How Philip Morris hopes to clean up Britain

Further to previous posts on the subject of cigarette litter, here's a quick update.

It was reported yesterday that 'Smokers who drop cigarette butts in the street will be made to watch video footage that shames them for harming the environment.'

According to the Telegraph:

Under the scheme, funded by tobacco firm Philip Morris with a seven-figure sum, council enforcement officers who catch people littering cigarette ends and issue them with a fine of up to £150 will give them an option of watching a 90 second-video.

The video, narrated by a celebrity, will explain why discarding cigarette butts on streets or in parks is so environmentally damaging. It will be emailed to the smoker, who will have to answer three questions to prove they have seen it. Once they have sent back their answers, they will be allowed to ask for a discount off their fine.

The suggestion that smokers are to be shamed ‘for harming the environment’ was, I hope, merely the Telegraph adding a colourful and ‘newsworthy’ twist to the story, but it's easy to see why the reporter may have jumped to that conclusion.

After all, while I don't condone littering of any sort, there is something a bit demeaning about being put on the naughty step and ordered to watch a video or be fined £150 for dropping a fag butt.

It’s one thing to educate people but shaming them to change their behaviour is often counter-productive because it breeds resentment and closes people’s minds.

Shaming people also feels like a modern day version of the old-fashioned stocks, albeit less public (unless the intention is to to ‘name’ them too).

I would further suggest that if this is a first 'offence' the £150 fine should not be reduced but dropped completely in the same way that many motorists caught speeding for the first time are given the choice of attending a speed awareness course or having three points added to their licence.

When I made that comparison on Twitter yesterday someone retorted that 'a large part of speed awareness courses is about shaming' and while that may be true I've also heard from several sources that they can be quite educational and are not overly judgemental.

The same should apply to cigarette butts. Littering is not exclusive to smokers (far from it) but campaigns like this do tend to sustain the idea that smoking is a 'dirty' habit and smokers are more 'inconsiderate' than other groups.

If however fines are going to be handed out, is it too much to ask that the income pays for more cigarette bins?

The argument that cigarette bins 'normalise' smoking won't wash. Yes, more smokers need to take responsibility for their litter, as many already do, but it needs more than threats of fines from local councils.

Smokers need help to dispose of their butts and that means more bins.

Smokers contribute a huge amount to the public purse through tobacco tax – billions more than it costs the NHS to treat smoking-related diseases, for example – so the money is there (or it was, before Covid).

If government wants to reduce the cost of cleaning up – while improving the environment – it has to work with not against the consumer.

And that’s where so many of these campaigns fail because they adopt a hectoring tone or theme that alienates the target audience.

Let’s hope Clean Up Britain (which is launching the scheme) and Philip Morris (which is funding it) learn from the worst excesses of Keep Britain Tidy, a group that never knowingly undersells its dystopian vision of environmental blight allegedly caused by smokers.

If they focus on education rather than shaming smokers I wish them well because improving the environment deserves our support. But it mustn’t become an anti-smoker witch-hunt.

PS. I'm looking forward to discovering the identity of the 'celebrity' who has been chosen to narrate the Clean Up Britain video.

He (or she) had better be squeaky clean and/or a national treasure. They must also be a smoker because this is not a job for an ex-smoker or never smoker.

Joanna Lumley, perhaps?

Comments

[Manx Gent]

If littering, rather than cigarettes, is the real problem maybe McDonalds should be sponsoring such a scheme for the rubbish around fast food joints. But then,are these schemes genuine and do they work anyway?
For example - in my town the usual healthy diet puritans grumbled about the litter around local takeaways. Town businesses ranging from small family shops to the one national chain (Costa) made a deal with the local council to provide extra bins but the problem just got worse. Why? Because (1) in most cases the bins were never provided and (2) even when they were the bins were never emptied. It further emerged that although takeaways and restaurants paid business rates for bin collections these weren't happening either.
As for the identity of the 'don't drop butts' scheme narrator - sadly, I'm guessing it will be some sanctimonious drip rather than a likeable character. If so, surely there is a case for anyone caught (and still sentenced despite the lack of bins) to appeal on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment.

[Pat Nurse]

They will shame and humiliate us. Isn't is the unwritten law that all organisations must be abusive to smokers - like always calling them stupid, selfish, unworthy pieces of shit? Isn't this what successive Governments have been pushing since our exclusion from society in 2007 despite the fact that we pay far more tax than any other consumer and get the least back for it?

We cannot depend on help from anyone. Officials just want to bully and shame. We must have our own campaign about pocket ashtrays, never mind street ashtrays. They will go, we will get blamed for it, and it means the smokerphobic council bullies get to make more money out of us in penalties and be more abusive to the smoker who uses the pavement because the street ashtray is not there.

They want their future that does not include smokers. The only way they can come close to that is by more bullying, more abuse, more consumer rights being removed, more jobs being denied to smokers and more of them being evicted from their homes.

The public has been groomed to hate us for almost 2 decades. Those who are doing the grooming are the ones who should be shamed. They are inhumane and inhuman thugs.