You've got to laugh.
When Stephen Williams, Lib Dem MP and chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health, sat down to write about the new Plain Packs Protect campaign on Monday, he must have thought he was on pretty safe ground.
After all, he had just come from a tobacco control conference on his home patch (Bristol) where he would have been surrounded by anti-smoking campaigners. Voices querying their grand plan to rid the world of smokers would have been non-existent.
You see, tobacco control activists live in a bubble. They don't invite opponents to their shindigs, they refuse to share a platform with "pro-smokers", and contrary views are actively discouraged.
So what happened next may have surprised the MP for Bristol West. He provoked a response, most of it hostile. In fact, as I write there are 148 comments on this particular thread. (Previous posts in January attracted 2, 9 and 15 comments. In December the most comments he got was 31.)
I estimate that 99 per cent of the comments are opposed to his vision of a smokefree world. So what does he do? He falls backs on the age-old fallacy that anyone who disagrees with the anti-smoking industry must be in the pay (or a stooge) of Big Tobacco.
Pathetic.
PS. The reaction to Williams' post reminds me of the response to a piece by another Bristol MP, Labour's Kerry McCarthy, in 2008. See Kerry McCarthy replies.
Simon Clark
One hundred and ninety-three (193) comments on Stephen Williams' blog.
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