Flag planting

Has anyone else noticed that ASH has changed its Twitter handle?

Two weeks ago the account previously known as @ASH_LDN became @ASHorguk, mimicking @AshOrg, the handle used by the original Action on Smoking and Health founded in America in 1967.

Curiously the change took place shortly before the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections on May 6.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this but it seems quite a statement and I would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall when ASH Scotland and ASH Wales discovered their counterparts in England were intending to rename their Twitter handle to embrace the entire UK.

Or perhaps these outposts of Britain’s tobacco control empire are quite happy to be perceived as regional and therefore junior partners to ASH (UK).

It does mark quite a turnaround though.

In February 2011, five years after ASH (London) claimed credit for masterminding the indoor smoking ban in England, I wrote:

Have you noticed how quiet ASH has been of late?

I refer, of course, to the London-based operation. You couldn't keep ASH Scotland quiet if you bound and gagged all 27 members of staff and left them on a remote Hebridean island without electricity (or a boat).

In England, however, there has barely been a peep out of our old sparring partners.

Three years later ASH's declining influence was even more pronounced and after experiencing the sharp end of Deborah Arnott's tongue (which was unusual because we usually got on OK) I commented:

Further to my previous post, I've been thinking about the reason for Deborah Arnott's bad mood.

This is pure speculation but could it be the gradual marginalisation of ASH London within the tobacco control movement?

Think back to 2006 when Deborah and her then deputy Ian Willmore were happy to claim credit for persuading MPs to vote for a comprehensive ban on smoking in public places ('Smoke and mirrors', Guardian).

Halcyon days. Mind you, I've always wondered how that went down with other tobacco control campaigners. Perhaps they were too busy patting each other on the back to notice.

Since then - and I'm sure it's not my imagination - ASH's influence has waned. The campaign for plain packaging has been driven by Smokefree South West, Cancer Research and other bodies; the ban on smoking in cars with children was a triumph for Labour's public health spokesman Luciana Berger and the British Lung Foundation; and since the BBC's move to Salford, Forest spokesmen are far more likely to be sat alongside Andrea Crossfield of Tobacco Free Futures, formerly Smokefree North West.

The North East is ably covered by Fresh so one has to question the purpose of a 'national' London-based group whose role is duplicated by so many other organisations. Do we really need them all?

In Scotland the anti-tobacco crusade is driven by the far more dynamic ASH Scotland whose CEO, Sheila Duffy, is rarely out of the papers and probably never sleeps. (I imagine she's composing a letter to the Scotsman even as I write.)

Likewise ASH Wales - and associated campaigns such as The Filter - prove that anti-tobacco campaigns can have style and occasional flashes of humour. Compare that to the leaden, po-faced pronouncements favoured by Deborah Arnott's ASH.

Since then however another change has taken place.

In England Smokefree South West kicked the bucket, followed by Tobacco Free Futures (formerly Smokefree North West), leaving only Fresh which acts as a sort on mini-me to ASH in the north east of England.

ASH Scotland meanwhile appears a shadow of its former self, the fearsome dynamism I once commented upon being a distant memory.

I put this down partly to ASH Scotland’s reliably puritanical attitude to e-cigarettes which has had the effect of marginalising the group’s influence (on risk reduction at least) whereas ASH has manoeuvred itself centre stage.

Attending the first E-Cigarette Summit in 2013 I noted Deborah Arnott’s rather negative attitude to e-cigarettes (toxic, potentially highly addictive) and it seems to me that ASH subsequently took a strategic decision to engage far more positively on the subject or risk being left behind.

The change in attitude not only gave ASH a shot in the arm but CEO Deborah Arnott has cleverly positioned ASH as a leading player in the e-cigarette debate with ASH data often being quoted by politicians and vaping advocates.

In short, ASH would appear to have rediscovered its va-va-vroom to the extent that last year they were even coordinating opposition to the Government’s plans to reorganise England’s public health system, as I explained here.

I am surprised though by the timing of the Twitter handle change. Why, on the eve of the devolved Scottish and Welsh parliament elections, would an England-based lobby group change its handle from @ASH_LDN to the less snappy (and rather ugly) @ASHorguk unless they were trying to make a statement?

Coincidence? Probably, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

It's a bit like that time ASH stopped calling itself an anti smoking charity and suddenly started calling itself a public health organisation.

If it doesn't keep reinventing itself it would be irrelevant thanks to decades of hate incitement against smokers ensuring bigger guns are aimed at us from the very top of Governmental power.