Further to my previous post, it's worth highlighting the hypocrisy of anti-smoking peer Baroness Northover.
Addressing Lord Naseby in the House of Lords on Wednesday, the Lib Dem peer commented:
Over the years, the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, has been a rather lone voice on the other side. From time to time Forest, which makes it plain that it is funded by the tobacco industry, kindly sends me its brief, no doubt inadvertently, and I recognise some familiar phrases that have just been voiced.
And yet this is the same Baroness Northover who, in a debate about smoking and pavement licences last year, told peers:
I want to take up the issue of smoking in these new spill-out areas, and I thank ASH for its assistance on this.
The gall of anti-smoking campaigners never ceases to amaze but Northover’s dig at Naseby is right up there.
She is happy to receive “assistance” from ASH, a powerful publicly-funded pressure group, but calls out a fellow peer for using “some familiar phrases” she associates with Forest, another pressure group but one she doesn’t agree with.
If that’s not rank hypocrisy I don’t know what is.
Unfortunately it's a tactic all too familiar to students of tobacco control whose aim, quite simply, is to shut down opposition.
Thankfully Baroness Fox didn’t let Baroness Northover get away with her not so subtle inference:
I also inadvertently receive communiques from ASH, the anti-smoking lobby group … and I have heard many of its lines rehearsed here as well on the other side of the argument.
I also heard anti-smoking peer Lord Rennard refer not once but twice to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health without mentioning that the cross party group (which has no official status within Parliament) is run by ASH.
Instead he told the House:
There are many ways in which we can further reduce the prevalence of smoking, and those of us who are members of the APPG on Smoking and Health set them out during the course of our debates.
And:
Last month, together with other officers of the APPG on Smoking and Health, I had the pleasure of meeting Javed Khan, chair of the Government’s independent review into smoking. He listened carefully to all our proposals, particularly on the levy, and certainly understood the necessity of funding being found.
I can't imagine who drafted those 'proposals' but I have my suspicions!