Message to ASH Wales? Grow up

Bit late to this but it’s worth mentioning because it amuses me when tobacco control activists throw their toys out of the pram.

The most recent example took place two weeks ago when a Welsh Conservative member of the Senedd sponsored a tobacco-related event in the parliament building.

Hosted by Darren Millar, the MS for Clwyd West, the ‘Tackling Illicit Tobacco Sales in Wales’ event was exactly what it said on the tin.

What made it controversial in some people’s eyes - although to say their outrage was manufactured would be an understatement - was the fact that it featured a presentation by the tobacco company JTI.

Now, anyone who knows anything about JTI will confirm that the company has been running campaigns against illicit trade for years. (Google ‘JTI, illicit trade’ for evidence.)

In Wales alone the company has been actively fighting illicit trade for some time so an event like this was hardly a surprise.

In 2018, for example, it was reported that:

An undercover operation by JTI in South Wales has revealed the prevalence of the illicit trade in the area, with 32% of stores visited found to be selling illegal tobacco.

Four years earlier, in 2014, the company partnered with the South Wales Argus in a test-purchasing investigation into illegal tobacco products.

JTI (and other tobacco companies) campaign against illicit trade because it costs them and legitimate retailers a significant amount of money in lost sales. It also devalues their brands.

Illicit trade also costs government billions of pounds in lost revenue (tax) so there is an obvious incentive for both sides to work together to limit these losses - or there should be, if politics doesn’t get in the way.

However, in an open letter to members of the Senedd, ASH Wales urged them to boycott the event.

(Note: it had to be an open letter because a private letter to Senedd members would not have generated the headlines ASH Wales were after. And where’s the PR in that?)

Claiming that Article 5.3 of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) ‘requires governments to take measures to protect health policy “from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry”,’ the group argued that ‘the event organised by JTI put these measures at risk’.

Seriously?

Of course Article 5.3 has long been deliberately misinterpreted by anti-smoking campaigners as a reason why politicians and government officials shouldn't engage with the tobacco industry and this is yet another example of their desperate urge to control what elected parliamentarians and government officials can and cannot do.

Personally I think our elected representatives are old enough to think for themselves without being lectured by activists more suited to student politics.

In Westminster Treasury officials meet industry representatives to discuss tax-related issues, and why wouldn’t they? Surely we can be grown up about these things?

Unfortunately ASH Wales, like the tobacco control industry in general, takes a more idealistic - bordering on infantile - approach to government relations with the tobacco industry.

Interestingly, however, in the same press release in which they urged Senedd members to boycott the JTI event, ASH Wales also declared:

ASH Wales will be attending the event at 10:30-2pm, 17/11/21. If you would like to cover this item for broadcast, please contact xx on the above number.

In other words, do as we say not as we do.

Their reason for attending an event they didn’t want the country’s elected representatives to go to is that they wanted to ask JTI some questions, which begs this question.

If it’s OK for tobacco control campaigners to attend a meeting with a tobacco company in order to ask questions, why can’t members of the Senedd attend the same event and ask their own questions directly?

I suspect that ASH Wales’ principal intention was not merely to ask questions (although that was part of the plan) but to disrupt the meeting in a manner that would look good on TV, hence the invitation to the media ‘to cover this item for broadcast’.

In other words, this was a PR stunt.

Which brings us to the funniest part of the story because not only was the event attended by almost every Welsh Conservative member of the Senedd - who no doubt found the ‘boycott’ letter as silly as we did - the ASH Wales delegation was denied entry and had to stage their ‘protest’, such as it was, on the steps outside the parliament building.

Adding insult to injury, the media - to the best of my knowledge - chose not to cover their childish antics.

Talking of which, it reminded me that a few years ago I criticised another campaign run by ASH Wales called The Filter.

Described as Wales' only dedicated youth stop smoking service, The Filter's Twitter account no longer exists so none of their occasionally crass and infantile tweets (or retweets) have survived but here’s one example:

With that and their latest stunt in mind it amazes me that anyone takes ASH Wales seriously. Incredibly however the group continues to be bankrolled by the taxpayer thanks to the generosity of the Welsh Government which is more than happy to contribute hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money annually to keep the ship afloat.

In fact, without annual injections of taxpayers’ money ASH Wales wouldn’t exist so bear that in mind the next time you hear them boast of being ‘the leading organisation working for a smokefree Wales via strong tobacco control policy and country-wide campaigns’.

Predictably their initial call for members of the Senadd to boycott the JTI event did get some coverage and even more predictably it was via Wales Online whose reporter, it seems, didn’t bother to ask the company for a response, preferring instead to quote at length John Griffiths MS, chair of the Senedd smoking and health cross party group, another opponent of the meeting.

According to Griffiths, the event “undermined” Wales’ strong public health message on smoking and also the ambitions for a smoke free Wales by 2030.

I would argue it did exactly the opposite. After all, if the Welsh Government is unable to significantly reduce or eliminate illicit trade, how is it ever going to achieve a ‘smoke-free’ Wales?

And if you want to eliminate illicit trade surely you have to work with the very companies whose brands and products are being ripped off by criminal gangs?

In addition a ‘strong public health message’ ought to include a warning that counterfeit cigarettes are potentially more of a risk than the legally approved version because who knows what’s in them?

Of course those are all sensitive issues for tobacco control campaigners because even the most fanatical anti-smoking zealot would be hard-pressed to deny that punitive taxation (which they support and want to increase) fuels illicit trade.

The Treasury knows this which is why successive chancellors have rejected calls to raise the tobacco escalator on cigarettes above inflation plus two per cent to inflation plus five per cent or higher, as demanded by anti-smoking campaigners.

Meanwhile other groups that ‘backed the boycott’ of the illicit trade event included the Royal College of Physicians, Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation Partnership.

Shame on them and shame on ASH Wales, a group whose sense of entitlement would be funny if it wasn’t underwritten with large amounts of public money.

So instead of calling for boycotts of perfectly legitimate meetings (that they then announce they are going to attend before complaining when they are refused entry!) perhaps they should just … grow up.

See also: Call for clampdown on illegal tobacco trade in Wales (Darren Millar)

PS. Interestingly, ASH Wales’ control freakery extends to asking the media to refer to them as a ‘tobacco control campaign group’.

I’m not sure why they feel to need to be so specific (I would prefix it with the words ‘taxpayer-funded’) but at least it’s better than ‘health charity’, the term often used to describe their counterparts in London when ‘anti-smoking lobby group’ would be a more accurate description.

Update: The video ‘ASH Wales protest against JTI event at the Senedd’, posted on November 18, currently has ten views, several of which I am responsible for.