Hypocrites ahoy!

I was on TalkRadio on Saturday speaking to presenter Mike Parry about discarded fag butts.

The item was prompted by two things.

One, Mike has a bee in his bonnet about cigarette litter – he hates it, especially the butts that are dropped outside the entrance to his apartment block.

Two, the previous Sunday (August 23) the Mail on Sunday ran a story with the headline:

No butts! Tobacco firms are warned they face tougher laws requiring them to pick up fag ends off UK streets unless they ramp up efforts to collect discarded cigarettes themselves

Apparently the Government intends to take a 'hard line' on the issue and has summoned the companies to a meeting 'to give them the choice of ramping up their own efforts to collect more discarded cigarette ends, or of being forced to do so.'

If this sounds familiar it's because MPs and the anti-smoking industry have been agitating for such a move for some time. In January 2015, for example, the Independent on Sunday reported that 'MPs want tobacco companies, takeaway restaurants and chewing-gum manufacturers to spend hundreds of millions of pounds cleaning up the mess their products create.'

If last week's Mail on Sunday report is correct the focus now appears to be exclusively on the tobacco industry. According to Richard McIlwain, deputy chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, "It’s time for the tobacco industry to step up to the challenge of ridding our environment of the millions of discarded butts that litter our streets, parks and beaches, pollute our watercourses and oceans and add to the toxic plastic soup that is choking our marine environment."

Perhaps this is the moment to mention that any reference to Keep Britain Tidy should come with the warning: 'Hypocrites ahoy!'

The truth is that the tobacco companies have tried several times to work with Keep Britain Tidy but, since 2013, KBT has refused to work with the tobacco industry.

In January 2015 I covered this issue in a blog post entitled Keeping Britain Tidy, part two. (Part one can be found here.)

Giles Roca, the-then director general of the Tobacco Manufacturers Association, told a parliamentary committee that the tobacco industry 'wanted to help find a solution to the problem of litter but is finding it "very difficult to play a role" because of the Local Government Declaration on Tobacco Control "which has effectively stopped local authorities doing business with us on matters such as litter".'

He added:

Keep Britain Tidy decided in December 2013 that it would no longer have any activity with the tobacco industry whatsoever. KBT will not deal with the tobacco industry. Local government will not deal with the tobacco industry on litter ...

We need leadership at a local level and at the national level. At the minute, Keep Britain Tidy will not talk to us. The board of Keep Britain Tidy passed a resolution in December 2013 that said it would not talk and not engage with the tobacco industry, which quite frankly is just preposterous …

Around the same time a tobacco company executive tweeted:

My company, incl me, has held numerous talks with KBT. Incoherent plans always aimed at squeezing pointless cash out of business.

Talks stretch back years. No desire to 'clean' in my view; more to ensure continued funding.

Ah yes, funding, because that's what this is really all about.

In essence, the tobacco control industry and associated groups like Keep Britain Tidy want tobacco industry money without the inconvenience of having to work with the companies.

For years anti-smoking campaigners have been calling for the government to impose a 'tobacco levy' on tobacco companies.

The figure they are currently talking about is £500,000 per annum, which would be in addition to the corporation tax the companies already pay and the £10 billion smokers contribute to the Treasury each year through tobacco taxation.

ASH wants the government to spend the money on, among other things, multi-media anti-smoking campaigns to 'persuade' smokers to quit, and now Keep Britain Tidy wants the industry to 'educate their customers about doing the right thing with their butts once they have finished with them.'

Is it unreasonably cynical of me to think that ASH and Keep Britain Tidy will be among the groups applying for grants from this pot of money to run those very same campaigns?

ASH, after all, has a history of asking the government for taxpayers' money – most recently applying for (and failing) to win a grant of £350,000 to fund its dreadful Quit for Covid campaign.

Before handing substantial sums to these groups, I think an audit of the effectiveness of their work might be in order.

Take, for example, Keep Britain Tidy's last anti-smoking campaign. Launched in August 2018, I wrote about it here.

I believe it cost £400,000 but where is the report that vindicates such largesse? Truthfully, apart from the launch – which, if I remember, had very limited media coverage – it seemed to disappear without trace.

So how effective was it and what were the criteria by which the campaign was judged? Was it reducing cigarette litter, changing attitudes, or was it media coverage and online hits?

I'd love to read an impartial evaluation of the Bin The Butt campaign but whether such a reports exists I don't know.

You may remember that I used to badger Public Health England about the annual Stoptober campaign. It was pretty clear that it was dying on its arse because each year PHE would move the evaluation goalposts.

If you want the details I suggest you read the following posts but the headlines give you a flavour:

Stoptober and the law of diminishing returns (September 2016)
Questions for Public Health England concerning Stoptober 2016 (November 2016)
Stoptober: the mystery of the missing evaluation (September 2017)
Stoptober 2017 limps on and we're still waiting for the 2016 evaluation (October 2017)
At last! The Stoptober 2016 campaign evaluation report (October 2017)
Stoptober’s ‘growing success’ explained (October 2018)

I'm pretty certain, btw, that had I not chased PHE for the evaluation reports nothing would have been published.

Anyway, not only am I strongly against the tobacco industry being forced to pay a levy to fund future anti-smoking campaigns (including anti-litter initiatives), I am even more opposed to the money falling into the hands of anti-smoking groups because experience suggests it will have little positive impact.

Instead it will simply be used to bankroll a tobacco control industry that will only get bigger and more assertive.

As for who is responsible for fag ends and other cigarette litter, my own view, as I told Mike Parry on TalkRadio, is that litter is something that the individual, not the tobacco industry, should take greater responsibility for, but smokers can't do it alone. They need help to dispose of their butts.

Instead, many councils refuse to install cigarette bins on the streets or even give planning permission for cig bins because, it is said, they 'normalise' smoking.

Government can't have it both ways. If they don’t want smokers to drop cigarette butts on the ground they need to provide more bins. It’s not rocket science.

As for the expense, the alleged cost of treating smoking-related diseases is £2.7bn a year. Tobacco taxation raises at least £10bn annually.

Forget those spurious estimates and calculations about the cost of smoking breaks etc etc, there is already a huge pot of money from which the issue of cigarette litter can be addressed without the need for a tobacco levy or additional taxation.

The problem is, the tobacco levy has become something of a holy grail for the tobacco control industry. Effectively, they want the tobacco companies to pay for anti-smoking campaigns, whether it's multi-media campaigns urging smokers to quit or anti-litter campaigns.

Previous chancellors – notably George Osborne – rejected a tobacco levy because he understood that the people who would pay for a tobacco levy would be the hard-pressed consumer on to whom the companies would pass the cost.

Given that smokers already pay punitive levels of taxation on tobacco this would not only be unfair but would disproportionately punish the less well off smoker.

Curiously, despite banging on about "inequalities" in society, that doesn't seem to bother the likes of ASH who consistently overlook the fact that the policies they support are driving more and more smokers into poverty.

Anyway, here are some of my previous posts about Keep Britain Tidy. Before giving in to their demands, one or two government advisors might like to give them a quick read:

Encams: what a bunch of tossers (April 7, 2008)
Message to smokers from Keep Britain Tidy (December 16, 2009)
Keep Britain Tidy - my reply (December 17, 2009)
Message to Keep Britain Tidy (August 30, 2018)
Keeping Britain Tidy, part two (January 11, 2015)

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

ASH and the anti smoker industry created inequalities for smokers both in healthcare and socially. As a lifelong smoker for 52 years, I know I was treated equally for the first three decades that I smoked and I have noticed more and more the inequalities forced upon me for the sake of moaning about inequalities faced by smokers.

The anti smoker industry is awash with hypocrites.

Cigarette litter was a rare thing before we got turfed outside because we used indoor ashtrays. If the Government or anti smoker industry really wanted to address the problem of cig litter, they need only run a stpotober type campaign urging smokers to use picket ashtrays. However, if they did, they wouldn't have litter to moan about nor an opportunity to pay their salaries from tobacco industry profits.

Btw, I once tang my local council and saud I would be happy to go and litter pick cig ends and they could get other smokers on board. They never got back to me.

As I have said before, smokers are seen but not heard. If they bothered to ever talk to us, we could easily suggest ways to resolve the problems created by the over zealous anti smoker industry.