From sin taxes to plain packaging, smoking bans to warnings about the perils of office cake, the reach of Britain’s nanny state has never felt more pervasive or pedantic.
Just this week the public health panjandrums came up with a new wheeze – proposing reducing the calorie content of certain naughty foods by 10% in a bid to shrink the nation’s waistlines.
Few know the intricacies of the public health bureaucracy – and the redundancy of many of their arguments – like our guest this week, the scourge of the scolds, Christopher Snowdon.
Andy Burnham is, apparently, going to solve the old age care problem. I tend to think he won’t but there we are, me and my cynicism. For he’s talking of organising something like the NHS, a National Care Service, which – as with the NHS – is the wrong way to do things. In order […]
Andy Burnham is not a forward-looking man. His musical interests stop at around 1998, his approach to industry is straight out of the 1970s and his favourite football team hasn’t won a trophy for over thirty years. It’s little surprise then that he takes a dim view of the ongoing tech revolution. It was reported […]
In my new book, Inside the Sausage Factory, I examine four campaigns for ‘public health’ policies in the 2010s and examined all the evidence that was marshalled for and against them. It turns out that the evidence for them wasn’t very good and there wasn’t much evidence marshalled against them, but that isn’t really the […]
