We'll meat again

While I was waiting to do a radio interview this morning I listened to the Five Live phone-in with Nicky Campbell.

Today's subject had something to do with meat (should we be eating less of it?).

According to one caller – a vegan – we don't have to eat meat, we have a choice, just as rapists have a choice to, er, not rape.

This may be true but the analogy was all wrong. In a split second she lost both credibility and the sympathy of many a listener because it was such an extreme thing to say.

Moments earlier Campbell had pressed her on her claim to be an "international athlete".

I paraphrase, but her answer was, "I ran for Scotland at cross-country 30 years ago."

She then added, "And I'm taking part in the Vegan 15 Peaks Challenge."

Is that just for vegans, someone (possibly Campbell) asked?

Again I paraphrase, but I think she said, "Yes, or you can be a vegan for a day."

So, you could win the Vegan 15 Peaks Challenge – which I imagine is a celebration of all things vegan – having been a vegan for less than 24 hours.

The next day, trophy in hand, you could be munching on a Big Mac or enjoying steak tartare.

You couldn't make it up.

PS. I Googled 'Vegan 15 Peaks Challenge' but I could only find a website for Vegan 15 Peaks Challenge 2010. No mention of subsequent events.

It's worth a look, though.

Smoking and the media: if you think it's child's play, give it a go

The Government has launched a new campaign to remind smokers of the "dangers of second-hand smoke".

Second-hand smoke, we are told, can cause middle ear infections (glue ear), asthma and even cot death.

Forewarned, Forest issued a press release yesterday afternoon. It will go down badly with those who want us to deny that smoking poses any risk to anyone - including smokers - but I don't care.

This is the real world and I'm getting a little bored with people who say Forest doesn't represent smokers because we (a) acknowledge there are health risks associated with smoking or (b) make comments such as "Everyone knows there are health risks associated with smoking".

It's true we don't represent the head-in-the-sand smoker who wants to party like it's 1959.

Nor do we represent the smoker who wants to quit and is perpetually apologising for his "disgusting" habit.

Forest, I like to think, represents the middle ground, a broad church that includes millions of adults who choose to smoke in full knowledge of the health risks (some of which are exaggerated) yet are considerate to those around them, especially children, accepting the need for some restrictions on where they can light up.

Anyway, this is our response to the Government's latest campaign:

A consumer group has accused public health campaigners of "unwarranted scaremongering" after the government launched a campaign to highlight the "hidden dangers of smoking in homes and cars".

Simon Clark, director of the smokers' group Forest, said:

"No sensible person would expose children to tobacco smoke in a small room or car, but to suggest that homes and cars should be entirely smoke free is, we believe, unwarranted scaremongering.

"In our view the risks of secondhand smoke are being exaggerated to meet the demands of a public health industry that won't rest until smoking has been banned in all public and private spaces.

"It's a deeply illiberal agenda that has no place in a free society.

"If the government is so concerned about people smoking at home or in their own cars they should amend the smoking ban so pubs and clubs can offer separate smoking rooms for adults who want to smoke.

"Education is better than coercion but government needs to offer smokers a carrot as well."

On several radio stations this morning I went a little further. I repeated our position that we do not condone smoking in a small enclosed space with children present but are strongly opposed to legislation.

I said I was sceptical about some of the information that is being bandied about, pointing out that glue ear – to take one example – is not exclusive to children of smokers. Far from it. My own son had it and he was never exposed to tobacco smoke as a child.

Likewise cot death and asthma. The number of asthma sufferers, as we know, has tripled in recent decades while the percentage of smokers has halved. Go figure.

I also asked listeners to put things in perspective. In the Fifties and early Sixties, when a majority of adults smoked, millions of children were exposed to cigarette smoke every day in their homes and cars.

Bizarrely, if you believe every piece of anti-smoking propaganda, that generation is living longer than ever before (ie in the history of mankind). I'm not suggesting there is a correlation, I hastened to add, but we should avoid scaremongering and exaggerating the effects of second-hand smoke to the extent that even smoking outside the back door is considered unacceptable.

Anyway, in a hostile political and media environment, smoking and health (especially where children are involved) is not the easiest subject to handle without being portrayed as a flat Earther or a swivel-eyed loon.

If anyone thinks they can do better I invite them to have a go - beginning with their local radio station - instead of whinging on the sidelines.

Good luck.

PS. This morning I was on BBC Radio Newcastle, BBC Radio Tees, BBC Radio Sheffield and BBC Radio Devon. This afternoon I'll be on BBC Radio WM (at 4.35).

Update: Angela Harbutt is on LBC shortly after 2.00pm talking about whether smokers are being bullied too much.

Chair of APPG on Smoking and Health defends lobbying but wants transparency

Stephens Williams MP, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health, has tweeted:

Lobbying is essential part of good law making but needs transparency. And lobbying is diff to dumb MPs & Peers cash for questions #bbcsp

At last, something we can agree on!

But first, I thought I'd check the APPG on Smoking and Health's own record of transparency.

According to the Register of All-Party Groups:

Action on Smoking and Health (a charity) provides administrative support to the group, which includes sharing of information with members of the group, provision of briefing material at meetings, and funding for group receptions and for design, printing, photography, and dissemination costs relating to group publications and stationery.

A small point, perhaps, but don't you think this is a little ingenuous? Can you imagine what our opponents would say if we said that Forest Eireann or the Hands Off Our Packs campaign were funded by Forest without mentioning that Forest is supported by British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and Gallaher Limited (part of the Japan Tobacco International group of companies)?

Visitors to the ASH (London) website will find a clear statement that ASH receives funding from Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation. In addition however ASH gets money from the Department of Health "to support delivery of the Tobacco Control Plan for England" (but not general campaigning, allegedly), but you have to dig a little deeper for that information.

That leaves the following questions: how much does the APPG on Smoking and Health cost to run, does it receive money from third parties not mentioned on the ASH website, and does it benefit in any financial or material way from the public purse?

For the sake of transparency I think we should be told.

Update on Sunday, June 2, 2013 at 21:40 by Simon Clark

Writing on Facebook my colleague Angela Harbutt says:

Stephen Williams says lobbying must be transparent. That's rich! It was he and his All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health that took state-funded 'charity' ASH along to a secret meeting with health minister Anne Milton during the consultation on plain packaging.

And did they discuss plain packaging? Yes they did. And was the meeting declared by Milton on the Ministerial Meetings register? No! It wasn't. Read more here ...

Misconduct or shambles? Behaviour of minister and civil servants raises serious questions (Hands Off Our Packs)

Ouch!

Wanted: greater transparency from tobacco control lobbyists

Also in today's papers ...

... a report in which the Observer 'reveals' that the Adam Smith Institute and other "right wing think tanks" including the Institute of Economic Affairs have received money from tobacco companies.

The paper adds that:

Tobacco Tactics, part of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath, notes that both think tanks took part in a series of debates organised by the pro-tobacco pressure group Forest in June 2011.

Oh no!

That would be the Voice of Freedom debates, one of which was called 'Civil liberties up in smoke'. Funnily enough, I invited Deborah Arnott, CEO of ASH, to take part but she didn't bother to even reply.

I got a similar response a few weeks later when I invited her colleague Martin Dockrell to take part in a debate entitled 'Risk and the pursuit of happiness: is smoking, drinking, gambling good for you?'.

I've said this before and I'll say it again. There are at least two sides to every public policy discussion. The tobacco control industry receives millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to lobby government. Those who oppose excessive regulation in areas such as tobacco, food and drink get nothing from the public purse.

Britain is a democracy (allegedly) and there is nothing wrong with think tanks receiving support from private sources. In fact, if I have a complaint it's that they (and Forest) don't get a whole lot more financial support!

In a perfect world there might be total transparency but before "health groups" point the finger at "right wing think tanks" let's have similar transparency from them. For example, we shouldn't have to resort to Freedom of Information requests to discover how much public money was spent on the Plain Packs Protect campaign.

The Observer, naturally, wasn't interested in that angle. Instead, today's report is essentially a re-hash of an ASH briefing for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health – Tobacco Front Groups and Third Party Lobbying Tactics – published last year.

Meanwhile, what of the Tobacco Tactics website – "a ground-breaking new online academic resource". How much does that cost to 'research' and run?

Or the University of Bath's Tobacco Control Research Group, which is part of a network of British universities with departments dedicated to tobacco control. Others include the universities of Nottingham, Stirling and Aberdeen.

How much public money do they receive each year to twist statistics conduct research and lobby government – or is that a secret?

I'd be interested too to know how much money it costs ASH to run the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health.

PS. The Financial Times did this story better, and more impartially, last year. The FT report (Big tobacco campaigns on freedom) began with my all-time favourite description of a Forest event:

The footage resembles a music video for an anarchist punk-rock band. Policemen, warning signs, CCTV cameras and spiked fences appear in a rapid sequence of black and white shots. A thrashing guitar soundtrack begins – cue the message: “Welcome to Nanny Town”.

If you haven't seen the video click on the image below. By a remarkable coincidence, it includes contributions by Mark Littlewood, director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Sam Bowman of the Adam Smith Institute.

We didn't pay them a penny. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Never heard of Lord Laird? Read on ...

The Sunday papers ... where to start?

It's difficult to get past the Mail on Sunday's front page headline (No 10 rocked by secret love affair) without wanting to know more, but even on Twitter no-one is daring to name names, with or without the addition of 'innocent face'.

We'll just have to wait for more details to emerge.

Meanwhile other papers are reporting that a number of peers have been caught up in the 'cash for questions' row. One of them is Lord Laird who has featured a couple of times on this blog.

In October 2008 I described him as a "persistent anti-smoking activist" after he tabled a question in the House of Lords asking the Government what proposals they had to ban smoking in all enclosed places (my emphasis) where children are present.

In August 2010, following a debate on BBC Radio Ulster in which I went head-to-head with him, I wrote:

Despite stiff competition, I can't think of a single peer who is more anti-smoking than Lord Laird. You could almost describe it as an illness.

I went on to publish the full discussion between Lord Laird and Lord Harris (who was Forest chairman from 1987 until his death in 2006).

The meeting took place in a small room at the House of Lords and with Lord Laird's consent we published the transcript on No Smoking Day 2003.

Even then he was way ahead of ASH and co. Ten years ago Lord Laird wanted to ban smoking in any public place, indoors or outdoors.

But his views went far beyond that. For example:

"How can people operate to the maximum of their ability when they're continually working out little ploys and plots to get outside for a tobacco break? I've been in organisations where the whole strategy is to get outside to smoke. Outside I see a lot of people smoking and on the ground is a whole series of cigarette butts which is very sad.

"And speaking as a male, there is nothing more horrible than to see an attractive female smoking a fag. I'll tell you an oxymoron: an attractive female smoker. How can you have a girl go to all the trouble to put on nice perfume and then smell like a stale ashtray? That's social exclusion.

Like Ireland's health minister James Reilly, who I wrote about a couple of days ago, Lord Laird's anti-smoking crusade appears to be driven by personal experience. As he told Lord Harris:

"I lost my own father, aged 63, through a smoking-related illness. I also lost an uncle, although he was in his eighties, through a long, slow, cancerous death, and three years ago my wife lost her best friend, a small blonde 51-year-old, to a smoking-related illness."

Read the transcript here. It's a fascinating insight into the mind of an extreme anti-smoker: Peer pressure: what Lord Laird thinks about smokers.

Curiously, my 2008 post concluded:

Believe me, Lord Laird is no fool. But he is driven by a sense of righteousness that, in my view, could be his (and the anti-smoking movement's) Achilles heel. I want to hear more, not less, from people like him because I am convinced that, eventually, they will shoot themselves in the foot.

Update: 'Lord Laird has resigned the Ulster Unionist Party whip following lobbying claims' (Sky News).

Stephen Williams: my part in Russia's smoking ban

Our old friend Stephen Williams MP is showing signs of megalomania.

This morning he tweeted:

Russia starts major new anti-smoking laws today. I met Russian Health Minister last year to share UK experience.

Such influence (or should that be effluence?)!

It reminds me of the title of a Spike Milligan book, Hitler: My Part In His Downfall.

The difference is, Milligan was being ironic.

Nevertheless, when the history of the long forgotten anti-tobacco movement is written 50 years hence I'm sure there will be a footnote that mentions Williams.

It's unlikely however to focus on his meeting with the Russian health minister.

At best there may be a reference to his role in the launch of the piss poor Plain Packs Protect campaign that was given hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money to lobby government and still couldn't get the policy over the line.

But I wouldn't bet on it. After all, he has plenty of rivals for that accolade.

A clear case of entrapment?

Email received earlier this week:

I have just paid a fixed penalty notice of £50 for littering, by dropping a cigarette end, outside Waterloo station last Thursday.

Unbeknown to me, a group of about ten civil enforcement officers were targetting people coming off trains and smoking by the bicycle racks outside the station.

Whenever I've done this before, there has always been a litter bin placed there, which I and most smokers use. It wasn't there last Thursday.

When I phoned Lambeth Council to pay the fixed penalty I was told that about 90 tickets had been issued that day at that location.

When I queried the unusual lack of a litter bin, I was told that the bins in the vicinity are often removed when a group of CEOs are performing an operation like this.

If this is true there's a word for such behaviour – entrapment.

Why Irish health minister James Reilly should resign

Whenever I'm in Ireland I choose my words very carefully.

A decade or so ago I was persuaded (wrongly, as it happens) not to set up a branch of Forest in Ireland because "the Irish won't take kindly to being told what to do by the English".

That was never my intention. I've lived in Scotland, for heaven's sake. I'm not completely stupid.

We eventually launched Forest Eireann in 2010 and spokesman John Mallon has just finished his second media tour of the country.

I met John in Dublin on Tuesday and, as ever, I kept my opinions about the Irish Government to myself, even when health minister James Reilly announced that the Cabinet had agreed to draft legislation to introduce plain packaging.

I helped write a press release but I sat back while John talked to the media and I maintained a similar diplomatic silence when I met a handful of Irish libertarians in a pre-arranged meeting on Tuesday night.

They probably represented the entire libertarian movement in Ireland so I didn't want to offend even one of them by berating their government, especially as they were more than capable of doing that themselves.

In short, I treat my Irish contacts the same way I treat my in-laws. I would no more criticise the Irish government in front of an Irishman than I would speak ill of my mother-in-law in front of my wife. (For the record, I get on very well with my mother-in-law but you get the point!)

Anyway, having spoken to a number of people in Dublin this week, there is general agreement on the following points:

• The Irish Government will do anything to distract attention from the state of the economy.

• Health minister James Reilly will do anything to distract attention from the state of the health service, A&E waiting times in particular.

• The Irish Government is employing the same trick it used when it became the first country in the world to introduce a comprehensive public smoking ban. This time it wants to trade on the fact that it will be the first country in Europe to introduce plain packaging, as if this is something to be proud of.

Another, important, point is this:

James Reilly made a big issue this week of the 'fact' that both his brother and his father had suffered from smoking-related illnesses:

Dr Reilly said he had been touched personally by suffering caused by smoking after his brother died of lung cancer and his father went blind following a stroke.

See: James Reilly reveals father and brother died from smoking illness (Irish Independent)

His brother's story was already known. I understand he was a doctor who died aged 46. An intelligent and educated man, he must have known about the health risks of smoking yet still chose to smoke. Why should his death, tragic though it was for his family, be used to de-normalise others who choose to smoke? Is that what he would have wanted?

The story about his father was news to people I spoke to this week. I understand that Reilly's father - also a doctor - had been blind for ten years following a stroke. According to the health minister this was the result of smoking.

Now, while I have enormous sympathy for anyone who has suffered such a loss, I would seriously question whether it is right that a politician with so much emotional interest in a product is personally responsible for legislation that will directly affect that product.

In many board meetings, anyone with such a close personal interest in a subject would be asked to leave the meeting while the matter was discussed by colleagues who could arguably offer a more objective assessment.

Understandably, perhaps, James Reilly has an emotional commitment to reducing smoking rates in Ireland.

That does not make him the best person to drive legislation through parliament. It could make him the worst because – it could be argued – his judgement may be clouded.

It's not for me to tell the Irish Government what to do but the more I read Reilly's comments the more I think he should either hand responsibility for tobacco-related legislation to a colleague, or he should resign as health minister and continue what appears to be a crusade against smoking from the backbenches.