Taxpayer-funded lobby group lobbies government to publish tobacco control plan "without further delay"
Thursday, October 13, 2016 at 13:10 At 1.30 this afternoon there's a debate on tobacco control in Westminster Hall at the House of Commons.
The leading figures appear to be Alex Cunningham (Labour), Norman Lamb (Lib Dem) and Mrs Flick Drummond (Conservative). No, I've never heard of her either so it will be interesting to hear what she has to say.
The driving force behind the debate is almost certainly ASH, hence this press release, issued this morning:
Members of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health will today be calling on the Government to publish its promised new Tobacco Control Plan without further delay. The Government committed to a new plan after the previous one expired in December 2015 and to publication in summer 2016, but summer has passed and there is still no publication date.
There is widespread public support for Government action to limit smoking. A recent large public poll found that over a third (35%) of adults in Britain thought the Government’s activities to tackle smoking were about right, while nearly 4 in 10 (39%) thought the Government was not doing enough. Only 11% thought the Government was doing too much. [2]
In today’s debate members of the APPG will be focusing on the stark health inequalities across the country, of which smoking is the major driver. The importance of tackling health inequalities was recognised by Theresa May when, in her maiden speech, the new Prime Minister committed her Government to “fighting against the burning injustice that if you’re born poor you will die on average nine years earlier than others.”
The release quotes Tory MP Bob Blackman MP who is chairman of the APPG on Smoking and Health:
"The UK has an excellent record in tackling smoking but we can’t afford to rest on our laurels. The evidence is clear: without a renewed strategy there’s a real risk that smoking rates will rise again.
"I recognise the need to control public expenditure but measures to drive down smoking are cost-effective and will result in reductions in heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory disease, with the potential to save the over-stretched NHS billions of pounds a year.”
Leaving aside the crass economic ignorance of that remark (fewer smokers mean far less revenue for the Treasury), Blackman added that he "strongly believed that the tobacco industry should be required to contribute to the costs of treating people with diseases caused by smoking".
"Given the appalling damage the tobacco industry causes, and given that the major companies are vastly profitable, I cannot see why they should not be required to make a greater financial contribution to help solve the public health disaster they have worked to create. I can’t imagine a more appropriate application of the polluter pays principle."
Anyway, this is part of Forest's response:
Forest has criticised members of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health, run by the anti-smoking group ASH, who are urging the government to publish a new Tobacco Control Plan "without further delay".
Simon Clark, director of Forest, said: "Like Brexit, the government must take its time and get its strategy right. How can ministers introduce new measures when we're still waiting for an independent review of existing policies, and measures such as plain packaging have yet to be fully implemented?"
He added: “Anti-tobacco campaigners are lobbying the government to introduce new tobacco control measures. Research however suggests there is little public support for further anti-smoking policies.
"What is equally clear is the public’s desire for a common sense approach to policy making in the area of tobacco control. Regulation should not be made at the behest of taxpayer-funded lobby groups but on the basis of credible, independent evidence."
You can read it in full here.
I'll keep you posted on this afternoon's debate. Last I heard very few MPs had noted their intention to speak so it could be a bit of a damp squib. We'll see.
Update: Well, I listened to the 'debate'. Needless to say it was completely one-sided and predictable.
The best bit was at the end when new health minister Nicola Blackman declined to give a publication date for the Government's new Tobacco Control Plan which she said had to be "evidence-based". That would certainly make a change.
Pushed on whether this meant this year or next she replied, sweetly, "You'll have to wait and see."
Oh, I wish I'd seen Deborah Arnott's face at that moment.
PS. I've no evidence for this but I wonder if Deborah's long-standing influence at the Department of Health may be coming to an end.
Given the nature of ASH's press release, and the minister's subsequent statement, they don't appear to be singing from precisely the same hymn sheet.
We can but dream.
Update: Tobacco control plan debate (Hansard).
Reader Comments (5)
Errrrm - I suspect for the first and only time in my smoker life I probably find myself sharing the same position as ASH - half in fear and half in worry about what exactly "wait and see means."
I'll crack open my cancer causing bottle of champagne only when Govt announces it is ending tax payer funding to political lobby groups in favour of diverting that funding where it should go - direct patient care within the NHS to benefit everyone, not just those in antismoker groups dependant on scaremongering for their own personal salaries.
Persecution, which is what this is, is not benign and it is dishonest of them to imply otherwise. It is also dishonest to claim it can be in any way a cost saving for the NHS.
All it would take would be for a single MP or mainstream media outlet to point this out and ASH would be history. What a shame we have been, and continue to be, so thoroughly let down.
Blackman is either lying, has the intellectual capacity of a sea slug or is inexcusably ignorant. Whatever the case is, he is misleading parliament. Formerly I wrote about such behaviour with modicum of politeness but I am utterly tired of hearing the same untruths used to justify authoritarian vileness and abuse of public funds.
Unfortunately Blackman is not my MP so he can ignore any help on health economics that I send him. Perhaps someone who he does have to answer to can set him straight on the subject and publicly demonstrate that Blackman has been informed why his claims are so wrong. Once it is established that he has received information explaining his error, if he continues in this vein, we will be able to say with confidence that he is a liar or an idiot rather than merely an ignorant ideologue.
To be honest, I strongly suspect that the government simply has its hands full already with all the Brexit arrangements (which they were completely unprepared for, and have therefore had to do some very last-minute, panicked “revision” to get their heads round) to be worrying about whether or not their latest Tobacco Control (or indeed Alcohol Control or Obesity Control) programme is launched “on time” in order to please the likes of Ms Arnott. In the great scheme of things, the launch of such, minor, single-issue “plans” tends to fade into the background when there are much more all-encompassing preparations to be made in respect of our highly-complicated withdrawal from the EU.
Indeed, it’s been one of my major beliefs that one of the reasons that our MPs have been able to allow themselves the luxury of developing one-eyed obsessions towards particular things that they happen not to personally like, and to develop cosy friendships with single-issue campaign groups/individuals like ASH, or the AHA, or Jamie Oliver is because they have had the time to do so. Now that they’ve got to start doing the job they were actually elected to do, i.e. running the country, and more and more of them will become involved in this process – as they must, because it is so complicated - increasing numbers will, I believe, discover that they just haven’t got the time to indulge themselves in their favourite hobby-horses any more, or at least not to anywhere near the same degree. And the further along the road to withdrawal from the EU we go, the more this will continue. Rabid crusaders on single, rather than general, issues will soon come to be seen (as indeed they used to be, quite rightly, seen) as the swivel-eyed obsessive bores that they truly are and their whiny rantings will increasingly be regarded as a waste of Parliamentary time, which could and should be utilised for much more important issues, by their more hardworking colleagues.
Which, to my mind, was one of the best reasons to vote to leave the EU – to get a better quality of elected representative and to weed out the ones who simply don’t understand, or don’t care about, the important nature of the jobs they have been elected to do and see it just as a means to re-fashion the world the way they want it. The sooner we relieve ourselves of the burden of these self-centred hangers-on, the better.
Dear Mr Clark
The plan should be titled for what it is: Smoker Control Plan.
Without smokers there is no smoking or tobacco industry. For the likes of ash et al to pretend they are anti-smoking or anti-tobacco is utter garbage. Neither are they Davids standing up to Big Tobbaco, since they have the might of government behind them and their target is the smoker: they are the Goliath against the individual smoker's David.
Once the silent majority understand the discrepancy between what the anti-smokers say and what they mean, I suspect more of them will side with the smokers.
DP