Defanging the Nanny State

Making the UK the freest country in Europe

The UK has been below average among European countries for lifestyle freedom for many years. The latest IEA Discussion Paper outlines simple, practical proposals to make the UK the freest country in Europe. It is not a choice between health and freedom. We can fix the nanny state and let people enjoy Christmas and New Year's Eve .

In 2016, the IEA and EPICENTER launched the first edition of Dr Christopher Snowdon’s ‘Nanny State Index’, which tries to measure the degree of restrictiveness of paternalistic policies that interfere with personal lifestyle choices in various areas. ‘Nanny state’ is obviously a pejorative term, which already signals disapproval. Nannystatists would not describe themselves in that way. They would describe themselves as ‘public health activists’ or as campaigners against ‘the industry’. The Nanny State Index itself, though, is completely value-neutral. It simply measures the extent to which government policy deliberately raises the price and/or decreases the availability of particular products, irrespective of whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. If I published, say, a weather report, and labelled it in a way which signals a personal preference for cooler temperatures over heatwaves, you could still make use of the report even if you did not share my preference.

The same is true of the Nanny State Index. A public health activist could simply rename it the ‘Public Health Protection Index’, and use it for their own purposes. They could treat a high score on the index as a cause for celebration, rather than, as Dr Snowdon does, as an undesirable outcome. Nonetheless – I have never seen a public health activist use the index, or a variant of it, in such a way, and this is probably not a coincidence. It would not suit them to draw attention to it.

Public health campaigners like to portray Britain as a laissez-faire economy, where producers of health-harming products can peddle their wares with minimal interference. In their version of events, British governments are in thrall to industry pressures, and therefore too timid to introduce the robust measures that would be required to improve
people’s health.

Dr Snowdon’s index, however, has consistently shown the UK to be at the more restrictive end of the spectrum, certainly when it comes to the regulation and taxation of alcohol, food and soft drinks, and tobacco products. British governments are not at all reluctant to interfere with consumer choices via a wide range of fiscal and regulatory measures.

Dr Snowdon is a liberal in the John Stuart Mill tradition, so for him, the role of the state is to prevent people from doing harm to others, not to prevent them from doing harm to themselves. This means that, for him, the question of whether paternalistic policies ‘work’, on their own terms, is a secondary one. Most people, though, are neither Millian liberals nor hardline paternalists. For them, the perceived ‘bang for the buck’ will matter. If a minor interference with consumer sovereignty delivers major health gains, they will support it; if it takes major interferences with consumer sovereignty to deliver minor health gains, they will not.

Dr Snowdon has repeatedly shown over the years that the
latter is a much more accurate description of the reality of nanny statism. It is possible to alter people’s lifestyle choices through policy measures, but those measures need to impose severe costs and/or inconveniences on people to have more than a minimal effect. This is true of individual measures, and it is also true of policy packages. The countries in the bottom five of the Nanny State Index (Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, Luxembourg and Spain) do not resemble the ‘Gin Lane’ dystopias which the dire warnings of public health campaigners evoke. In four of them, life expectancy at birth is higher than in the UK, and the fifth one – the Czech Republic – is catching up fast. The same is true of healthy life expectancy, a measure of life expectancy adjusted for health status.

For the purposes of this paper, my question to Dr Snowdon was not what a libertarian laissez-faire solution would look like: that would have been a very short paper indeed. Rather, my question to him was: what would it take for the UK to move to the bottom of the Nanny State Index – but only just. I was not asking for a score of zero, but for a score slightly below that of the current best (or, depending on your perspective, worst) performer.

The Nanny State Index uses a scale from 0 to 100, with the German score of 10 being the lowest in the sample. Germany is not exactly a country that is known for being underregulated, or insufficiently law-abiding. It is still, in the broadest sense, a European nanny state, albeit a light-touch one. Hence my question to Dr Snowdon: what would it take to match, and then slightly
undercut that score?

Read his answer below.

Kristian Niemietz

Editorial Director

Institute of Economic Affairs London, December 2024