Christopher Snowdon

Christopher Snowdon is Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs

The insanity of Britain’s housing market

On the day the Office for National Statistics announced a sharp rise in consumer price inflation, albeit to a still modest 1.5 per cent, we discovered that house prices have jumped by a staggering 10.2 per cent in the last year. The average house in England now costs £275,000, close to ten times the average

The problem with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s war on obesity

With his little round spectacles and earnest expression, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is the Penfold to Jamie Oliver’s Dangermouse. Both men have been largely forced out of the restaurant business due to public indifference and now spend their time writing endless cook books and lobbying the government for tougher laws on food that is deemed high in

Why 2021 could be the year of economic Armageddon

The British economy is wrapped in bandages – we won’t know whether the wound has scabbed or turned septic until they are ripped away. By the time the furlough scheme ends in April, whole sectors of the economy will have been out of action or severely incapacitated for over a year. Cash grants and the

Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid prohibition

So now we know the threshold at which Nicola Sturgeon pulls the trigger. If the number of daily hospital admissions for Covid-19 exceeds a tenth of the number recorded at the April peak, she will lay waste to the hospitality industry. From Friday, all pubs and licensed restaurants in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Forth

The true cost of coronavirus on our economy

When future historians look back on 21st-century mortality statistics, they will struggle to find anything out of the ordinary in Britain in 2020. When they look at the economic data they could be forgiven for thinking we were hit by an asteroid. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts a fall in GDP of around 12

Farewell, Public Health England

Farewell, Public Health England. Hello, National Institute for Health Protection. As expected, the hammer has fallen on the agency that promised to ‘protect the public’s health from infectious diseases’ but floundered hopelessly when tested by coronavirus. PHE failed to expand diagnostic testing, failed to engage with the private sector, stopped contact tracing when the virus

Boris Johnson’s absurd nanny state crusade

If reports in today’s papers are to be believed, the government will propose a new raft of nanny state policies on Monday. This time the target is food. A ban on advertising sugary, salty and fatty food on television before 9 p.m. is said to have been given the green light. The government will also dictate

The Edition: are white working class boys being left behind?

38 min listen

White working class boys consistently perform worse than other demographics in the UK’s education system – why? (00:45) What is it like to be ‘cancelled’? (14:20) And is it time to return to the office? (24:50) With the IEA’s Christopher Snowdon; former Ucas head Mary Curnock Cook; journalist Kevin Myers; the Spectator’s columnist Lionel Shriver;

Boris’s war on obesity is a mistake

In less enlightened times, an outbreak of a deadly virus was taken as a sign of God’s displeasure and would be accompanied by the persecution of an unpopular minority. It was less than a coincidence that the scapegoats tended to be those of whom the Church took a dim view: heretics, ‘witches’ (i.e. unmarried women)

The truth behind the election’s so-called fact checkers

All election campaigns see politicians exaggerate, stretch the truth and make promises they can’t keep. But if a report issued in early December is anything to go by, the 2019 general election campaign was a particularly dishonest affair – and one party was particularly guilty. On 10 December, Metro reported: Similarly, the Independent reported: Websites which make no attempt

Labour should scrap state schools, not private ones

Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner has promised that if Labour wins the next election it will use its first budget to ‘immediately close the tax loopholes used by elite private schools and use that money to improve the lives of all children.’ This slab of red meat went down well with the class warriors at

The UN’s warning to Syrian smokers is beyond parody

You really can’t make this stuff up. With hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions fleeing for their lives, the failed state of Syria is being told by the World Health Organisation to concentrate on… plain packaging. In a statement last week, the UN health agency warned that ‘notwithstanding the current crisis in the country,’