Great to see the Tobacco Tactics website has had a makeover, and not before time.
Launched in 2012, the website was the work of the Tobacco Control Research Group at Bath University.
When I reviewed it almost eight years ago (Tobacco Tactics - what do you think of it so far?) I commented that 'some of the entries were so random and the quality of research so erratic that it seemed more of an own goal than a serious campaign tool for the tobacco control industry.'
On the other hand I was quite tickled that two sections were devoted to Forest – 'Forest' and 'History of Forest'.
Several Forest campaigns that were or had been active - The Free Society, Save Our Pubs & Clubs and Hands Off Our Packs - got a further page each.
They even devoted a page to me, declaring, "Clark is an active blogger." Not the epitaph I was looking for but better than nothing.
However it was the page devoted to The Free Society that really caught my eye. As I wrote at the time:
In keeping with its McCarthyite template, [Tobacco Tactics] names a list of contributors to The Free Society, some of whom have never written about tobacco.
It also names organisations that have co-hosted TFS events, ignoring the fact that many of them were on non-tobacco related issues and the word 'smoking' was never mentioned by the majority of speakers (who have been listed nevertheless).
Clearly, any association with Forest (even indirectly via The Free Society) is considered worthy of a mention.
I wonder what former Conservative party chairman David Davis MP, Matt Grist (senior researcher at Demos), Professor Terence Kealey (vice-chancellor at the University of Buckingham) and Toby Young (associate editor of The Spectator) will think of that.
When they agreed to take part in a discussion called 'Freedom, Education and the State' hosted by The Free Society and the Adam Smith Institute, I bet they weren't expecting their names to appear, a year or two later, on a state-financed website called Tobacco Tactics!
It was these and other random entries (the Henry Jackson Society and the Centre for Social Cohesion to name two) that really made me question the nature of the project.
However, after the initial excitement (hey, they're watching us!), I didn’t give the project much thought. If a bunch of researchers wanted to keep tabs on us, so be it. Neither I nor Forest had anything to hide.
Then, in March 2018, a new project was announced going by the name of STOP (Stopping Tobacco Organisations and Products).
A self-styled 'tobacco industry watchdog’, STOP describes itself as a 'partnership between the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath, the Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control, The Union, and Vital Strategies.
It was reported to have been given $20 million by Bloomberg Philanthropies but when, 14 months later, it launched an online database visitors were merely redirected to the University of Bath's tired and extremely stale Tobacco Tactics website.
As I wrote at the time (€20 million for this?!):
Aesthetically the Tobacco Tactics website always looked terrible, even at launch. How difficult would it have been to transfer the information to a shiny new database on the STOP website, giving researchers the opportunity to edit and update it at the same time?
Perhaps they were listening to me because a 'new and improved' TT website has now been launched.
It still includes pages devoted to the Henry Jackson Society, the Centre for Social Cohesion and lots of people who contributed to The Free Society website without ever writing about tobacco, but, God love 'em, the site looks magnificent, everything I hoped for when I heard Bloomberg had gifted €20 million to the project.
Of course, the database has been updated since its launch in 2012 and you will now find sections devoted to the UK Vaping Industry Association (founded in 2016) and other bad boys such as Forest EU, Consumer Choice Center and the Foundation for a Smokefree World (all launched in 2017).
If you've got a spare moment do visit the site. Frankly, if you can't find your name or the 'libertarian' organisation you work for, you must be doing something wrong!