Alex Cunningham, Labour MP for Stockton North, was a prominent driver of the ban on smoking in cars with children.
He was also an enthusiastic supporter of plain packaging and last year he backed a bid to have health warnings printed on individual cigarettes.
This week, during a debate on the Government’s Autumn statement, the shadow minister for courts and sentencing (and vice-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health) pointedly asked:
While I am on about health inequalities, why on earth will the Government not put a levy on tobacco companies’ profits to fund a desperately needed tobacco control plan?
A clip of Cunningham addressing the House on this issue was posted on Twitter by the Cancer Research UK policy team which added the comment:
Action to tackle tobacco - the biggest cause of cancer - was missing from last week's fiscal statement.
Thanks @ACunninghamMP for stressing this 👏
In what appeared to be a coordinated act several CRUK employees then added their support. Prevention policy manager Alizee Froguel tweeted:
Thank you @ACunninghamMP for raising this. 👏 Tobacco costs our economy far more than taxes bring in.
We need more money for the services that help people quit and it’s time we make Big Tobacco foot the bill for the damage their products cause.
Prevention policy advisor Olivia Cheek wrote:
Thank you for raising this @ACunninghamMP! It’s time the polluter pays for the damage it causes!
Prevention policy trainee Kerry Pearson added:
Smoking costs society £17b in England alone, whereas taxes from tobacco only bring in £10bn for UK as a whole. It’s surely only right that the tobacco industry pay for this damage? Thanks @ACunninghamMP for raising the question!
And public affairs officer Heather Laff gushed:
Brilliant thanks @ACunninghamMP!
I’m not quite sure how those comments fit in with CRUK’s charitable and therefore non-political status but I’ll let that pass, for now.
Meanwhile, and in response to the original tweet, Forest commented:
Successive governments have to date not introduced a tobacco levy because the cost would be passed on to the consumer, many of whom are from poorer backgrounds, thereby discriminating against the less well off who already pay punitive rates of tax on tobacco.
Surprisingly this was retweeted by none other than @ACunninghamMP but before we could congratulate the Labour MP on his open-mindedness someone must have alerted him or his office because the retweet was subsequently deleted.
Fortunately, in anticipation of exactly that, I took a screen shot of the evidence. And here it is:
PS. When I saw that Cunningham had retweeted our tweet I knew it must be an error because when I invited him to take part in a Forest webinar on tobacco control in March 2021 he replied, “Sorry Simon, I don't work with organisations like Forest.”
Deduce from that what you will.