VIRTUE SIGNALLING – PART 2

In my last article I wrote about “virtue signalling” – the tendency of some people to adopt modes of thought or action as a means of signalling to others how virtuous they are – regardless of whether their actions have any operative significance. The tendency to say “me too” in respect of utterly vacuous policies like sugar taxes, minimum alcohol pricing, plain packaging of cigarettes and health warnings on bottles of booze, is a way of signalling which side of the moral divide you’re on in respect of a range of apparently disparate issues which are in fact connected, in that they represent a kind of new puritanism.

Almost without exception virtue signalling is about gesture politics. It is an easy way of appearing to do something that doesn’t require too much effort. It almost always involves imposing bans, taxes or regulations. And more often than not it signifies a moral disapproval that is rooted in a kind of crude anti-capitalism. Not all of this meddling is restricted to what we eat, drink or smoke. But a lot of it is.

Which brings me to “vaping”. I’m not a smoker and never have been. I spent 23 years running licensed premises in which people were allowed to smoke tobacco and I just took it for granted. When the smoking ban was first mooted I felt then as I feel now: that it should be up to operators to decide whether to allow it or not; or whether to have a smoking room; in essence, give people a choice. But it was not to be. I don’t intend to rehearse the whole debate about smoking and second-hand smoke, but I do think that the advent of vaping has created a dilemma for the virtue signallers who walk amongst us, and the smoking debate has been resurrected in a different form.

The Welsh government is proposing to ban vaping in enclosed public spaces – to treat vapers like smokers. The ban is supposed to kick-in sometime in 2017. But health minister Mark Drakeford has recently told the Welsh Assembly’s health and social care committee that vaping would be allowed in wet-led pubs that don’t serve food, and where unaccompanied children are banned. But it appears uncertain exactly what this means. As Assembly member Darren Millar put it: “Many wet-led pubs serve pickled eggs, pork scratching and packets of crisps on the bar. Are these pubs included in the ban or not?”

What is it that gets into people and makes them feel it is necessary to get into the granular detail, the tick-and-tock of other peoples’ lives in this way? There is a division of opinion amongst the public health community with the British Medical Association, Public Health Wales and the Centre for Tobacco Control Research all favouring a ban (and not just in Wales). But Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation Wales and Action on Smoking and Health are all opposed. The reason for this division is that while most people see vaping as a means by which people can enjoy the recreational use of nicotine without inhaling the carcinogens in tobacco, others say it is a gateway to smoking, not a way of kicking the habit. Overwhelmingly the research demonstrates that it is a way of giving up, not a way of starting.

But here’s where the health and moral aspects of this issue get intertwined. Nicotine is a drug; and it is seen as a drug of addiction. So should people be encouraged to use it at all? And insofar as vaping represents a private sector solution to a public health problem - that is something that makes some in the public health racket feel very nervous indeed. So better to signal that vaping is just a less-bad way of smoking by treating vapours as smokers, but maybe with a few concessions.

What makes this kind of restriction even more of a piece of virtue signalling nonsense is that in the vast majority of pubs and bars vapours go outside with smokers in any event. Some operators insist on that as a matter of policy, and I understand why. It is difficult to explain to your customers why one way of enjoying nicotine is permitted inside, but the other requires you to leave the building. It creates control dilemmas for operators and their staff. So, why not do with vaping what we should have done with smoking – leave it to the operator to decide what their policy is in relation to vaping, and leave it to customers to decide where they want to drink.

Paul Chase

VIRTUE-SIGNALLING AND BASEBALL CAPS

Going back around twenty five years or so pop stars, celebrities, and other people who were famous for being famous began to wear baseball caps. It started in America. It became cool. If you wore your baseball cap the wrong way round it was even cooler. It spread to Europe and the UK and before long everyone under thirty was wearing a baseball cap. Even the fact that William Hague, the (then) young leader of the Conservative Party wore one wasn’t enough to put people off. This is sometimes called “fashion” or “the latest craze”. It’s what happens when people whose brain power isn’t sufficient to blow their hats off decide it’s probably safe to wear one. People yearn for a sense of belonging, and so the wearing of a baseball cap became a way of signalling “I am one of you”.

But this desire to signal to others that you have joined their tribe, or to castigate others who haven’t joined yours, isn’t limited to harmless sartorial fads; it applies to ideas and in particular it applies to moral ideas. Some people like nothing better than sitting in judgement of how other people live their lives. TV soap operas have trained them in how to do it. And if they can wag their fore-finger at other peoples’ behaviour, whilst advocating a “better way of life”, then not only does this provide them with a means of occupying the moral high-ground, it thereby signals how virtuous they are. 

“Virtue-signalling” is very much in vogue at the moment. We’ve seen numerous examples of it in recent months. For example, Dr Sarah Wollaston MP, who chairs the Commons Select Committee on Health, is an inveterate virtue-signaller. Her one-sided trial of the sugar industry predictably resulted in a call for the government to introduce a “sugar tax” on fizzy drinks. She was aided and abetted in this by poster-boy Jamie Oliver who has applied a sugar tax to such drinks in his restaurants. This is a classic example of virtue-signalling, because if you look at the amount of sugar in his Eton Mess you can clearly see that his actions are designed to send out a “me too” signal of virtue whilst hoping no one notices that he isn’t really serious (about anything). 

Virtue-signalling, like fashion fads, has all the characteristics of a virus. It spreads to people who haven’t got good intellectual immune systems. And so it is that we hear that the NHS is about to introduce a faux tax on sugary drinks in its hospital eateries. No doubt someone will produce a mathematical model that shows how effective this has been in tackling the “obesity crisis” which threatens to “bankrupt the NHS”. This will be used as a means of persuading government to introduce it more widely. Meanwhile Public Health England can puff themselves up with self-righteous moral virtue at how they are leading by example (at some financial cost to patients). If you’re forced to cancel hospital parking charges I guess you have to recoup the money somehow.

And then there is the dogged determination of the SNP government in Scotland to introduce minimum unit pricing. It must have been so gratifying for them to attend the conference of the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance (temperance cranks), which they hosted last year in Edinburgh, and be acclaimed as “Scotland the Brave”. Let’s hope this is some solace for them because in the wake of this the European Court of Justice effectively ruled minimum pricing contrary to EU trade law.

Finally there is our hapless Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies. Sally was prepared to abandon ninety years of science that proved the protective health effects of moderate drinking in order to justify new “low risk” drinking guidelines of just 14 units a week for both men and women. Virtue-signallers love simple messages because they instinctively believe that ordinary folk are too thick to understand anything even slightly complex. I can’t decide whether Sally did this to signal to the other members of the “public health” racket that she is one of them, whilst knowing that this was bunk, or whether she was leaned on to compromise the science in the name of creating a new factoid: “there is no safe level of drinking”. Predictably, all the other fuss-buckets who earn their livings from flapping around in the unhappiness of others signalled their agreement – Alcohol Concern, the Institute for Alcohol Studies, Professor Gilmore from the Alcohol Health Alliance, and countless foot soldiers from local councils who have now been placed in charge of “public health” – all said “me too”.

You could be forgiven for thinking they were all engaged in a conspiracy. But actually you don’t need to imply a conspiracy when they all think alike. I quite like baseball caps now that they’re no longer fashionable. I wonder how long it will take for virtue-signalling to go out of fashion. It can get awfully cold up there on the moral high-ground.

Here We Go Again

The doom-mongers of the public health racket have been fast out of the blocks this year, wasting no time reminding us that we really shouldn’t enjoy ourselves without consulting the doctor first. But let’s start with some good news: minimum unit pricing.

Minimum Unit Pricing (MUP)

On the 23^rd December the European Court of Justice (ECJ) released its final opinion on the compatibility of MUP with EU law. To no one’s surprise this confirmed the draft opinion, published in September, that MUP is contrary to EU law if less restrictive tax measures can be introduced. It is worthy of note that the ECJ refers to “less restrictive tax measures” not confining itself to alcohol duty – which is controlled by Westminster, not Holyrood. The Scottish Government will now get a range of new tax raising powers so cannot say they have no powers to deal with alcohol abuse other than minimum pricing.

Putting a brave face on it, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon again noted that it was for the Scottish court to decide on the legality of MUP. It’s as if she regards the ECJ as an advisory body to which she can say “thanks very much for your opinion, duly noted, but we’re going ahead anyway.” She would do well to read the Note at the end of the ECJ’s press release. The Note states that courts and tribunals of Member States can refer disputes that have been brought before them to the ECJ for an interpretation of EU law. Crucially it adds: “The Court of Justice does not decide the dispute itself. It is for the national court or tribunal to dispose of the case in accordance with the Court’s decision, which is similarly binding on other courts or tribunals before which a similar issue is raised (my bolding).”

This is hugely significant. Unless the Scottish Government can provide evidence to the court that proves MUP, and only MUP, can address Scotland’s particular problems with alcohol and health – something they have singularly failed to do so far – then the Scottish minimum pricing legislation is incompatible with EU law and cannot be enacted. In addition, the ECJ’s ruling will apply to current minimum unit pricing proposals in Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

This may well chunter-on to a final ruling in the UK’s Supreme Court in London, but I think this measure is effectively dead in the water.

Revised lower-risk drinking guidelines

We await the official publication of these, but it has been widely reported that lower-risk guidelines for men should be reduced to the same level as for women – 2 to 3 units a day – but with an added proviso that we should all have two alcohol-free days a week. This is odd. The lower limits for women are based upon the fact that women metabolize alcohol differently to men, because pound for pound they have less water and more fatty tissue than men. Because fat retains alcohol and water dilutes it, alcohol remains at higher concentrations for longer periods of time in a woman’s body, exposing her brain and other organs to more alcohol. Women also have lower levels of two enzymes – alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase that break down alcohol in the stomach and liver. As a result women absorb more alcohol into their bloodstreams than men.

Have these simple biological facts changed? No. So it’s hard not to reach the conclusion that chief medical officer Sally Davies just wants to simplify the message regardless of the science because of some highly theoretical risk factors that arise out of very low levels of consumption. A more rational approach to setting lower-risk guidelines is to ask at what point a moderate drinker’s risk of dying from all causes exceeds that of a person who doesn’t drink. We know from the meta-study done by Augusto Di Castelnuovo in 2006 that for men that level is between 3.4 and 6.8 units a day, and for women it is between 1.7 and 5.1 units a day. Sorry Sally, but your revised lower-risk guidelines will lack credibility with the public and serve little purpose except for providing another stick with which to beat the alcohol industry

Calorie labelling on beverage alcohol products to combat obesity?

The Local Government Association has called for calorie labelling on bottles and cans of alcohol, calling on breweries and drinks’ producers to “show leadership in tackling the obesity crisis”. Dr. Sarah Jarvis told Sky News she was “amazed at how little people understand” about the calories in alcohol. I sympathise Sarah, I’m always amazed when people don’t share my obsessions too. Well, I have good news! Diageo is introducing calorie labelling on all its products in 2016 and is presently consulting on the most effective way to communicate this information. Other drinks producers are likely to follow suit.

But here’s a thought: the calories contained in an alcoholic drink are contained in the alcohol. A gram of alcohol has 7 calories (as compared to 4 in a gram of sugar and 9 in a gram of fat); there are 8 grams of alcohol in a UK unit. Therefore there are 56 calories in a unit of alcohol – so a small measure of whisky (1 unit) has 56 calories; a pint of session beer with 4% abv has 2.27 units and therefore 127 calories; a pint of lager with an abv of 5% has 2.84 units and therefore 159 calories – so not massively calorific products. And through the industry voluntary responsibility deal we’ve removed 1.2 billion units of alcohol from circulation. This equates to reducing the calorific intake of drinkers by 67.2 billion calories. Name me another industry that has done more than that to fight obesity! 

SUGAR? NO THANKS, I'M SWEET ENOUGH!

The heading above is my stock response whenever anyone asks do I take sugar in my tea. I am however, a self-confessed chocaholic and I prefer proper fizzy drinks – not the anaemic ones that don’t have any sugar in them. And what is more, I don’t think that is any of Sarah Wollaston MP’s damned business. The Commons Health Select Committee that she chairs has just recommended a 10% ‘sugar tax’ on fizzy drinks, along with a number of other recommendations including product reformulation to reduce sugar content the legal mandating of reduced portion sizes is also on the agenda along with more labelling requirements.

On the BBC News site this story was presented under the heading “MPs Back Sugar Tax” – er…well, seven of the committee of nine did so – that’s just one percent of the total number of MPs in the Commons. We can take some comfort from the fact that two of the committee didn’t back this. Conservative MPs’ Andrea Jenkyns and Andrew Percy both dissented, with Jenkyns calling the proposal “patronising nonsense”. “Here, here” say I!

This whole campaign has been led by ‘Action on Sugar’ – a crackpot group of healthist zealots who see sugar as one of the ‘industries of addiction’ that need curtailing by government. In fact these people believe sugar consumption should be reduced by half – which would take us back to the levels of consumption last seen during the Second World War when sugar was rationed. This really shouldn’t surprise us. Whenever ‘safe levels’ of alcohol consumption are discussed anti-alcohol campaigners use 1952 as their starting point to show how much alcohol consumption has risen. This is because in 1952 rationing had just ended and people were pretty skint – so if that’s your comparator the increase in consumption is made to look pretty steep.

We hear a lot about austerity, but taking us back to war-time levels of consumption because it is “good for us” is a bizarre ambition. If we want to tackle obesity why pick on sugar? A gram of sugar contains just four calories; a gram of alcohol seven calories and a gram of fat nine calories. People need to eat less and exercise more – and that is sensible advice, but it should be up to you if you want to take it.

Sugar isn’t just about sweetening things – it gives food texture and acts as a natural preservative. It shouldn’t need pointing out, but it does, that a sugar tax is regressive and will disproportionately affect consumers with low incomes. In any event sin taxes rarely affect consumption by much and reduce obesity not at all. Mexico’s sugar tax reduced consumption by just six per cent and had no discernible impact on obesity. Denmark also embraced the idea of taxing its citizens into anorexia with a fat tax and a tax on soft drinks. It abandoned both.

So, with all this evidence why does Sarah Wollaston and her ever-so-cute poster boy Jamie Oliver still champion this idea? For Oliver this is just another way of raising his profile although he’s empty-headed enough to believe it will work; for Wollaston I suspect this measure is at least as important symbolically as it is instrumentally. She is desperate for a victory over Big Soda now that the virtual demise of minimum unit pricing makes a victory over Big Alcohol increasingly unlikely.

I really don’t understand what Wollaston is doing in the Conservative Party. Her ideology is state control of large swathes of industry so that ‘public health’ campaigners become the arbiters of the consumption patterns of the nation. What about free markets and choice Sarah? No doubt Big Business will be blamed if the government sticks to its policy of not introducing a sugar tax. After all, that’s what socialists do. I think you should cross the floor and join Jeremy’s party Sarah – I believe he has a nice allotment and bakes his own scones. I don’t know if he puts jam on them though!

Paul Chase

THE LICENSING ACT – 10 YEARS ON

The Licensing Act 2003 went ‘live’ at midnight on the 24^th November 2005. Initially it enjoyed cross-party support and even qualified support from ACPO. The only stumbling block to its progress through Parliament was an amendment in the Lords which came to be known as the ‘Morris Dancing exemption’ – their lordships were concerned that traditional English folk dancing might be caught by the new definition of regulated entertainment – and thus Morris Dancing and the like was solemnly exempted from the regulations; everyone kept a straight face. It was in the time-lapse between the Bill passing into law and it coming into effect that we saw the development of what was arguably the most extraordinary moral panic of modern times.

The labelling of the new licensing regime by the Daily Mail as the “twenty-four hour drinking Act” was instrumental in persuading politicians, bishops, police chiefs, newspaper editors, a variety of self-appointed, socially-accredited experts and other assorted ‘right-thinking people’ that this would lead to a binge-drinking epidemic, a crime wave, and in particular an increase in rape and other assaults. And that our hospitals would be flooded with so many casualties that the new Act would “bankrupt the NHS”. Ever since this claim, a crisis isn’t a proper crisis unless it threatens to do that.

In reality we have seen crime and disorder fall, and as a sub-set of that we have seen alcohol-related crime and disorder fall. The other falls – in the overall level of drinking and in problem drinking and teeny drinking have been well documented. I don’t suggest that these improvements have happened because of the new licensing regime, but certainly they don’t support the proposition that the sky would fall in and society as we know it would crumble as a result of licensing reform. Some would argue that we haven’t seen the creation of a continental café-bar culture either – but this was never more than a piece of New Labour spin.

In fact neither the worst fears nor the best hopes attached to this reform were realised. The lesson for politicians is that the expectation that a reform to the way in which we regulate how the retail distribution system handles a product would automatically read-across to a cultural change in terms of how consumers would use that product, was unrealistic. Regulation is only a part of the mix; drinking cultures are much more complex than was supposed.

All of that having been said, I do think that the Licensing Act 2003 has been a qualified success, despite the legislative repentance that followed as a result of the initial moral panic. It was sensible to separate the licensing of persons from the licensing of premises. It was right to enable licensing hours to be responsive to local needs and consumer demand. Getting rid of nationally prescribed ‘permitted hours’ was a welcome departure from the paternalism of the past. Although the trade was initially suspicious of moving licensing from courts to councils – and in the process discovering that they loved magistrates after all – it was broadly a positive move. If there is to be a further reform of the licensing system I would like to see licensing continue to be administered by council licensing authorities, but for contested applications to be heard in the courts with a proper judicial procedure, in the event that objections cannot be mediated away.

The Licensing Act 2003 did enable some welcome changes to the drinking culture, particularly in city centres. Under the Licensing Act 1964 the city centre night-time-economy had become a youth leisure ghetto. If you could only sell alcohol after 11 p.m. if it was ancillary to the combination of music, dancing and the availability of food, in practice this meant nightclubs and late-night bars with a loud disco. The demographic this appealed to was obvious. What is equally obvious is that we all behave better when we are in the company of people older or younger than ourselves. When the new licensing regime swept away these outdated restrictions it enabled the creation of a much more diverse night-time-economy that attracted a much wider demographic. The political and media perception of the city-centre drinking culture is still rooted in mass volume, vertical drinking establishments, but this is not the way the late-night drinking culture has evolved.

The Licensing Act 2003 did ignite a debate about alcohol and society. The nexus of that debate has now moved beyond crime and disorder and into the realm of health impacts. What is lacking in this whole debate is honest statistics. We don’t even have a nationally agreed definition of alcohol-related crime; the number of alcohol-related hospital admissions and the impact of alcohol on A&E departments have been grotesquely exaggerated by a new public health movement that sees alcohol as an “industry of addiction”. The debate about alcohol and society is more polarised than ever before. That is perhaps the worst unintended consequence of the Licensing Act 2003.

Paul Chase

 NANNY-WATCH

Barely a day goes by without some new ‘threat’ to our health being announced by epidemiologists or others health campaigners. For these people – I call them ‘healthists’ - the meaning of life appears to be the elimination of anything enjoyable in order to achieve maximum longevity. Key to this is the elimination of ‘risk-factors’ from our diet and our lifestyles. The key technique used to frighten us all into abstinence is to concentrate on cancer risks. Here an old trick is used: take a very small baseline risk and then measure the increase to that risk that arises if you engage in ‘unhealthy’ eating or drinking. The effect of this is to give prominence and publicity to very large percentage increases in very small baseline risks.

Here are some examples of this crack-pottery that have come to light in the past two weeks:

Firstly, inevitably, alcohol. The ‘lower risk’ drinking guidelines are now being examined by the Department of Health with a view to reducing them. The reason given by the DoH is that there is “no safe level of consumption in respect of the epidemiological risk of developing cancers”, and “the cancer risks of drinking is a game-changer.” It is of course accepted that excessive consumption of alcohol is causally related to a number of cancers, but the risk is dose-related.

So, taking oral cancers as an example, what is the overall risk caused by drinking alcohol? According to Cancer Research UK there were some 7,300 oral cancers diagnosed in the UK in 2012. Of these tobacco smoking was identified as the cause in 65% of cases. Alcohol consumption accounted for 30% of these – some 2,190 cases. 30 million adults in the UK drink at least once a week. Of those 30 million, 2,190 of them develop an alcohol-related oral cancer; that’s 0.007% of regular drinkers! And remember, these figures include very heavy drinkers as well as moderate and light drinkers – so should we panic and abstain? Well, about 30% of alcohol-related oral cancer sufferers do die from this condition. So, around 657 deaths out of 30 million drinkers – 0.021%.

Every such death is a tragedy, but the actuarial risk is minute. The proposition that anything that raises the epidemiological risk of a cancer ‘isn’t safe’ is therefore somewhat problematic. In everyday life people make trade-offs. They don’t ask “is this product or behaviour safe?” they ask “is it safe enough?” We do this all the time and not just in relation to food and drink. We don’t ask is driving a motor vehicle safe; we ask is it safe enough. In other words, do the benefits of driving justify me in taking the risks? When we are told that tobacco smoking results in the premature death of half of all smokers that may well deter people from starting, or persuade existing smokers to quit. But if you were told that 0.021% of regular drinkers die from an oral cancer, would that put you off? It is this kind of epidemiological paranoia that leads healthists to call for abstinence and any lowering of the lower risk drinking guidelines is but a staging post on that journey.

In addition to the cancer risks of alcohol we’re had some real healthist gems in the past fortnight:

·         The official advice of the European Food Safety Authority is as follows: when you make a piece of toast only toast it golden brown, don’t burn it or you will ingest acrylamides which are carcinogenic. Acrylamides are contained in crisps, savoury snacks, soft and crispy breads, biscuits, cakes, crackers, cereals and coffee. Or anything nice.

·         Fry your foods in butter or lard because frying them in vegetable oil raises your risk of cancer.

·         Less than one sausage a day increases your cancer risk. And be sure not to cook your Sunday roasties too dark and crispy because they contain acrylamides too!

·         Eating a steak once a week rectal cancers by more than two fifths.

·         Less than one sausage a day raises your risk factor for cancer.

But my favourite was cheese addiction. Cheese contains casein – a protein which becomes super concentrated in the cheese making process and forms morphine-like compounds. These then bind with the opioid receptors in your brain making cheese as addictive as morphine. Pizza restaurant chains are nothing more than drug dealers who rely on addiction for repeat business! Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine, describes cheese as “dairy crack”.

And then we come to energy drinks.  Doctors warn that just one energy drink a day raises the risk for heart disease even amongst young healthy adults. This is a veiled attack on caffeine, which is of course contained in coffee. I was wondering when coffee drinking was going to be attacked by healthists. Anything that is successful raises their ire. My tip is that the epidemiological risks of caffeine consumption will be the next ‘big thing’ to occupy their small minds.

Paul Chase