Mustering some Christmas spirit
Wednesday, December 19, 2012 at 8:48 Thrilled to see the Forest Christmas card reproduced in The Times.
The paper's Business Diary applauds us for "mustering some Christmas spirit" in our fight against plain packaging, noting that we "did not forget to include Stephen Williams, the MP spearheading the campaign [for PP], on [our] Christmas card list".
"Forest," the paper reported, "sent the above specially printed card to Mr Williams' office last week to wish him a Merry Christmas. Still, we're not sure that comparing cigarette packets to children's Christmas stockings is necessarily a winning strategy."
Actually, the card reads 'Hands off our presents' (not 'Hands off our stockings') and 'Plain packaging? You must be crackers' with no reference to children (not even visually), but it's the season of goodwill so I'll let it pass.
Worth noting, though, that the only way The Times could have known that we sent Stephen Williams a card is if his office told them. So perhaps it was Williams – the old devil – who suggested the "children's Christmas stocking" angle.
They never stop trying to smear us, do they?!
PS. Three years ago another Forest Christmas card inspired this article by columnist Vicki Woods in the Telegraph: The pubs that died after giving up smoking.
It began:
In a year when the postman brought me fewer handwritten, stamped and posted Christmas cards, the corporate ones stood out. I liked a depressed Santa sitting under a pub sign saying NOBODY'S INN. It was a Merry Christmas from Forest (the pro-smoking people), hand-signed in different biros by Nicky, Sue x and Squiggle.
Squiggle? That was me!
Update: Stephen Williams (below left) is pictured alongside Deborah Arnott, CEO of ASH, in the ASH Annual Review 2012. And yes, we sent Deborah a Christmas card too!
Reader Comments (10)
What a bundle of fun they are.
Well they (photo) look like a bundle of laughs. I bet their office party is a real hoot. And who is the spotty youth in the background? He doesn't look old enough to smoke anyway.
I know one shouldn't judge by appearances, and when I was younger I used to tease my mother about it ("Don't trust him dear. His eyes are too close together..."), but it's difficult to avoid seeing the puritan intent in the visages and stance of these people. They have "Party Pooper" writ large in their expressions.
They look like their own packaging proposals - drab and generic. That woman second from left looks like a lizard.
Who dug up these five?
"PROTECT CHILDREN DON'T LET THEM LOOK AT THESE CORPSES"
Merry Christmas Simon
Maybe next year you should just use that photo with the message, "Merry Christmas from ASH! Tidings of joy to all!" I suspect that may make some realise exactly who they are dealing with far more effectively than humour and wit, things which we all know are anathema to ASH and their cronies.
Awful! Put's me off Christmas dinner. Bitterness, inadequacy and disappointment pours out of them.
Make a great poster for our cause. Become a finger wagger and you, too, could look like this. Yuk.
The draconian smoking ban which has seen more than ten thousand licensed premises close, has left smokers with nowhere to go. Whether people smoke by choice or not smokers are now excluded from society much as gay people were fifty or so years ago.
I still feel totally outraged by it and that Forest is not doing nearly enough. Ash have declared that they are against smokers and bare little if any difference at all to a smoker hate group.
The Five crusaders hold an image of a baby inhaling someone else's smoke (except the baby itself would have to be smoking to get that close to that much smoke).
Pity that the crusaders themselves will be responsible for influencing its impressionable mind to the attractions of smoking by having forced smokers onto the streets and by introduced intriguing, glitzy packaging with huge coloured pictures on it.
They might even be called shills of Big Tobacco.
Perhaps Stephen Williams' talents as a constituency MP compensate in some way for his immature, illiberal performances elsewhere?
And for the 2013 poster. . . just superimpose a beer can or a fat person. . . and hold that pose.
But dont go too near the horses!