Nothing wrong with lobbying

Good to see Lord Bell, who spoke at the Forest Freedom Dinner two weeks ago, on Newsnight last night.

He was feisty too and in no mood to bow to the likes of Sarah Wollaston, the rogue Tory MP who decided a debate about lobbying was yet another opportunity to bash the Government on plain packaging.

(It was not lost on this viewer that Lord Bell kept referring to himself as a "true Conservative" while looking directly at Wollaston.)

The great thing was, he seemed to be enjoying himself and without prompting announced proudly that he was a smoker.

Earlier in the evening I spent 40 minutes listening to Radio 4's File On 4 report about tobacco lobbying in Brussels.

The most pertinent comments, I thought, came from BAT's Ronan Barry and Conservative MEP Martin Callanan although they will no doubt be ignored by those who sense a conspiracy behind every Big Tobacco initiative.

According to Barry:

"We sell a legal product and are a legal company and therefore have a role to play in communicating our point of view to people who make decisions that impact upon us.

"There are certainly at least as many lobbyists arguing against our positions as there are arguing for them, so it's not true to say there are armies of us here lobbying."

Callanan agreed:

"This idea they put across that it's a sort of David and Goliath - these industrial giants with thousands of well-paid, suited lobbyists and only one or two little NGOs representing the oppressed common man is very, very far from the truth - it's the other way round if anything."

In my limited experience of Brussels that is certainly how I see it.

I know too that on a UK level ASH has an annual budget several times the size of Forest. And that's even before I factor in the money given to ASH Scotland, ASH Wales, Smokefree South West, Tobacco Free Futures etc etc.

The combined cost and the number of people employed to lobby on behalf of tobacco control dwarfs anything I've ever witnessed on our side of the argument.

Why, they even have three national newspapers - the Guardian, Observer and Independent - acting as unpaid cheerleaders. That's another resource the tobacco lobby can only dream about.

The BBC has a report on its website - Lobbyists puff and blow over new EU tobacco rules.

You can also listen to File On 4 here: Tobacco: The Lobbyists.

Meanwhile I had to laugh yesterday when I read this tweet by Labour health spokesman, the hapless and increasingly tedious Diane Abbott:

BBC News - Tobacco firm argued against plain packaging in meeting with UK government #torycigs

Oh no, surely not! How dare they!

I don't know how she finds the time, but Abbott has been tweeting non-stop about Big Tobacco, Lynton Crosby, David Cameron and the Tories. It must be a form of addiction.

For all the noise she is making, however, one thing is very clear. We have yet to read a shred of evidence that Crosby has ever lobbied the prime minister or the Government on plain packaging.

Until they do, I can't take a single word that Abbott or her fellow tobacco control campaigners tweet seriously.

What we are witnessing is politics, pure and simple. You gotta love it.

Finally, hats off to Zak Goldsmith. The Tory MP told Newsnight that MPs are there to be lobbied. That's our job, he said.

The only stipulation on lobbying, he added, is that all lobbying should be transparent.

I agree. The likes of ASH however prefer to hide behind APPGs or arrange "informal" meetings to lobby government that only come to light through Freedom of Information requests.

Compare that to the meetings between the DH and the tobacco companies. With the exception of the meeting with Philip Morris, minutes of the meetings with Imperial, JTI and British American Tobacco have been available for months.

Goldsmith also made the point (I paraphrase) that without lobbyists MPs would struggle to be well informed on a wide range of issues.

This is undoubtedly true. Politicians, like general news reporters, cannot be expected to be experts on every subject so lobbying is an important part of the political process.

It does however require MPs (and reporters) to be open to both sides of the argument. In far too many cases that is not the case.

Comments

[Blad Tolstoy]

Good article, Simon, and super accurate.

If anyone wants to see the kind of dirty play by tobacco control and its lobbyists and mutual back scratchers, then take a look at Tobacco Control Tactics managed by Wiel Maessen of Forces Netherlands, TICAP and HorecaClaim. see:

http://tctactics.org/index.php/Main_Page

If anyone hasn't been to this site before, it's a useful addition to the reference library!