I mean make the appropriate noises with their tongues.
So what is the trap?
Labour knows damn well that the public are fed up with the nannying. The public have said so in a poll just recently. Thus, Labours (and Liberals) are trying to goad Tories into enacting health zealots’ legislation to make themselves unpopular. Clever, don’t you think? Note that, as yet, these Labour proposals are not actually part of their election manifesto. Thus, the interests of the Health Lobby and the temporary interests of the Labour party coincide.
But the trap will only work if the Tories are stupid enough to fall into it. Remember, as I said earlier, that the coalition is dead. Liberals also have an interest in discomforting the Tories, especially MPs like Williams, who is an anti-smoking zealot of the first order, and who is almost certainly on his way out of parliament at the GE.
What should the Tories do?
To answer that question, it is necessary to ask the question, ‘?Do the Tories either believe the poll which showed that people are sick to death of the nannying, or do they accept the sort of polls produced by YouGov which state that 70% of the people love and welcome bans?’
I would advise the Tories thus:
1. The people who welcome bans are not the people affected by the bans, apart from those who have been brainwashed.
2. When people say that they want to stop smoking (or reduce their alcohol intake or want to slim) they are stating their second preference and not their first. Their first preference is to continue to enjoy tobacco (or booze or food), but it is an expensive habit due to the vicious taxes. I have personal experience. When I was a single ‘man about town’, the cost of cigs was well within my ‘budget’ (what budget? I mean that with ‘spending money’ of ‘5 per week, 10p for a packet if fags was not important around 1960). However, when I married and had children and had a mortgage, etc, the cost of smoking became a factor in our household costs. True, I was ‘addicted’ to tobacco ‘” in a sense. Giving up was painful for a few days ‘” ‘the black hole of despond’ opened up. But I did give up smoking for a full year and was able to buy my first car as a result. But what really happened? All that happened was that I exchanged the cost of smoking for the cost of owning a car and of driving. Had I conquered the ‘addiction’? Well, surely after twelve months, I must have? But I started smoking again. Why? There can only be one reason, which is that I really, really enjoyed smoking and that the addiction element was not the most significant element.
3. Labours (and Liberals) want you to commit suicide by rushing legislation through to ban smoking in cars and introducing PP. The 70% of the population who are non-smokers do not really give a shit one way or the other. If they were told that banning smoking, increasing the cost of alcohol, taking out sugar foods would increase the taxes that they themselves would have to pay, those people would rapidly change their minds. ‘?Dear Mr Cameron. Use your brain rather than your tongue. Do NOT enact legislation which will make Tories unpopular. Get a grip’
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Finally, we have a serious problem. If we accept that Labours are serious about persecuting smokers, drinkers and fatties, how can we stop the tyranny? If the Tories actually go ahead and fall into the trap, then the solution is easy ‘” vote UKIP since there is no alternative. But suppose that the Tories do NOT fall into the trap? Should we smokers, drinkers and fatties vote Tory to stop Labours persecuting us (assuming that Labours really mean what they say)?
My thinking is this. If the Tories do not actively contest the illiberal waffle, then they are fools, and so I shall vote UKIP. If they do contest it, then I might just vote Tory. BUT, in my constituency, Labour rules, OK. For me personally, only UKIP makes sense. In marginal constituencies, whom I would vote for would depend upon how the Tories react to this Labour trap. If the Tories call the Labour bluff, then I would vote to keep the Tories in power. If they fall into the trap, then I would vote UKIP.
The result of GEs depends upon the marginal constituencies, but ‘marginal’ is stretchy. The smaller the difference between Tory and Labour, the more significant the votes for UKIP.
Bla. Bla.
Are we seeing deliberate, concerted efforts by the three main parties to disseminate confusion and uncertainty, with the intention of maintaining their individual party allegiances? It seems quite likely to be so to me. Why else would they keep constantly changing their stances?
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Finally, OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM STINKS. Why? Because of precisely the deliberate intention of the current political parties to create general confusion to maintain their collective control overall.
Is there a space there for a new political party which we could call ‘?THE TRUTH PARTY’? I chuck that idea out because it just this second popped into my mind. I wish that I was twenty years old than seventy five years old.
What could be better than a political party that is called ‘?The Truth Party’? A lovely idea, I think, but the idea has a major fault, in that the ‘opposition’ would have to be ‘?The Untruth Party’.
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However, there is some traction in that idea in the sense that part of the problem with our current, stinking political system is that politicians can deliberately lie and cheat, as we have seen with the expenses scandal. They cannot be trusted, but there is no system which can punish them for their support of tyrannical laws due to the monopoly.
That is the reason that REVOLUTIONS occur from time to time. We are due for a revolution. The first step must be that THE PEOPLE of England take ownership of the land. I have mentioned it before, but got shot down because people did not understand what I meant (probably my fault).
What I mean is that it should be clear beyond doubt that the only people who own the land of England are all the people as a group. The land can be leased and, sometimes, that lease can be free of costs. (My ground rent has become so ridiculously important that the landowners have stopped bothering to collect it, HOWEVER, if I sold the house, the vultures would demand their their back-dated cut ‘” without doing a thing to earn their cut). Just imagine how much money is being creamed off the economy by landowners, who do no work at all to justify their income. How and why did the Labour, shortly after WW2, not SEE that the ownership of the land is absolutely critical to everything that happens in our country? The present situation as regards land ownership is medieval.
There is no doubt in my mind, even though I am not paying a land rent because the landlords cannot be bothered to collect it, that land rents, which are currently paid to parasites, could thoroughly change our economy and our competitiveness in the world if the rents were paid to ‘The People’ in the form of The Government.
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Our political system stinks. Cameron, Miliband and Clegg emit pongs which are worse than farts.Why? Because they regard themselves as Gods.
Labour targets Frosties and jelly babies in public health campaign
Andy Burnham attacks David Cameron for failing to stand up for British children because of ‘powerful vested interests’
15 January 2015
By Holly Watt, Whitehall Editor
High levels of fat, sugar and salt in children’s food would become illegal under a Labour government, the party’s manifesto will say.
The shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham is due to announce that Labour would introduce news strategies to improve public health – ensuring the NHS remains affordable and sustainable.
Mr Burnham will attack the Prime Minister and the government for being ‘?too close to powerful vested interests’ to stand up for British children.
Labour’s changes will include strict rules on food labelling and targeted action on high-strength, low cost alcohol.
Mr Burnham also wants to make children born in 2015 the first ‘?smoke-free generation’ by introducing standardised cigarette packaging and limiting the tobacco industry’s ‘?increasingly sophisticated methods’ to recruit young smokers to their customer base.
‘?In a century of rising demand, helping people take more responsibility for their own health will be essential if we are to ensure the NHS remains affordable and sustainable for the future,’ Mr Burnham will say at the launch of Labour’s public health policy.
Poor health is having a serious effect on the NHS. Patients suffering from obesity and diabetes are putting increasing pressure on the system.
The cost of diabetes to the NHS is expected to rise from £10 billion to £17 billion a year by 2035.
If Labour wins the election, the government would also prioritise health education. Plans include ensuring that school children are given emergency first aid training and promoting basic levels of physical activity.
Childrens would be taught CPR and how to use defibrillators on heart attack victims. The location of defibrillators would be mapped – with the public being able to identify the closest on smart phones.
Under the new rules, a maximum limit would be set on levels of fat, salt and sugar in food marketed “substantially” to children.
Mr Burnham has previously considered a 30 per cent cap on sugar in cereals marketed at children. This would hit well-known brands including Kellogg’s Frosties, which have 37.0g of sugar per 100g and Coco Pops with 35g per 100g.
‘?Children will need better protection from the pressures of modern living and the harm caused by alcohol, sugar and smoke and Labour will not flinch from taking the action needed to provide it,’ Mr Burnham will say.
There are currently strict rules to prevent foods with high salt, fat and sugar content being advertised on TV during children’s programmes, but other forms of marketing could now be affected.
The World Health Organisation has previously accused food companies of finding ways to bypass the rules on advertising unhealthy products to children and fuelling the obesity crisis.
Although the rules apply to children’s television, they do not cover shows like Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor, which are widely watched by younger viewers.
Food companies are also increasingly targeting children through computer games, mobile phones and social networks.
‘?Labour wants the next generation to be healthier than the last,’ said Lucian Berger, she shadow health minister. ‘?We want every adult to be able to make informed, healthy choices that are right for them. Whether it is deciding to cycle to work, taking up a sport or quitting cigarettes, today we are setting a range of actions we will take to support people to achieve this.’
