20 years ago – exit Clive, enter Deborah
Friday, March 17, 2023 at 12:00 To no-one's surprise, this week’s tobacco tax rises were welcomed by ASH. True to form, however, they still weren't satisfied.
There was a 'lack of action on disposable vapes', they complained, and a 'failure to reinstate funding to help smokers to quit and prevent youth uptake'.
They were also 'disappointed that the Chancellor did not accept our recommendation to change from RPI [Retail Price Index] to average earnings as the foundation for the tobacco tax escalator'.
I wrote about this 'recommendation' a few weeks ago and I was right, I think, to question it because, if the forecasts are right, by the end of the year inflation will have fallen below earnings growth (where it generally resides) and that, I think, is one of the reasons ASH is pressing for change.
But that's not what I wanted to write about today, although it is ASH-related.
In January 2003 it was announced that:
Clive Bates, the highly respected director of Action and Smoking on Health (ASH), is to leave the charity after five years in March to take a job as a government adviser.
It is therefore 20 years ago (this month) that Bates left ASH to join Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit and I can’t let the moment pass without comment.
According to Campaign:
The news of Bates' departure emerges in the week that tobacco advertising ends in the UK. He had campaigned tirelessly for the ban.
Indeed he had, but despite that he seemed quite a good sport, prompting me to write, a decade later:
I have always had a soft spot for Clive, even when he was director of ASH.
By all accounts some of his predecessors were humourless zealots driven by an ideological hatred of Big Tobacco and anyone who dared to challenge the new anti-smoking orthodoxy ...
Clive was never like that. Unlike many people in public health he's had a varied career outside that cosseted industry. He's not obsessed to the point of lunacy by smoking or anything else.
Most important, he has a sense of humour.
This included contributing to the 'What's My Vice?' feature in the Forest magazine Free Choice, and when he left ASH, in March 2003, we sent him flowers. It was the least we could do.
Our magnanimity (never reciprocated, alas!) continued in the Guardian, of all places:
Simon Clark, Bates's opposite number at the pro-choice, pro-smoking group Forest, describes Bates's tenure at ASH as "a breath of fresh air" after the "antics" of his predecessors.
“Funnily enough, I'd written an affectionate profile of Clive before Christmas for our new website, in which I said it was time for him to move on and that he'd make an excellent New Labour spin doctor,” says Clark. “I shall now have to rewrite it.”
But enough about Bates, who is now a saintly ambassador for tobacco harm reduction (vaping in particular). What about his successor?
Deborah Arnott was 48 when she replaced Clive as director of ASH, so you do the maths. I'm not being ageist (I'm 64 myself!) but it does beg the question: could retirement be looming for this long-serving titan of tobacco control?
I'm sure Deborah would love to be at the helm if and when England is officially designated 'smoke free', but the 2030 target is seven years away, added to which the chances of achieving a smoking rate of five per cent or less, even by then, is optimistic.
I'm wondering therefore if the Government's new Tobacco Control Plan, to be announced "in the coming weeks", could turn out to be Deborah’s swan song.
For years the holy grail for Arnott and ASH has been the imposition of a ‘polluter pays’ levy on the tobacco industry with a view to funding more smoking cessation services and anti-smoking initiatives.
Figures mentioned have ranged from £105m to £700m annually, which would keep a whole new generation of tobacco control campaigners in work for years to come.
Like Bates and the ban on tobacco advertising, Deborah has campaigned tirelessly for a tobacco levy so I imagine that’s the principal legacy she is hoping to leave before she departs, stage left.
Another legacy she may be hoping to leave is plain packaging - and I’m not talking about tobacco, which is in the bag already, but e-cigarettes.
Yes, ASH wants all vapes (not just the disposable kind) to be sold in standardised packaging, just like tobacco. (Chris Snowdon explains all here: 'Sweet Jesus, not plain packaging again!'.)
To be clear, I’ve no reason to suppose Arnott's retirement is imminent, but it didn't go unnoticed that in 2021 Hazel Cheeseman stepped up from director of policy to deputy chief executive.
I may be wrong but I don’t recall ASH ever having a deputy CEO (or deputy director) before, so it wouldn’t surprise me if she is being lined up for the top job when Deborah does call it a day.
Anyway, I'll write a more fulsome 'tribute' in May, which I think marks the 20th anniversary of her long reign.
After 20 years on the frontline of the war on tobacco she deserves no less!
Reader Comments (4)
Oh please don't. My stomach couldn't handle such vomit inducing tributes. No one should be congratulated for working to ensure social isolation and humiliation for targeted groups of people who do not have the same strength or backing to defend themselves from attacks by professional activists who make their living by demanding the poor consumer pays more.
There is absolutely nothing charitable about her work to attack smokers at every opportunity. I do not buy into the idea that her organisation attacks smoking and not smokers when smokers smoke and one cannot exist without the other.
Why not celebrate someone who has worked hard for 20 years trying to promote freedom, social inclusion and tolerance rather than celebrate someone who has worked tirelessly for oppression, social exclusion and intolerance?
You haven’t read my ‘tribute’ yet, Pat! However, while I deplore many of the outcomes of ASH’s activism, I genuinely don’t think there is malice aforethought. I believe they are motivated by good intentions (like the temperance movement) but we see life (and smoking) in very different ways. That doesn’t mean we can’t be civil to one another even though I fundamentally oppose what she and ASH stand for.
Don't hate the smoker
Deborah Arnott
"A new advertising campaign currently being aired on TV illustrates the truth - that smokers are literally "hooked" on tobacco. The sickening images of smokers being dragged along by giant fish hooks illustrates the strength of nicotine addiction which can be as difficult to break as heroin or crack cocaine."
https://web.archive.org/web/20130716103817/http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jan/08/post877
She wasn't expecting a generation of young vapers to appear in their place because it was supposed to be so much safer
Full marks for way overdoing it Deborah!
Life was freer and happier, when people were allowed to think for themselves.
If I am treated with civility, I respond with civility. However, ASH has caused me nothing but misery and if that is the unintended consequences of their so called good intentions, then forgive for not feeling the love.
No smoker ever wanted to impose their smoke on others and we know that this issue could have been dealt with by promoting and supporting tolerance and consideration, choice and segregation. ASH wanted nothing more than total intolerance of smokers and to achieve it they have put out a constant stream of scaremongering about smokers and smoking over decades and through the generations to ensure smokers are denied any tolerance or any right to exist in society with compassion.
All of this from the start has been to impose a future without smokers but why should this arrogant organisation believe it has any right to impose its way of life and preferences on others? No one minds education about harms associated with consumer products, which is a good thing, but indoctrination about the character and nature of consumers of those products is quite something else.
My life went from one of equality in all aspects to one of inequality over the decades as I began to be seen less like a person or fellow human being to one being judged prejudicially as a lifestyle and no where has this had a more adverse effect than in healthcare where everyone deserves to be treated equally and with respect and compassion - or for some, the workplace where paying smokers less based on an assumption that they do not work as hard is being accepted as a good thing.
In my honest opinion whatever their intention, ASH has done nothing for the public good but promote division, intolerance, inequality, poverty, and exclusion and rather than take a step back to evaluate whether their stance has achieved good they still insist on more demonisation and stigmatisation of smokers and exclusion from civil society while giving themselves a hefty pat on the back.
That's how I feel. I despise ASH with a passion.