How much should governments be allowed to regulate what we eat, drink, smoke and vape? SpeakFreely’s Oscar Gil-Lewis sits down with Harrison Griffiths of EPICENTER to discuss Europe’s Nanny State Index and the growing politics of paternalism across the continent.
Read a transcript of the conversation below.
Oscar Gill-Lewis: The last Nanny State Index was published in 2025. What exactly does the index measure?
Harrison Griffiths: It’s edited by Christopher Snowdon from the Institute of Economic Affairs. Essentially, it gives countries across Europe a composite score based on their policy towards alcohol, smoking, vaping, and food and drink regulation.
OGL: Who came out as the biggest nanny state in Europe in the last report?
HG: Of the countries measured, Turkey came out worst. That’s been a fairly consistent pattern recently, particularly when it comes to things like advertising for these “sinful” products, so to speak.
OGL: And who is the least nanny-state country?
HG: Germany. Loath as I am to admit it as a Brit, they’re absolutely smashing us in this regard. They score particularly well on alcohol, where their approach is very liberal compared with most of the continent.
OGL: Is alcohol the main driver of that? You might expect more economically developed countries to be less paternalistic.
HG: That’s one of the things I might have expected as a prior—that there would be some correlation between economic development and a general tendency not to nanny people around.
But that isn’t necessarily the case. It’s quite jumbled. Turkey and Lithuania are towards the worst end. The UK entered the top ten in the 2025 edition, largely because it tanked its score in what had previously been one of its strongest areas: safer alternatives to nicotine, most notably vaping.
Then towards the other end you’ve got Germany, and Italy is fairly low as well. So it isn’t really a “usual suspects” situation. There’s a real mixture across the different categories.
OGL: How much influence does the European Commission have over this? Brussels is very interested in reducing things like sugar, alcohol and tobacco consumption. Are these policies primarily European or national?
HG: They’re mostly national competencies. There is, of course, plenty of EU involvement in tobacco. You constantly hear conversations in Brussels about increasing regulation of tobacco products and potentially introducing special duties across the single market. So we’ll probably see more attempts by Brussels to get involved.
But an awful lot of this still comes down to national policy. Most of the countries measured are EU member states, yet you see enormous differences between them. There are things like plain-packaging mandates and restrictions on flavoured cigarettes that come from Brussels, but national policy still matters enormously.
OGL: Italy is interesting because you might not immediately expect it to score relatively well.
HG: Exactly. Italy is another example of something you don’t necessarily expect.
It has historically had a stronger Roman Catholic influence on society and, on issues such as sex work or same-sex relationships, can be somewhat more conservative than neighbouring countries in Western and Central Europe.
I don’t know enough about the Italian situation to explain exactly why it performs comparatively well in the areas measured by the Nanny State Index. But if somebody had given me the countries blind, I probably would have guessed that Italy would be nearer the top.
OGL: You mentioned sex work. Should something like that be included in the Nanny State Index?
HG: Probably not, simply because the index grew out of Christopher Snowdon’s work opposing nanny-state policies in Britain, which has mostly focused on very private decisions about what people put into their own bodies.
There is certainly a liberal argument that sex work falls within the same general category. If you have consenting adults and somebody wants to pay for something, then their body is their choice and it isn’t really the government’s business.
But there may be additional implications surrounding sex work that go somewhat beyond the largely internalised costs involved in the things currently measured.
Alcohol, for example, certainly can have externalities through antisocial or violent behaviour. Smoking has the second-hand smoke question, although I think much of that can be internalised through property rights. A pub can say that you can smoke inside, or that you can’t. If you don’t want to inhale cigarette smoke, you can go to a non-smoking establishment.
With vaping that problem is much smaller, while things such as junk food and fizzy drinks are overwhelmingly personal decisions.
So I wouldn’t be opposed to someone creating a broader index. I just don’t think sex work is an obvious addition to these four existing categories.
OGL: One of the striking things when travelling through Germany is seeing smoking rooms at airports. People can smoke without affecting everyone else. That seems like a good example of finding a practical solution rather than simply prohibiting something.
We’ve also seen genuinely innovative technologies such as vaping and heated tobacco. Yet the British government seems increasingly interested in restricting those products despite their being less harmful alternatives to smoking. Why?
HG: As I see it, there’s a very strong ideological puritanism that has worked its way into British public-health institutions over the last thirty or forty years, while those institutions have massively expanded their remit.
Take heated tobacco, vaping or oral tobacco products. These are much less harmful than smoking.
Let’s not be denialists about smoking: smoking is incredibly bad for you. Most people understand that. They choose whether to do it at their own risk.
But what the market has done is create products that can deliver nicotine without so many of the negative consequences associated with cigarettes. If your priority is genuinely harm reduction, you should be extremely interested in these innovations.
I’m actually coming at it from a slightly different perspective. If you want to smoke yourself to death, that is your right. I certainly don’t encourage anyone to do that, but it is your right.
Where people begin attacking innovative and much safer alternatives, I think there is a puritan instinct that simply doesn’t like people enjoying these things.
There are people with genuine concerns about whether vaping encourages more people to consume nicotine in the first place. There may be some evidence for that. But most countries already have age restrictions. In Britain, you can’t legally sell these products to under-18s. Enforcing those laws should be the focus, rather than restricting a game-changing alternative to tobacco.
OGL: So that is essentially the gateway argument?
HG: Yes. But it isn’t clear that vaping necessarily leads people towards smoking.
People point out that vapes come in all sorts of flavours and may therefore be attractive to young people. But even if we take the question of underage nicotine consumption seriously, underage cigarette smoking in Britain is at record lows.
I don’t think children should be consuming these products. Those laws should be robustly enforced. But even where vaping replaces smoking among young people, you are still talking about harm reduction.
There is potentially far more harm than good to be done when governments restrict these alternatives. In Britain, the most egregious examples are the ban on disposable vapes and restrictions on flavourings.
OGL: Are there comparable innovations in alcohol? Something that gives people the benefits they enjoy from drinking without the harmful effects?
HG: Not as far as I’m aware. If somebody could invent that, it would be magnificent.
If you could produce something that delivers the pleasant social and personal consequences of alcohol without the negative side effects, that would be an absolute societal game changer.
But alcohol raises a similar philosophical question. Laws against selling alcohol to children should obviously be robustly enforced. But for the vast majority of adults who drink, alcohol is a social lubricant and a relaxant, and they don’t develop a serious problem with it.
Resources should certainly be available for people who recognise that they have a problem and want to stop. And where alcohol contributes to violence or antisocial behaviour, I would much rather law enforcement devote its resources to preventing those crimes and dealing with the people committing them than say, “Some people behave badly when drinking, therefore everybody else has to suffer.”
There are ways to mitigate those harms without ruining everyone else’s fun.
OGL: Governments would argue that these restrictions improve health outcomes. Is there a strong basis for the state restricting people’s choices for their own health?
HG: I don’t think so.
Christopher Snowdon recently discussed the growth of the nanny state in Britain and traced some of it back to mandatory seat-belt laws. People may laugh and say, “You’re a crazy libertarian—you oppose seat-belt laws?”
I live in Serbia, where seat belts aren’t mandatory in the back of cars. I always wear one because I would rather not die in a car crash. But it’s your choice. It’s your risk assessment. It’s your comfort. It’s your right.
When countries stray into even relatively small interventions in the interests of protecting people from themselves, you establish a precedent that the state has an interest in personal decisions whose consequences are overwhelmingly borne by the individual making them.
From there, that precedent grows and grows.
So if someone says, “Would you really oppose mandatory seat belts?” then, yes, absolutely.
Wear your seat belt. Don’t smoke. Don’t get drunk all the time. But if an adult understands the risks and wants to do something anyway, they should have the liberty to do it.
OGL: What would supporters of these public-health interventions say if you pointed out that being more restrictive doesn’t necessarily correlate neatly with better outcomes?
HG: It depends on their ideology and their point of view.
Look at Britain. You’ve got plenty of MPs on both sides of the aisle who have an ideological commitment to anti-smoking policy. They will correctly point out that smoking is harmful, kills people, causes terrible diseases and shortens lives. They’ll make similar arguments about the negative consequences of alcohol. Those things are true.
The disagreement is philosophical. Is it right—or even possible—for governments to try to tinker with individuals until they become perfectly healthy beings? Or do you accept that people are imperfect, that they enjoy consuming some unhealthy things, and work within those constraints while respecting their decisions?
When it comes to safer alternatives to tobacco, I have far less tolerance for the prohibitionist argument because restrictions can actually push people back towards cigarettes.
You can instead say: “You like nicotine. Fine. That’s your choice. Here are ways of consuming it that are substantially safer than smoking.”
If government then interferes with those alternatives, it risks causing harm rather than preventing it.
OGL: There is another incentive here. The British government receives substantial tax revenue from heavily taxed tobacco products.
HG: That’s the other side of it. Politicians respond to incentives, and there are two big ones.
First, it’s a good source of revenue.
You can make a Pigouvian argument for some taxation. Alcohol consumption can generate negative externalities through antisocial behaviour and violence. If there were some small tax designed to internalise that externality and the money went directly towards putting police officers on the streets late at night, I could see the argument for it.
But there’s a difference between that and something simply becoming a cash cow.
Governments—and the British government in particular—are very vulnerable to the temptation to find their favourite cash cow and milk it until it’s thin and rotting away.
The second incentive is political. Unfortunately, in Britain we’re not arguing for an especially popular position.
The British people are curtain-twitching nannies.
I think that’s a really bad tendency that has seeped into our political culture, and the two things reinforce each other. The more government intervenes, the more people become accustomed to intervention and feel empowered to campaign politically against some innocuous thing that somebody else is doing that doesn’t affect them.
There aren’t many votes to be won by being anti-nanny-state. Politicians like revenue and they like getting re-elected. At the moment, many of these policies can give them both.
OGL: But taxation and regulation can eventually become self-defeating. If you push them too far, you create black markets.
HG: Yes, and we’re seeing a massive expansion of black-market cigarettes in Britain right now.
Once that happens, the government obviously loses some of the revenue it was trying to collect.
And booming illicit markets tend to bring additional problems. You can have territorial disputes and violence, and when you engage in black-market transactions you can’t rely on ordinary contract or legal-enforcement mechanisms. That increases risk.
Those things make black markets much more dangerous and destructive than legal markets.
OGL: Australia has seen arson and violence connected with the illicit tobacco trade. Could Britain eventually see something similar?
HG: I certainly hope not. I have no idea whether that is coming.
But illicit cigarettes have become a lucrative business. And lucrative illicit businesses can bring violence because of territorial disputes and the absence of ordinary legal mechanisms for resolving disagreements.
There’s obviously no place for that whatsoever, and law enforcement should come down extremely hard on people using violence in connection with the cigarette trade.
But it is a risk that accompanies the expansion of black markets. What has happened in Australia—with people setting fire to property as part of turf wars over illicit tobacco—is bizarre to see in a developed, open, liberal country.
OGL: How important is public opinion in explaining the differences between countries?
Sweden, for instance, has pushed back against restrictions on snus, partly because it is culturally embedded there. Is there a relationship between countries where the public resists paternalism and countries that perform well in the Nanny State Index?
HG: Sweden is a very good example when it comes to tobacco harm reduction. It has one of the lowest cigarette-smoking rates and has historically been much more open than most European countries to alternatives such as oral tobacco.
It depends where you look, though. Is nannyism coming from the public? From political elites? From intellectual elites?
In Britain, a lot of the public-health intelligentsia pushes these policies and can rely on considerable support from a fairly nannyish public. That’s almost the perfect recipe if you want a bigger nanny state.
Turkey may have a very different cultural explanation. Italy is different again. Germany is another interesting example.
Anyone who spends time in a large German city can see that people are comparatively free and relaxed about these things, particularly alcohol. Walking around with a few cans of beer is perfectly normal in a way that, in some British cities, can bring you into contact with the police.
To really understand the differences, you would need to look country by country.
But the culture of a country—and the extent to which that culture translates into a willingness either to demand regulation or resist it—is obviously a huge part of why we end up with such different outcomes across Europe.
