November 7, 2022 - 10:00am
Towards the close of life, ambition naturally wanes. So when two years can be considered the reasonable maximum lifespan of your time in office, a distaste for long-term thinking may be understandable. Even still, the mere suggestion that one of Rishi Sunak’s first decisions during his turn at Britain’s rotating premiership would be to review the status of Sizewell C, the planned nuclear reactor in Suffolk set to provide up to 7% of the country’s future energy needs, was not a reassuring one.
While we should be relieved that Number 10 has swiftly come out to quash the rumour, that it had any currency at all — and that it seemed so plausible — highlights the greatest challenge facing Britain. The anti-growth coalition is real, and it extends to within the Tory government. No wonder that even members of Sunak’s cabinet worry he will preside over only economic contraction and managed decline. The contrast with Labour’s ambitious pledge to secure clean energy self-reliance through nuclear and renewable power by 2030 is stark.
It surely ought to be impossible to ask the country to accept wartime levels of deprivation — including, the Bank of England warns, the longest recession in a century — without also promising a wartime level of government spending to ameliorate its worst effects. As the head of the National Grid, John Pettigrew, warned the BBC just last week, to hit the government’s self-imposed climate targets and still keep the lights on, the country “will need to build about seven times as much infrastructure in the next seven or eight years than we built in the last 32.”
But in the ageing Britain of 2022, the political incentives are all arrayed in the other direction: against building, against spending, against action. Anything that disturbs the peace and tranquil views from Britain’s frigid, soon-to-be candlelit nursing home sparks outraged tutting from our establishment. When Tory MPs actively compete to demonstrate their opposition to new energy infrastructure just to retain their own seats, what hope is there of radical investment? After all, perhaps we won’t need to turn the lights on or heat our homes in 2030. Who knows, maybe we’ll all be dead. At the very least, it’s someone else’s problem.
No doubt the increasing volatility of British politics has accelerated the short-termist thinking of our political class. Why commit to spending now, when your political enemies may reap the rewards, ten or five or even one year hence? For the moribund Conservative government, the incentives are even sharper: why build infrastructure for a future your voter base is statistically unlikely to see? Britain’s youngest prime minister in modern times is cursed with leading a party in its dotage. While China sets to work building 150 new nuclear power stations by 2035, Britain is giving up the will to live, wrapping itself in a blanket, and dimming the lights to save a few pennies.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“I don’t know what happened to make the WHO so implacably opposed to vaping.”
Lobbying, bribery, corruption spring to mind.
But lobbying by whom, and to what end? Could tobacco companies be paying off the WHO to protect their markets, particularly in developing countries?
Quite likely – countries with tobacco growing industries, perhaps even the high tax benefit from cigarettes in other countries.
Most UN organisations are rife with this sort of thing.
I would think so and not just in developing countries. It would seem obvious that tobacco companies would wish to discredit vaping, especially if it encourages people to quit smoking entirely.
There’s no reason the tobacco companies can’t dominate the vaping industry as well. They have the raw materials!
Of course, but it’s a diminishing market since it’s a halfway house to stopping rather than a long-term addiction like gaspers.
The only people who actually want to vape are those who already smoke cigarettes and want to stop.
No-one in their right minds would vape if they weren’t smokers in the first place.
The tobacco companies tried bubblegum flavoured vape – clearly aimed at young people who probably haven’t smoked cigarettes – but I think those are banned now.
Vaping clearly represents a major threat to them, hence the lobbying and bribery.
The Chinese are heavy smokers, just sayin.
India is a great country but its politics and governance are more than usually awful. Arbitrary and evidence-free government decisions are commonplace, as with this ludicrous ban on e-cigarettes.
The Indian government owns 28% of ITC, its main manufacturer of cigarettes, bidis and other tobacco products. Shares in stocks in that corporation are soaring.
See my post. $$$$$$$$$$
Yes smokers pay a lot of tax. They must continue to get ill or even die to pay for the NHS.
Well, sure, this is kind of true, but only in the sense that every public health institution has been incompetent on COVID well past the point where they made things worse rather than better. The WHO has been absolutely mind-bendingly terrible on COVID and the only thing that “saves” it is the fact that most other large public health bodies reflexively follow it, so it drags them all down to its level.
)
Its stance on vaping is exactly what you’d expect to see from the WHO given its track record. This isn’t some weird aberration, the WHO is always like this. Misinformation pours out of it on a near daily basis. COVID is the textbook example, especially anything China-related, but it’s not just that. This is an organization that mounted an investigation of the lab leak theory which it had to renounce days later when people pointed out they hadn’t actually investigated anything. It claimed there was no clear evidence COVID was transmitted person to person, even though human-infecting CoVs always are. It stated outright to a BBC journalist that the there was little evidence masks worked but the messaging had changed due to political lobbying. Their last great outing on the world stage resulted in an article in Der Spiegel titled “Reconstruction of a mass hysteria: the Swine Flu panic of 2009”. Their chief at the time gave a speech in which she argued swine flu should be exploited to fight for “changes in the functioning of the global economy,” and to “distribute wealth on the basis of” values “like community, solidarity, equity and social justice” – and that was before they got an actual former communist as their chief!
The WHO is a disaster zone and should be scrapped. It took an entirely manageable medical problem and turned it into a global catastrophe due to its complete takeover by a hard left ideology that has learned it can manipulate people through an artificial fear of death.
(Oh, good article by the way, very important topic and I wasn’t aware of how big the difference is!
I couldn’t agree with you more about the WHO. . It has become over-politicised and the people running it, down to goodness-only-knows what level, are too compromised for it to just do a bout of navel-gazing and miraculously emerge ‘reformed’. The whole thing should be scrapped.
Quite apart from anything else, a global health bureaucracy, oddly enough, behaves like any other global bureaucracy does. Since its turf in this case is health, the more global health problems there are, the bigger the empire it builds.
If they’re coming for vaping (I’m a vaper), what about alcohol? Surely more harmful than vaping?
Don’t give them ideas.
What about vaping alcohol flavour-rum & bacardi that sort of thing?. The drinks industry would not like that
It hasn’t been perfect during Covid by any means, but it hasn’t been conspicuously worse than a lot of other institutions. First, is this a serious statement? And second, what kind of defense is it to say “others were worse.” WHO is the tip of the spear globally. It’s the same place that did its best to pretend China was not the source of the virus. It parroted the Chinese claim that there was no evidence of transmission of the virus between humans. That it’s off base on vaping does more to demonstrate consistency than leadership, and the wrong sort of consistency at that.
The bureaucratic mind.
If freedom of the individual is so important, why do we have to waste time and money persuading people that they shouldn’t smoke?
Imagine that all UnHerd contributors were smokers and governments around the world were trying to stop us from smoking. Outrage and more outrage!
We can still have laws to protect people who choose not to smoke from the dangers of passive smoking.
Exactly! Enclosed spaces like bars and restaurants should be able to define their own policies – advertise “Smokers’ Bar!” if they want – as long as no one is forced to work there and the policies are gradually implemented to allow those who took their jobs with the understanding they would be working in a smoke-free environment can change jobs.
It’s the HCN, CO, PNAs etc that are dangerous in smoke, not the nicotine. So vaping should be strongly promoted as a smoking alternative if the WHO wanted to actually, you know, promote health.
I think it is the Puritan strain which runs through much of the public health establisment that accounts for much of the hostility toward vaping. They get high on their prohibitionism and can’t stand that a fun smoking substitute might be available.
The WHO has shown itself to be easily captured by Chinese interests. Has Big Tobacco also bought its acquiescence?
My take as a pot smoker (not a tobacco smoker) is that there is something about vaping that is unconsciously associated with weed smoking. And that this visual association is enough to implicate the device. Between that and the tobacco industry it doesnt have a chance.
Sure the WTO is seriously flawed, but it’s hardly high brow to point this out.
Here’s why.. https://www.who.int/news/item/17-08-2016-michael-r-bloomberg-becomes-who-global-ambassador-for-noncommunicable-diseases
Hmm. Not a very balanced article. I’m a Canadian doc. The national committee I was on a few years ago, as part of its public health mandate, looked into the question of: is vaping an on-ramp to or an off-ramp from cigarette smoking? The answer is BOTH. Over time most places where vaping is common (mostly amongst youth) have seen cigarette smoking rates rise, indicating it is more of an on-ramp than off-ramp. (a huge number of new cigarette smokers started with vaping and moved up)
As with every question of societal policy, the scientific stats and research on vaping cannot answer the question of whether we should ban it. That is a question of civil liberties, and how much control we think the government should have over individual lives. People are free to do many risky things. Should they be allowed to vape as well?
I hate vaping as much as smoking. A friend vaped in my flat, telling me it was not as bad as passive smoking exposure. Even though he vaped by an open window, I started coughing which lasted all evening and well into the next day!
So it is not better than real cigarettes.
Vapers and smokers are banned from my home.
Don’t you just hate auto-correct. Instead of vape, it’s ‘corrected it to taped or raped!! Dumb robot!
On my IPAD I can turn off auto-correct.