Plain packaging becomes compulsory in Australia from tomorrow.
Sensing an opportunity to promote the policy in Britain, Cancer Research today released the result of its latest poll:
Nearly 2 in 3 Britons support tobacco plain pack plans
A Cancer Research survey of 2,000 UK adults will find that 63pc support a move to get rid of colourful and 'slickly designed' cigarette packets. From Saturday tobacco companies in Australia must sell cigarettes in plain olive-brown packaging while from April 2015 small shops in England must remove all tobacco products and adverts from display.
Forest has responded as follows:
"Overwhelming" opposition to plain packaging
The smokers' group Forest has dismissed claims by Cancer Research that nearly two in three Britons support plans to introduce plain packaging of tobacco in the UK.
Forest says a recent government consultation on standardised packaging of tobacco attracted around 700,000 responses, half a million of them opposed to plain packaging.
Simon Clark, director of Forest, which runs the Hands Off Our Packs campaign, said:
"Forest alone submitted over a quarter of a million signatures against plain packaging. In total we estimate that around 500,000 people registered their opposition to the measure.
"The scale of the public response against standardised packaging has been nothing short of overwhelming. However many polls they commission, the tobacco control industry cannot spin its way out of that."
I'll be discussing the subject on Five Live Breakfast tomorrow ... and on BBC Breakfast (on the sofa in Salford).
Update: Angela Harbutt (Hands Off Our Packs) will be on the BBC News channel shortly after 11.00am tomorrow.
PS. I don't know what question Cancer Research asked to get the result they did, but click here to see how ASH got a very similar result in April.