Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – USA

I do not believe that the relationship between smoking and obesity rates is simple but this graph suggests that as a society we should at least consider taking a more holistic look at health issues.

For far too long now, health policy has been dictated by a dangerous combination of single issue campaigning and statistics based “evidence”.

People are not numbers, they do not conform to the rigid norms dictated by the public health industry and many will choose to accept certain health risks in pursuit of what they consider a more enjoyable if potentially shorter life.

I have no idea how much of the rise in obesity in the USA was fuelled by ex-smokers displacing one potentially harmful activity with another.  Similarly, campaigners have no idea whether trying to reduce young people’s access to tobacco and alcohol might lead to increased uptake of other substances that are potentially more acutely threatening to their health.

One thing that we do know, or should if we bothered to learn the lessons of history is that many public health interventions have had unintended negative consequences and the more illiberal and draconian the intervention then the greater the risk and impact of such consequences.

Chris Snowdon deals with this subject in some depth in his book The Art of Suppression. It is an informative well researched read for anyone interested in the reality behind the rhetoric.  Until I read it, amongst other things I was unaware that Heroin was originally promoted by the pharmaceutical industry as a non-addictive alternative to morphine.  Snowdon covers a range of issues including the disaster of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, the EUs illogical ban on oral tobacco and the growth in designer drugs as a consequence of Ecstasy prohibition.

He questions why prohibitionist policies remain attractive to many in the light of their historic failure and concludes that “in the end, fear is more intoxicating than hope.”

By Chris Oakley. Chris has previously posted on Liberal Vision:  Smokers-State Aprroved hate and Intolerance is UK policy,   Alcohol is Old News – Minimum Pricing for Digestives is the “Next Logical Step” , Soviet Style Alcohol Suppression Campaign Called for By Public Health Activists , Alcohol Taxation: The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth , A Liberal Tolerant nation? and  What hope is there for liberty if truth becomes the plaything of political lobbyists.

He wrote to me to ask about my views of the government’s proposals “to re-define marriage”, which he believes “will have far-reaching consequences…[that] will have an adverse effect on the stability and flourishing of our local community.”

I beg to differ.

Unsurprisingly for the backbencher who likes to see everything to do with Europe in apocalyptic terms, he contends that the pro-growth policies needed in Britain and the EU cannot be achieved without putting an end to legislative burdens and “generating policies that the integrationists in Europe – including the Liberal Democrats – simply refuse to allow.”  He concludes by affirming that the British government “cannot achieve growth because the Liberal Democrats, as part of those arrangements, have silenced the Prime Minister’s promise to repatriate, among other policies, burdens on business. It is called 57 votes and the keys to No. 10.” 

Now I’m sure Mr Cash is a committed subscriber to the Daily Telegraph so I am surprised that he overlooked the wise words of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills a few days ago. The majority of EU states, clubbed together in the Like Minded Group, want to see more deregulation, less red tape and an expanded Single Market (the latter of which was happily signed up to by Margaret Thatcher). For the benefit of those with their fingers in their ears and to separate reality from Mr Cash’s caricature, here’s a snippet of what Vince Cable wrote,

On the Working Time Directive: “I have continued to fight a rearguard action, so far successfully”

On our flexible labour market: “the last thing we need is the imposition of a new set of regulations potentially costing the economy billions a year”

On the ECJ: “I am not just fighting to keep the opt-out. There is also a battle to fend off damaging rulings by the European Court of Justice…I have instructed my officials to roll back these damaging rulings wherever possible…”

On fighting our corner in Europe: “We achieved agreement in Brussels to exempt around 1.4 million UK small businesses from burdensome EU accounting rules. When foolish and costly initiatives come out of Brussels, it is tempting to wave the Union flag and plead British exceptionalism.”

We need to put an end to Cash’s false dichotomy: you can be pro-market and pro-EU. One doesn’t need to unflinchingly subscribe to everything the EU does in order to support our continuing membership. There is, as Vince Cable said, a progressive majority in the EU replacing the dinosaurs of the past – it’s just a shame that some Tory Jurassic Park politicians cannot recognise the facts.

Nonetheless, their recent showing in the regional election in Schleswig-Holstein has confounded the critics. Widely tipped to fail to reach the necessary parliamentary threshold, they managed to secure a respectable 8.2% after a succession of poor results (Der Spiegel has more).

Interestingly for British Liberal Democrats, the FDP have embarked on a more confrontational approach with their CDU-CSU coalition partners. As one newspaper reported, their parliamentary group leader recently remarked that they had “successfully fought traces of “Social Democratization” among the conservatives”. Sounds like a great guy!

Lib Dems should monitor their strategy with interest. It is not too late to reverse our fortunes. We too can confound the polls and critics.

Both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will need to assess where they go from here. Saying its down to mid-term blues after another drubbing won’t do (Alex Salmond, the Scottish Emperor politician, was able to increase the number of SNP councillors whilst in government).

Certain Tories will want their party to move further right to appease UKIP, whilst many Liberal Democrats will no doubt seek to shift the party leftwards after Labour’s gains. It will be hard to reconcile these views. Some may say they are poles apart.

However, the senior party figures that have taken to the airwaves have been silent on the key issue following the local authority elections: just what are the increasingly out of touch Cameron and Clegg going to do about a potential march of the penguins?

Not So Happy Feet

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which brings together the presidents of the Medical Royal Colleges and Faculties and so purports to represent nearly every doctor in the UK, is to lead a campaign to tackle rising levels of obesity.

One’s initial reaction might be to welcome a medical intervention aimed at combating something that kills as many as 30,000 people each year. But unfortunately, it is not a medical intervention that these doctors have planned.

My latest article on the IEA blog explains that the medical elite, having identified what it considers to be the end that society should pursue, is turning to the coercive power of the state to achieve that end.

Comments on the IEA blog, please.

And they say WE need saving!

I have previously commented on nations more liberal and more tolerant than ours with respect to their treatment of those who choose to smoke. In addition to Germany and The Netherlands I have observed pragmatic approaches that guarantee smoke free air for the many without victimising the significant few in France, Austria and Switzerland.

It is mildly surprising that Switzerland offers some of the best facilities for travelling smokers despite being home to the WHO an organization that seeks to impose its politicised extra budgetary funded will on all without actually having to do anything as inconvenient as obtaining a popular mandate.  My experiences are based on Basel and things may become decreasingly liberal as one approaches Geneva.

Basel provides airside facilities for smokers in both arrivals and departures. They have chairs, tables and other comfort features that tend to be absent from smoking facilities in the UK where our laws are intended to punish and coerce.  UK facilities lack even the basics like an appropriate number of walls.

The Swiss authorities seem unconcerned that the mere sight of a cigarette brand will cause a mass surge in smoking uptake suggesting that they are reasonable, sane individuals unlike their increasingly ridiculous UK counterparts. Imagine not only allowing a cigarette manufacturer to advertise on a smoking lounge but having the intelligence to work out that it might be a good way to help cover the costs of providing such facilities.

Basel airport links directly to an international high speed rail network and it is a short walk from the terminal to the train station.  On arrival there smokers are greeted by the amazing sight of a cafe with a ventilated separate smoking lounge. Yes, smokers can sit down and have a drink in some comfort and apparently without bothering non-smokers.

In the UK smoking facilities are exclusively outdoors and not segregated which seems to create an issue for some non-smokers. I have never really observed unwanted smoke in my workplace but I have noticed that these days I seem to experience greater exposure to environmental smoke outside UK buildings.

It seems I am not alone. Here is a selection of reader’s comments from media forums:

 “I object to having to walk on the road because you’re all standing outside the pub/restaurant on the pavement. When I have to stand close to you and you smell so bad I want to be sick”

 “I for one am tired of the thick wall of foul smelling smoke outside of every shop on every high street in every town as the inconsiderate people who smoke stand in the doorway indulging in their foul habit”

 “Smokers are by nature dirty. They stand outside smoking without a care for anybody else walking past them and blowing their smoke in faces…”

It would appear that a more reasoned approach that did not force smokers onto the streets might benefit everyone but instead, our government encourages social division through laws that inevitably create conflict. Should anyone be in any doubt about the degree of hate and prejudice that has been encouraged towards those who smoke, here are a few more readers’ comments:

“Smokers disgust me. Me and my friends do see them as second class citizens. We all look down our noses at them and their disgusting and filthy habit. We make sure they know it too.”

 “Smoking is disgusting and dirty. And so are smokers.”

 “It’s a no brainer. If you smoke, you are stupid. If you are stupid, you are probably low-income or no income beyond benfits”

“smokers are weak minded addicts and should be removed from society if they can’t be helped or refuse help.”

“We could always just change the law to allow people to legally shoot dead anyone caught with a cig between their lips outside the four walls of their home…”

 And from 2 people commenting on a BBC forum:

 ”Smoking is darwinian”

 “An excellent point. My only objection is that procreation often takes place prior to demise.”

 It is difficult to imagine that comments like these would be considered acceptable if directed against any other minority but thanks to a myopic adherence to the one dimensional “quit or die” mantra of the activists and an ongoing “denormalization” campaign, UK politicians have given legitimacy to this hate, which is an inevitable consequence of trying to force social change through coercion and state sponsored intolerance combined with deliberate distortion of the facts.

Politicians who continue to support such strategies despite their manifest failure are entitled to their opinion in an allegedly free society but those who promote intimidation, exclusion and hatred as a means of engineering change should not call themselves liberal. Hiding behind the pretence that it is possible to “denormalize” an established activity without “denormalizing” the millions who indulge in it is not a valid excuse.

By Chris Oakley. Chris has previously posted on Liberal Vision:   Alcohol is Old News – Minimum Pricing for Digestives is the “Next Logical Step” , Soviet Style Alcohol Suppression Campaign Called for By Public Health Activists , Alcohol Taxation: The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth , A Liberal Tolerant nation? and  What hope is there for liberty if truth becomes the plaything of political lobbyists.

No prizes for guessing what Kristian’s conclusions are.

I strongly recommend reading the report, but if  you are in a hurry, here is the summary from the IEA website:

Not enough is being done to reduce the extraordinarily high cost of housing in Britain. This is the finding of a new report released today by the Institute of Economic Affairs Abundance of land, shortage of housing.

In the research Kristian Niemietz looks at how housing costs in the UK have exploded in recent decades. Real-terms house prices in 2011 were more than two-and-a-half-times higher than in 1975, with rent levels following suit. Nothing about this was inevitable. Many other countries have experienced rising housing costs as well, but in most other cases, the increase has been much lower and/or largely transitory. In the USA, Germany and Switzerland, real-terms house prices are still close to their 1975 levels.

Other main findings include:

·         Housing affordability measures show housing to be unaffordable in every single one of the 33 regions in the UK.

·         There is still plenty of room for development in the UK:

·       Only 1/10th of England’s surface land is developed and even in developed areas, the single biggest item is gardens.

·        Literally ‘concreted-over’ land makes up only 1/20th of England’s surface area.

·         Housing benefit is a flawed approach to dealing with the problem of low-cost housing – it favours those living in expensive areas rather than those on low incomes.

·         The main difference between the UK and its north-western European neighbours is not in demographics, but in completion rates of new dwellings.

·         Empirical evidence from around the world shows that planning restrictions are the key determinant of housing costs.

Recommendations

·         Only a thorough liberalisation of the planning system can address the affordability crisis.

·         The government must resist vested interests lobbying against planning reform to help those struggling to afford to buy a home.

·         The government’s National Planning Policy Framework does not address the fundamental flaw in the current planning framework – that the current incentives encourage NIMBYism.

·         The combination of a restrictive planning system and an over-centralised tax system should be addressed so that local residents obtain the advantages of development.

·         It must enable rational trade-offs between preserving valuable pieces of countryside and other considerations:

·      One way to achieve this is to extend the coalition’s ‘localism’ agenda to local finances and planning. If local authorities had to cover most of their expenditure through local taxes, they would have an interest in enlarging their tax base, and granting planning permission would be one way of doing so. People would be free to vote for NIMBY policies, but they would be aware of the cost. Blocking development would mean foregoing tax cuts or better local public services.

All very sensible. All very sound.

Comments on the IEA website, please.

Yet even if profit-making providers were able to deliver state-funded schooling, this would hardly represent a free market in education. For one thing, almost all discussion of voucher schemes and for-profit provision assumes that prices will be capped.

This misses one of the most crucial benefits of allowing markets to operate.

Read the rest of the article, and leave any comments, at the IEA blog.

The wording of the petition is as follows:

We the undersigned believe that the attempts by the Coalition government to restrict non-EU immigration by way of a cap has no evidential basis and that it should be removed. Contrary to the aims of its advocates, the cap harms the UK economy and with it the job prospects of UK citizens by discouraging enterprise and foreign investment.

Given that the Coalition government recognises in its agreement that immigration has “enriched our culture and strengthened our economy” it should not pander to populist and protectionist measures which allow our labour market to stagnate and our skills-base to insulate itself from modernisation.

We consider that the existing points system does not benefit from an arbitrary cap on non-EU immigration. Removing the cap will send out two important messages. Firstly it will show that Britain is open for business. Secondly it will make us a more tolerant and culturally enriched society.

It is certainly true that combining a points-based system with an arbitrary cap is less belt-and-braces and more flogging a dead horse. In fact, the points-based system is itself deeply flawed, ignoring as it does the huge demand for unskilled labour in this country which – under our current welfare system – is not being met by the domestic “reserve army of labour”.

Personally I hate the expression “Britain is open for business”, but I’ll forgive Graeme that small slip because it’s otherwise a great petition.

I urge all Liberal Vision readers to sign the petition.

Lazy, immigrants, freeloading off the state.