None of the above

Amazon has sent me an email featuring half a dozen books ‘we think you might like’.

Worryingly, the list includes titles by arch Remainers Ian Dunt (‘How Westminster Works … and Why It Doesn’t’), Alastair Campbell ('But What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong and How You Can Help Fix It'), and Chris Bryant ('Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament – and How To Do It').

Goodness knows why the algorithm thinks I might like them but if anyone wants to buy me a book for Christmas, here's a hint ... none of the above.

Christmas in Cambridge

For years my wife has ordered the majority of her Christmas shopping, presents included, online.

I’ve generally rejected this approach, preferring the traditional dash round the shops in the final days before Christmas.

One reason is that smaller items, if pushed through our letter box by the postman or delivery driver, are vulnerable to attack by the dog who reacts as if the house has been invaded by enemy aliens.

(If we are invaded by aliens, or burglars, this might be useful, but at the moment it’s just annoying.)

I also like the instant gratification of buying stuff and taking it home with me rather than waiting several days for it to be delivered, although Amazon Prime’s next day delivery service is the next best thing and a lot less time-consuming.

It's true too that there's often more choice online. My other excuse however is that I quite enjoy pottering around town and city centres in the days before Christmas.

Not the shops, obviously, which are hellishly busy unless you get in very early, but the streets and markets.

If it’s not raining I enjoy the atmosphere - the lights and decorations - and what I usually do, after a short walk, is find a nice coffee shop where I can read the paper or watch the world go by for an hour or two.

Cambridge, where Forest is still based (we moved here in 2005 after our London office became ridiculously expensive), is one of England’s more attractive towns (in the centre at least) but even Peterborough, which is equidistant from where I live, has some appeal at Christmas.

It doesn’t have a great reputation but people forget that before the Sixties, when it started to expand, Peterborough was a relatively small town dominated by an historic cathedral off the main square.

Unfortunately its 20th century equivalent - the large John Lewis store in the main shopping centre - has now closed, so that’s a major disincentive to go there to shop, especially when the Cambridge store is still open.

Anyway, I’ve finally come round to my wife’s way of thinking and this year I’ve ordered almost everything - bar the turkey, which we get from a local butcher - online.

Most if not all items have been delivered within two or three days and, I have to say, I’m feeling far less stressed than usual.

The dog almost got his teeth into one package that was pushed through the letterbox despite his very obvious barking on the other side, but I managed to wrestle it off him before any serious damage was done.

Thankfully most items are too big to go through the letterbox but it does mean regular trips to the front door when delivery men come a-knocking, which can be awkward if you’re in the middle of a Zoom or Teams meeting.

What I am missing, though, is the sound of a live Christmas choir or even Roy Wood belting out ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ over an in-store audio system.

I also miss the Christmas lights so tomorrow I intend to spend the morning in Cambridge getting into the festive spirit.

I’ll begin with coffee and a bun in Fitzbillies. After that I’ll take a stroll round the open air market (above).

Weather permitting, I shall then wander around some of the college grounds, if they're open to visitors. (Days and times vary.)

Thereafter, I may pop in to Fopp, the small independent record store I wrote about in 2007 when it was one of a handful of Fopp shops that survived a major cull.

If I have time, I may also visit the cigar shop where, a few years ago, I was invited by the Cambridge University Conservative Association to give a short talk.

Finally, I'll visit one of the small independent bookshops where I intend to buy something for myself.

Cambridge - Town & Gown is a remarkable collection of photographs that were originally posted on a website called A Cambridge Diary.

It featured a new portrait taken every day for 13 years, but I only stumbled upon it quite recently.

Needless to say, photographer Martin Bond ended his daily challenge almost as soon as I started following him, but he's created an archive of over 5,000 pictures, which is hugely impressive.

Funnily enough, we’ve lived near Cambridge for 24 years but we’ve never attended the famous Christmas carol service at King's College Chapel, although my wife listens to it religiously (no pun intended) on the BBC every year.

As it happens, there are two services. The first, broadcast by BBC2 on Christmas Eve, is recorded in the middle of December and is restricted to members of the college.

The second, on Christmas Eve but broadcast on Radio 4 on Christmas Day, is free and open to members of the public if you're willing to queue for hours, which I'm not.

Instead, when the children were younger, we would take them to the carol concert at Ely Cathedral, 17 miles north of Cambridge. It's a wonderful building but impossible to heat and therefore very cold at this time of year.

Thank goodness, then, for Pizza Express and mulled wine.

Vaping - the two faces of ASH

According to MailOnline:

Demonising vaping is prompting young people to switch to tobacco as mixed messaging suggests they are equally as dangerous, experts warn

Deborah Arnott, CEO of ASH, told the paper:

“All the negative press around vaping hasn’t helped,” she said. “Suggestions that vapes need to be in plain packaging, branded with health warnings and kept out of sight, like tobacco, just give the impression that both are equally harmful when that’s not the case.”

That’s all well and good.

In March, however, responding to a study that found that ‘removing bright colours, pictures and fancy lettering from packaging made youngsters less likely to be attracted to vaping, but did not deter adults who wanted to use vapes to quit cigarettes’, Arnott took a different view:

“The Government,” she said, “should take note and commit to implementing standardised packaging for vapes and vaping products without delay.”

A few months later, responding to another study, her deputy Hazel Cheeseman declared:

“Quantifying the impact on children of the growing promotion of vapes is crucial to determine the scale of the problem and how it can be best addressed. This analysis shows that in-store promotion has the biggest impact, which is why ASH is advocating that promotion and display of e-cigarettes in shops should be prohibited, as should the child-friendly packaging and labelling of vapes.”

So, if I’ve got this right, the CEO of ASH believes that calling for vapes to be sold “in plain packaging … and kept out of sight, like tobacco” would “give the impression that both are equally harmful when that’s not the case.”

Yet she and the group’s deputy CEO have, in the last eight months, urged the Government to (a) ban the promotion and display of e-cigarettes in shops, and (b) introduce standardised packaging for vapes, “without delay”.

Confused? Me too.

See also: With friends like these (a gentle reminder)

Smoking costs UK economy £50bn a year says vaping industry, quoting ASH

While The Times has been busy publishing a series of attacks on Big Tobacco and vaping, I was amused to see the vaping industry parrot ASH concerning the cost of smoking to the economy.

According to a statement by the UKVIA on LinkedIn:

Smoking now costs the UK economy £50bn a year. Coupled with the emotional cost to the 76,000 families who lose a loved one every year, the public health role of vapes, proven as the most effective way for smokers to quit, is increasingly critical.

The £50bn figure comes from a press release issued by ASH on December 6, the day the consultation on smoking and vaping legislation closed.

According to ASH:

Smoking costs England £49.2 billion each year in lost productivity and service costs, plus an additional £25.9 billion lost quality adjusted life years due to premature death from smoking.

The claim got very little coverage so kudos to the UKVIA for spreading the word. (I’m kidding. You’d have to be extremely gullible to believe such rubbish, so let’s put it down to self-interest.)

Contemplating those figures does however make me nostalgic for the days when treating smoking-related diseases was said to cost the NHS a mere £800,000 a year.

That sum later jumped to £1.5bn, then £2.5bn, before peaking at £2.7bn. Today ASH says it’s £2.2bn, although no-one really knows because it’s all based on estimates and calculations, and blaming smoking ignores the fact that most ‘smoking-related’ diseases are multifactorial.

So how did we get from there to the figure of £50bn?

You can probably trace it back to the fact that whenever ASH raised the cost of smoking to the NHS, opponents were able to point out that smokers actually contributed £10bn to the economy (£12bn if you included VAT) through tobacco duty so, economically at least, they were a net benefit.

And that’s how the argument played out for many years. It got to the stage where I was delighted if the subject was raised in interviews because we always won that particular argument. The receipts were clear and on our side.

To combat this, ASH eventually moved the goalposts and argued that the true cost of smoking to the country was, in fact, £12bn a year.

But it didn’t end there.

Despite falling smoking rates, in January 2022 it was announced that the cost of smoking to the economy had risen by £5bn to £17bn.

This year we hit peak absurdity when a report claimed that the total cost of smoking to the UK economy in 2022 was just over £173 billion!!

As I wrote here (February 10):

This absurdly inflated figure is broken down as follows:

1. Productivity costs. These total just under £31 billion. The largest single component is reduced output due to expenditure on tobacco products compared to other goods and services, amounting to just under £14 billion. Reduced employment for smokers compared to non-smokers, and reduced earnings for working smokers compared to non-smokers, both account for between £7 billion and £8 billion of reduced productivity.

2. Service costs. These total just over £18.6 billion. The additional cost of informal care in the social sector is the largest single component of service costs at just over £9 billion, followed by the cost of additional unmet need for social care services at just over £5.7 billion, and the cost of smoking to the NHS at £2.2 billion.

3. Cost of early deaths from smoking. This is the largest single component of costs at just under £124 billion.

Curiously, the link to the report on the ASH website no longer works, so we are left with the most recent claim that ‘smoking now costs the UK economy £50bn a year’.

Which is it? £14bn, £17bn, £50bn, or £173bn?

Or none of the above?

I’m confused, but as the former chairman of Forest, the late Lord Harris of High Cross, once wrote:

If laymen dare to question any of these guesstimates and projections, the sophisticated statisticians take refuge behind their computers which have been heavily programmed to incorporate a variety of elaborate assumptions and statistical techniques.

And since researchers have discovered that the bigger the reported risk the better the chance of attracting funding and getting their results published (known in the trade as ‘publication bias’), they have exerted much ingenuity in what is known as ‘data dredging’ – that is, torturing the statistics until they confess!

The hilarious thing is not that the UKVIA has fallen for this claptrap (I suspect they know it’s nonsense) but they must think there’s some benefit in recycling it.

Either way, I fear it will end in tears.

How soon, for example, before the cost of vaping to society is being similarly assessed and exaggerated by ASH and other nicotine control groups? (You could say the process has started already, albeit the current focus is on schools, not society at large.)

Cherry-picking figures that play to the Government’s anti-smoking agenda is going to look pretty foolish when those same sources start calculating the alleged cost of vaping, as they undoubtedly will, sooner or later.

Meanwhile it was reported by The Times this week that the All Party Parliamentary Group for Vaping, formerly the APPG for E-Cigarettes, has apparently closed down after chairman Mark Pawsey decided he was unable to commit any further time to the role, and no-one else wanted to do it.

That’s the spirit!

Are young people quietly rebelling against the anti-smoking killjoys?

Nigel Farage, 59, wasn't the only smoker among the cast of I'm A Celebrity 2023.

According to the Independent:

After surviving 23 days deprived of food, hot showers and a flushable toilet, Sam Thompson emerged from the I’m a Celebrity jungle desperate for one thing … a drag on a cigarette.

The 31-year-old Made in Chelsea star puffed away at the show’s wrap party and joined a long list of cool kids who love to light up.

Interestingly, the article – Why smoking is back in fashion for Generation Z – coincides with the publication of a study this week that suggests that 'more young people in England took up smoking during the pandemic, stagnating the years-long decline among 18 to 24-year-olds'.

At 31, Thompson is a Millennial rather than Gen Z, but he's arguably still indicative of something I wrote as part of my recent Letter on Liberty, 'Freedom: Up In Smoke?'.

Commenting on young people smoking, I quoted a story recorded by a student at Trinity College, Dublin:

Walking into campus through the Arts Block one morning, I was confronted by a screen declaring Trinity a ‘tobacco-free campus’. Not only was I surprised, having not heard this once in my six months of studying here, but my confusion was further justified once I walked past the arts block and saw the revolving cast of smokers standing outside. Trinity may declare itself tobacco free, but it is certainly not in practice.

Meanwhile, I added:

The Tab Student Smoking Survey 2021 revealed that ‘52 per cent of students who took our survey say they smoke cigarettes’. That surprised me, but one explanation (other than the fact that it was a self-selecting poll) may be that many students are social smokers - they can’t afford to be heavy smokers, nor are they addicted to smoking. Despite the health concerns about smoking … there remains a quiet rebellion among the young against the killjoys who want to dictate how we live our lives.

When I wrote that back in July I also had in mind some recent experiences of my own. For example, when I spoke at a small event at Edinburgh University in April, my host, an undergraduate, insisted that smoking is far from uncommon among students.

Others, also in their early twenties, have said pretty much the same thing to me, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes too.

I'm not suggesting, as the Independent would have us believe, that 'smoking is back in fashion for Generation Z', but I do think that the more the Government and the humourless anti-smoking industry continues with its war on smoking, the cooler it will be to smoke.

That's just human nature, and it's why the generational ban on the sale of tobacco will almost certainly prove counter-productive.

Ban the sale of tobacco to new generations of adults and smoking will instantly gain the allure of forbidden fruit.

The Government clearly hasn't thought this through but as Ella Whelan, editor of Letters on Liberty, said at our recent Nanny State of the Nation event:

"I think Rishi Sunak might not have met many young people ... I also know that young people haven't lost their rebellious spirit."

I think she’s right. And if it’s true (stats vary) that the decline in smoking rates among young adults has stalled, banning the sale of tobacco to that same demographic could be the most provocative thing any government could do to a generation that doesn’t expect or wish to be told how to live their lives.

Update: Chris Snowdon has commented on the smoking rate story here. I think he’s sceptical.

My response to the apparent contradiction between smoking rates flatlining and tobacco sales falling during the same period is that the cost of cigarettes and hand rolled tobacco may be forcing smokers to purchase less, legally at least.

Also, and this is pure speculation on my part, but my guess is that many smokers in their twenties are not habitual smokers but occasional social smokers.

The combination of the two would therefore explain what to Chris seems an inconsistent anomaly.

Ultimately, though, what matters is that adults of all ages have the right to purchase tobacco if they want to. Whether smoking rates are going up, in decline, or flatlining, is irrelevant.

All you can be sure of is that the tobacco control industry will spin any study to its advantage. On that I do agree with Chris.

Below: Ella Whelan speaking last month

BAT and the World Vapers Alliance

The lead story in The Times today is something we rarely see nowadays, an in-depth report of an ‘exclusive’ investigation.

No surprises, however, for guessing that it concerns the tobacco industry and e-cigarettes, and has been published at the exact moment the Government is considering its next move on smoking and vaping. Coincidence?

The headlines – ‘Pro-vaping campaign funded by Big Tobacco’ (print edition) and ‘Revealed: how tobacco giants are bankrolling secret pro-vaping campaign’ (digital edition) – speak for themselves.

I’m not going to address every ‘revelation’, most of which I was already aware of, but the 'news' that British American Tobacco (BAT) has funded ‘a “grassroots” campaign that presented itself as the voice of ordinary vapers’ won’t come as a surprise to readers of this blog because I wrote about it almost two years ago, and I wasn’t even the first to do so.

Having written about the World Vapers Alliance twice in 2021 (and not in glowing terms), in January 2022 I commented:

If the WVA stuck to advocating vaping as a safer alternative to smoking I would have no objection to the [Back Vaping Beat Smoking] initiative. However the campaign – with its boxing-related imagery – oversteps the line, as I explained here (The gloves are off).

I then added:

When I published that post I had no idea that BAT was funding the project, although according to Vaping360.com it has been an open secret among members of the vaping community for some time.

I then linked to the Vaping360.com website where it read:

A Daily Beast story published last weekend tells the story of the worst-kept secret in vaping - that British American Tobacco is behind the World Vapers’ Alliance, a supposed grassroots vaping advocacy group.

See: Astroturf vaping group exposed (for the second time)

In other words, a story about BAT and the WVA isn’t a Times’ exclusive at all because the information was already out there, courtesy of the Daily Beast, Vaping360.com, and even this blog.

Nevertheless, it does give me an opportunity to repeat the point I made in that January 2022 blog post when I wrote:

It would be hypocritical of me to criticise the WVA for accepting tobacco money (so I won't) but I'm surprised BAT didn't insist on complete transparency because that's the arrangement we've always had with the tobacco companies that support Forest.

In my experience it's the best policy because if you try to keep your corporate donors secret the outcome is endless questions and occasional investigations that are potentially far more damaging to the integrity and credibility of your campaign. The truth will come out eventually so why not be upfront and open about it?

In Forest's case the only people who bang on about our funding are spokesmen for ASH who seem to have it drilled into their heads, ready to unleash as soon as they open their mouths on air, but it's a non-story because we've never hidden it.

See: Campaign funding - why transparency is the best policy

I still don’t understand the WVA’s lack of candour. When Forest received funding from BAT we were completely open about it and the information appeared at the bottom of every page on our website.

Whether you wish to believe the additional line, ‘The views expressed on this or any other Forest-affiliated website are those of Forest alone’, is up to you, but we have never hidden or disguised the principal sources of our funding.

In fact, I have always believed we are stronger and more credible for being open and frank about it. Either way, I'm pretty certain the 'news' wouldn’t feature as part of a front page ‘exclusive’.

Farewell, Mark Drakeford

Mark Drakeford has announced he will step down as first minister of Wales in March.

It wasn't unexpected. He signalled some time ago that he would resign around the mid point of the current Welsh parliament and he's kept his word.

However, while I have enormous sympathy for someone whose wife died suddenly (in January this year), I can't say I am sorry to see him go.

Thankfully, talk of banning smoking outside pubs and in town centres in Wales, first proposed by Drakeford in 2018, appeared to be derailed by Covid and other more pressing issues, but you could never be sure it was off the agenda as long as he remained in office.

My worry, as I wrote at the time, was that:

Tobacco control is almost a nationalised industry in Wales and the Welsh media make little or no effort to provide any sort of balance in their reports.

If you live in other parts of the UK what happens in Wales also tends to go under the radar, which in this instance would be a huge mistake.

If Wales adopts Drakeford’s proposal the policy will almost certainly be considered by the Scottish government. Even in England there will be some local authorities who want to give it a go.

Plans to extend the smoking ban to outdoor areas may have been thwarted, or postponed, but you didn't have to look far to find further evidence of Drakeford's nannying – some might call it authoritarian – streak.

This, after all, was the man who in 2016 came within one vote of banning the use of e-cigarettes in enclosed public places in Wales. Six years later he was still bemoaning it (First Minister Mark Drakeford says failing to push through vaping bill is one of his biggest regrets).

However, it's only two months since he suggested that vapes should be available on prescription only, and who can forget it was his government that recently introduced a 20mph speed limit in every town and village in the country.

We're not off the hook yet, though, because one of the two 'early front runners' to replace him is Vaughan Gething, the former minister for health in Wales, of whom I wrote in July 2020:

We already knew that minister for health Vaughan Gething wanted to extend the smoking ban to outdoor areas in Wales because he said so in a written statement on June 24:

"I remain committed to making more of Wales’ public spaces smoke free and intend to progress work in the next Senedd term to extend the smoking ban to outdoor areas of cafes and restaurants and city and town centres."

If I'm honest I sensed that Gething – who is currently minister for the economy – wasn't in the same mould as Drakeford when it came to banning things, but you can never tell.

Perhaps he was just doing his master's bidding but politicians, as we have discovered, love to leave a legacy and smokers are an easy target.

Devolved governments also have limited powers, and tackling smoking is one of few areas where they can 'make a difference', especially if it's in the name of health.

In short, it's far too early to rejoice at the resignation of one first minister when we don't know who his successor is, or what their agenda might be.

My advice? Watch this space.

Monday mourning

This morning I tweeted a link to a report that appeared on the BBC News website overnight.

Māori mourn loss of hard-won smoking reform

If anyone is in mourning, however, it’s the BBC.

When it was reported, in December 2021, that the Labour government in New Zealand wanted to ban the sale of tobacco to anyone born after 2008, I noted that:

Forest’s reaction was reported by the digital Daily Express and MailOnline and I was also interviewed by Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk Radio, Patrick Christys and Mercy Muroki on GB News, and Darren Adam on LBC.

The glaring omission on that list is the BBC.

See: Balance and the BBC (Taking Liberties)

Two weeks ago, when the incoming centre-right government in New Zealand announced that, as part of the new coalition agreement, it would repeal the policy, the BBC sniffily ignored the news for three whole days.

When the BBC News website finally got round to acknowledging the story, it led with the views of ‘health experts’ - who were inevitably incensed by the decision - and ignored the many voices who supported it.

See: New Zealand smoking ban: Health experts criticise new government's shock reversal (BBC News)

This is important because what’s happening in New Zealand, where the idea for a generational sales ban originated, is clearly of enormous relevance to the UK where the Government has only recently closed a public consultation on the issue.

Now, two weeks later, the BBC is using the highly emotive word ‘mourn’ to describe the reaction of an entire race of people, many of whom may actually welcome the incoming government’s more liberal approach to tobacco control.

What is missing, once again, is any semblance of balance, but I’m not sure the BBC cares anymore.

Here, for example, is what I wrote in 2021 when Forest took Five Live presenter Nihal Arthanayake to task for interviewing only Hazel Cheeseman of ASH when the New Zealand ban was first announced:

What is depressing is that a leading presenter on a national BBC radio station appears to have set himself up as judge and jury on smoking and won’t acknowledge that a discussion on the subject is rather more complicated and nuanced that the bald statement that 'around 78,000 people in the UK die from smoking'.

It’s as if he has listened to one side (the prosecution) and decided that whatever case the defence might have it’s not worth listening to because the prosecution has already won the argument.

Indeed, if I understand him correctly (he may wish to correct me), Arthanayake seems to think that the health risks of smoking are so great that they outweigh any debate or discussion that might (shock, horror) offer a more positive/alternative view of smoking.

As readers know, Forest has never encouraged anyone to start smoking and we fully acknowledge the health risks associated with the habit.

Nevertheless we cling to the old-fashioned view that, in a liberal and mature society, the ability to make informed choices and take responsibility for our own health - especially when it involves known risk factors such as diet, alcohol and combustible tobacco - are principles worth fighting for, and discussing.

I’m not sure the BBC agrees, which is annoying because they are happy to demand from millions of people an annual licence fee, but they seem increasingly unwilling to broadcast or publish views that are entirely mainstream and, in this instance, supported by 58 per cent of the adult population in Britain.