Eating sugary food, drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes are legal activities. But politicians still use the law to discourage them. They raise their price, prohibit or limit their advertisement, restrict where they can be sold and consumed, and sometimes ban them outright. These politicians...

The Index tracks over-bearing, paternalistic lifestyle regulation across the EU in four categories: alcohol, e-cigarettes, food/soft drinks and tobacco. Nanny state interventions in these areas are invariably promoted on grounds of health and yet it is difficult to see how clamping down on...

The World Health Organization and Public Health England have been widely criticised for their response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper looks at what went wrong. The WHO has been accused of being credulous in its dealings with China and giving the world a false sense of security about the...