Interrogated by the Morning Star - and I survived to tell the tale
Friday, March 18, 2011 at 19:00 Had a long conversation this afternoon with Rory MacKinnon, a reporter for the Morning Star.
He's working on a piece about the response to the Government's tobacco control plan and wanted answers to the following questions (which he kindly emailed in advance):
1. I understand you told a select committee in 2000 that Forest received around £250,000pa in funding from the TMA. Is this figure still accurate?
2. You also confirmed that this represented around 96% of Forest's operating budget. Is this also still accurate?
3. You have said in both your testimony to the select committee and on Forest's website that it was "not set up by the industry, but independently by this chap, Christopher Foxley-Norris, and a few of his pals." Can you confirm that neither the TMA nor its predecessor the Tobacco Advisory Council were behind its creation? If not, why do you maintain that Forest is an independent organisation?"
4. I've read several interviews and columns in which you've said there is no evidence for a tobacco display ban reducing the number of young smokers. How do you reconcile this with the importance the tobacco industry itself places on branding and visibility?
I won't repeat my replies to these and other searching questions. Suffice it to say I'm not expecting a ringing endorsement of Forest or our role in the war on tobacco!
Reader Comments (4)
Monty Python, eh?
If £250K is from the TMA then it shows how little the tobacco companies are worried about the tobacco control lobby's impact on its profits. As Pat (Nurse) has remarked before, they're not our friends. But then I knew that, too.
Dont worry Simon, only 3 people read it. I am sure more people know about this article through your site.
So what if tobacco even has donated some piddly money to defending its own positions in this world. It's a free country, free enterprise, legal product, major contribution to world economy for at least half a millenia and has a right to donate some funding from time to time, including to defend itself from the lying filth-mongering anti-tobacco forces funded a gazillion times over by the satanic puritanical hateful lying pharmaceuticals, which are the real subject to be investigated and questioned by the media, not Forest - in my humble opinion.
Even if FOREST does receive the bulk of its income from the tobacco industry at least it hasn't the neck to call itself a 'Charity'.