I was going to draw a line after last week's posts about the plain packaging consultation and attempts to discredit the Hands Off Our Packs campaign.
Time to draw breath, I thought, at least until the Government publishes its eagerly awaited review of the consultation.
But then I read an article on the University of Bath's Tobacco Research blog: 500,000 against plain packaging? The figures just don’t add up.
Let me begin by saying how flattered I am that researchers at Bath have been following this blog:
Clark has published a number of blog posts ... defending the credibility of the HOOPs campaign and diverting attention away from the HOOPs scandal by directing criticism at the Plain Packs Protect campaign.
HOOPs scandal? Cheeky bastards.
Remind me. Ah, yes, I think they mean the Waterloo Station incident when one individual (employed by a marketing agency, Tribe) admitted signing the HOOPs petition on behalf of two friends who, he says, had agreed to have their names recorded.
That was wrong, certainly, which is why we offered to discount two names from the 235,000 or so that were submitted in support of our petition. But a scandal? Hardly.
Correct me if I'm mistaken but an example of a genuine scandal is when a Research Fellow at a leading state-funded university encourages an unknown number of people to sign several petitions knowing that they should sign only one, before adding:
I would seriously doubt that there will be cross checking between charity petitions so it may be worth signing all of them to get your money’s worth.
Outwith a banana republic a more blatant case of attempted petition rigging would be hard to find.
But Tobacco Research doesn't mention that. Instead it chooses to highlight a handful of complaints about the HOOPs campaign:
- [unethically] targeting parents in playgrounds telling them that plain packets would be completely plain with no health warnings;
- gathering signatures in loud nightclubs;
- targeting adolescents in the street telling them that the government was trying to ban cigarettes
My response to these complaints (not recorded by Tobacco Research) was a comprehensive five-page letter that was sent to the Department of Health on August 30.
I won't go into detail (the correspondence has been released under Freedom of Information if you want to read it) but the following snippets will confirm the robust nature of that reply:
I disagree that approaching adults in a park with children present was unethical. All adults, including parents, have the right to respond to a public consultation and should be given that opportunity.
It was not part of Tribe’s brief to approach people inside clubs. The activity was focussed on outdoor canvassing of opinion and to Tribe’s knowledge there was no deviation from this.
The very clear brief was that only adults were to be approached. [The complainant] does not hazard a guess as to what age the teenagers were, but clearly if they were aged 18 or 19 then they were as entitled as any other adult to voice their opinion.
I can assure you that the signature collectors were never briefed that [the government would be removing health warnings from packs].
All signature collectors were thoroughly briefed about the nature of the HOOP campaign and were very clear in their description of the campaign and what plain packaging would mean.
Incredibly, the complaint about nightclub canvassing was based not on first hand experience but on the word of "one of my friends". The writer – who was not at the club so did not witness any of the things she was complaining about – even objected to the way our canvassers were dressed:
The girls were dressed in very little – presumably a tactic to try to get as many signatures as possible from the male population from the male population in the club!
Stifling an enormous sigh I responded as politely as I could:
There was a strict (and modest) uniform so we cannot agree with the assertion that “the girls were dressed in very little”.
There was one more complaint that also got short shrift. Professor John Britton, chairman of the Royal College of Physicians’ Tobacco Advisory Group, a director of the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies (UKCTCS), and a trustee of ASH, wrote:
In a meeting with undergraduate medical students here at the University of Nottingham on Monday, one student informed me that he had been approached by two of his friends who I understood to be other students to sign the 'Hands Off Our Packs' petition. He stated that his friends had to acquire a certain number of signatures otherwise they would not get paid. He went on to say that he had signed the petition giving a false name because he felt sorry for his friends.
Before I reveal our response, consider how this complaint is reported by the University of Bath's Tobacco Research project:
[Britton] described how he had been told by his students at the University of Nottingham that friends of theirs at the University were being paid by HOOPs to gather signatures for the petition.
Note that 'one student' has become 'students' (plural) and 'two of his friends' has become 'friends of theirs' which could mean any number of people. Deliberate falsification or sloppy reporting by Tobacco Research?
Anyway, part of my response to Professor Britton's complaint read:
It is completely untrue that individuals would not be paid if they did not acquire a certain number of signatures.
As for the rest of this farrago, how can Forest be held accountable for an allegedly intelligent adult signing a petition he didn't agree with just because he felt sorry for his friends (if that indeed was the case)?
Unbelievable.
Dear reader, this is just some of the nonsense we have endured for several months. Sometimes I feel as if I've stepped through the looking glass into an alternative world where John Britton and Deborah Arnott are the King and Queen of Hearts, the medical student is the March Hare, and Andrew Black, tobacco programme manager at the Department of Health, is the Mad Hatter.
Then I wake up.
The real scandal, of course, is not two questionable signatures on the HOOPs petition. It is the repeated abuse of public money to mislead ministers, MPs, the media and even members of the general public who may stumble upon this pathetic propaganda.
Simon Clark