Paul Johnson remembered

A few weeks ago I mentioned having a little red address book.

It was given to me 40 years ago when I left my first job in PR and I still refer to it today even though most of the contact details - many of them from the Eighties and Nineties - are out of date.

I name-dropped a few people, some of them quite well known at the time, whose addresses and phone numbers from that period are in the book, although I couldn’t always remember why.

One of them was journalist and historian Paul Johnson whose death was announced yesterday. The former New Statesman editor and Spectator columnist was 94 and as often happens the news jogged my memory.

You probably need to be my age or older to remember but for a long time Johnson was a significant figure in politics and the media.

Having been an ardent socialist in the Sixties he went on a political ‘journey’ and became a devout supporter of Mrs Thatcher. (He later endorsed Tony Blair but that’s another story.)

Back in the Eighties he was also a fierce critic of the BBC which is how our paths crossed.

Shortly before publishing my first Media Monitoring Report in November 1986 a handful of eminent journalists were invited to a private dinner to discuss the findings and I’m pretty sure Paul Johnson was one of them.

Either way, when the report was published he was one of its biggest cheerleaders, devoting an entire column to it in The Spectator.

My original copy of that issue disappeared many years ago but after a quick search online I found it in The Spectator archive, headlined ‘Bias in the Duopoly - Paul Johnson welcomes the first report of a new broadcasting monitor-unit’.

Describing it as a ‘real eye-opener’, he wrote:

This substantial document must be read in full by everyone in public life directly involved in the workings of the duopoly [BBC and Independent Broadcasting Authority], and especially by members of the IBA and the BBC Board of Governors. For MPs and journalists who feel they have not time to go through the whole thing, there is an admirable 15-page introduction, which summarises the first conclusions of the survey.

After listing many of the findings he added, ‘[The] MMU’s first report is abundantly rich in detailed material, and I shall be returning to it’, which he did. Then, in June 1989, he devoted another column to our work, noting:

The latest report of the Media Monitoring Unit on British television current affairs programmes, covering the period April-December 1988, detects signs of a distinct change. It begins to look as if the drive by [Director-General] John Birt to achieve greater objectivity and accuracy in the BBC current affairs presentation is having some effect.

Or, to put it another way, the pressure the MMU was putting on the BBC was also having an impact.

Overall though our research continued to find significant evidence of political bias in television current affairs programmes, leading Johnson to conclude:

[The] Media Monitoring Report justifies [its analysis] with 66 pages of detailed assessment of the series monitored, and a further 72 pages of descriptive analysis of individual programmes in them. This is accompanied by a description of its aims and methodology. I don't think any fair-minded person who actually troubles to read it through can fail to be concerned by the state of 'the best television system in the world', as its defenders laughably call it. If you don't believe me, look at the Report yourself.

We were of course very grateful for these endorsements because they helped put the MMU on the map.

For a broader appreciation of Paul Johnson’s sometimes controversial career I recommend this obituary:

Paul Johnson, prolific journalist and historian who started on the Left but became a champion of the Right (Telegraph)

See also: Paul Johnson was a man who never wrote a dull sentence (Daily Mail)

PMI launches Unsmoke Your World YouTube channel

Great excitement at Philip Morris.

The global tobacco company that funds the Foundation for a Smokefree World and wants the UK government to ban the sale of cigarettes in England by 2030 has launched a new YouTube channel called Unsmoke Your World.

It will feature the ‘real experiences and stories of people around the world that decided to #Unsmoke’.

Although the channel was only launched officially today 18 videos have been uploaded already, some of them up to two months ago.

They come with titles like ‘Bob unsmoked to improve his music’, ‘Nelleke unsmoked for her family’, and ‘Astrid unsmoked her fiancé’.

At the time of writing they have been viewed 16, 13, and 19 times respectively.

Ionel and Delia’s stories are faring no better, with 19 and 17 views respectively, while Aphrodite (who ‘unsmoked for herself’) and Annabelle (who ‘unsmoked to stop a habit’) have been viewed just eight times apiece.

The video with the most views to date is ‘Eva unsmoked for art’ (95) but that’s the nearest to three figures any of the 18 videos have come.

Meanwhile a 19-second trailer, uploaded 22 hours ago, has currently been viewed 52 times (on YouTube). Let’s see if we can get that figure past 100 before the end of the day. Click here to make your view count!

Perhaps I’m being unfair and these figures will skyrocket over the next few months, but it’s worth noting that although this is a ‘new YouTube channel’ it’s not the first time the company has launched a series of ‘Unsmoke Your World’ videos.

Previously however they were posted on the PMI YouTube channel with titles such as ‘Bully (sic) unsmoked for self-discipline’, ‘Alexandros unsmoked for the sea’ and ‘Samboy unsmoked to inspire others’.

Moreover there are now at least two PMI videos with the title ‘Unsmoke Your World’ - the trailer for the new channel (below) and ‘another video’ (2.5k views) produced two years ago.

As you might expect, all these videos are well produced with impressive branding, but they haven’t exactly gone viral.

Full marks though for persistence.

Fighting talk

I was on TalkTV on Monday.

I was invited to discuss Labour’s plan to consult on banning or progressively raising the age of sale of tobacco to eradicate smoking.

It was one of those rare interviews where I was able to talk without being interrupted all the time, either by the presenter or another guest.

Towards the end however presenter Ian Collins suggested (not unreasonably since he had to play devil's advocate), that it "would be far better to live in a world that was smoke free”. Naturally I demurred, arguing that:

Of course there are some people who are addicted to smoking and wished they had never taken it up but there are also a great many people who enjoy smoking, get pleasure from smoking, or perhaps they take comfort from smoking, and if you are an adult and you choose to smoke a legal product that choice has to be respected ...

Then there are social smokers who are not addicted to tobacco. They simply enjoy it when they go out for an evening and they are outside a pub and they have got a drink in their hand. They like to have a cigarette and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that as long as the person doing it knows that there is a potential health risk and of course they need to be considerate to people around them, and most smokers these days are.

So I think we have just got to move on a bit. We've got enough rules, regulations, laws, legislation to do with smoking. We don't need the government interfering any more. When you think of all the problems that the future governments are going to be expected to deal with, whether it’s the economy, the NHS, the idea that we should be tackling smoking is absolutely ridiculous because actually, on purely financial grounds, it’s said to cost the NHS £2.5 billion a year to deal with tobacco-related diseases but smokers contribute over £10 billion a year through tobacco taxation and VAT. So smokers more than pay their way in society. They are not a drain on the nation’s resources.

Funnily enough, when I mentioned social smokers I could see him nodding his head and it turns out that Collins is a social smoker himself because after the interview had finished ("Nice argument outlined there from Simon Clark"!) he told listeners:

I kind of socially smoke and really enjoy [it] and every now and then I will go into a bit of a phase ... I’ll socially smoke on a Saturday, then I will carry on smoking until Wednesday, but broadly speaking I will smoke when I have a couple of drinks and I enjoy smoking when I have a couple of drinks.

Update: Chris Snowdon has written an article for Spiked, The road to prohibition, in which he states:

The public consultation mooted by Wes Streeting makes it almost inevitable that the UK will emulate the Kiwis [and progressively ban the sale of cigarettes to future generations]. The public-health blob will inundate the consultation with carbon-copied responses in favour of prohibition, and if the government declines to introduce the policy or decides to wait for further evidence, nanny-state activists will portray this as a ‘u-turn’ and accuse Streeting of being in the pocket of the tobacco industry. That is exactly what happened in the plain-packaging campaign.

I've spoken and written about creeping prohibition many times so I share some of Chris's pessimism. Nevertheless even I think it's unnecessarily defeatist to be talking like this at this stage.

Prohibition of tobacco is not, in my view, inevitable and politicians must understand that if they choose that path they're in for a hell of a fight.

The question (as I touched on yesterday) is, who's up for it?

Lusia McAnna

I was very sorry to read that Lusia McAnna had died.

Most of you won’t know Lusia, and I didn’t know her that well myself, but she was a lovely lady, always friendly, with a ready smile and an engaging twinkle.

According to Tobacco Reporter she had pancreatic cancer and died shortly before Christmas.

I would generally see Lusia at the annual Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum where she would be busy helping her friend Elise Rasmussen, founder and president of GTNF.

Together they set up and ran the networking group Women in Tobacco but what I didn’t know, until I read her obituary today, is that Lusia was a businesswoman in her own right having established a textile conveyor belt company that manufactured garniture tapes (used in cigarette production), in 1995.

When she retired in 2015 she became a dedicated volunteer at The Witham, an arts centre in Barnard Castle, Northumberland, where her work was recognised in 2021 by grateful trustees (Super-volunteer hailed for her efforts at Barney arts centre).

“Volunteering here is about so much more than just The Witham,” she told the local paper. “It’s great to be part of the team – you become part of the family.”

The same is true, I imagine, of GTNF and the wider tobacco world. She became part of the team, and part of the family.

She was a good friend of Forest too, supporting many of our events in person or (during Covid) online.

Condolences then to family and friends but I’m sure she’d want this to end on a lighter note so here goes.

In June 2016, on the day of Smoke On The Water, Forest’s annual boat party, I emailed our 200+ guests as follows:

Rain or shine (OK, rain) we look forward to welcoming you to Smoke On The Water, our annual boat party on the Thames.

Lusia’s response:

See you tonight Simon - sunshine or rain.

To which I replied:

Bring your brolly!

Her retort?

I'm a "hard" Northerner :-) 

“Hard” but humorous. She’ll be greatly missed.

Below: Lusia McAnna (far right) at the Forest Freedom Dinner in 2017, with Elise Rasmussen (second left)

Labour, law and libertarians

In an interview with The Times published on Saturday Labour's shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said he is ready to take on the libertarian right over smoking.

I have news for him. The libertarian right, such as it is, has largely given up defending the right to smoke.

Today they’re more interested in supporting vaping as the free market ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of smoking.

Or promoting the legalisation of cannabis which is way more trendy than tobacco even if many users choose to smoke it.

But when it comes to defending the practice of smoking tobacco you can often hear a pin drop.

According to The Times, which only recently ran a leading article (‘Stub it out’) supporting New Zealand style policies to achieve a ‘smoke free’ England by 2030:

New Zealand has introduced a law which means that nobody now under the age of 14 will ever be permitted to buy cigarettes, and [Streeting] is interested in doing something similar here.

That was on Saturday. The next morning Streeting appeared on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg (BBC One). Labour, he confirmed, ‘would consult on banning the sale and purchase of cigarettes as part of a “radical” package of measures to stamp out smoking’.

Mea culpa, I was unaware of the Kuenssberg interview and Streeting’s comments until Sunday afternoon when I saw they had been widely reported online.

Forest’s reaction was therefore too late for those reports, many of which were generated (I think) by the Press Association which, not for the first time, didn’t bother to contact Forest for a response.

We did belatedly get some comments out there (here, here and here, for example) and yesterday I did a couple of interviews, one on BBC Radio Ulster, the other on TalkTV, but from the free market/libertarian right all I could see and hear was silence, even on social media.

The notable exception was a post by Alex Singleton (The nanny state of it all) on the ASI blog. Alex writes:

In a free country, people should have the freedom to take part in activities that affect themselves without having hectoring moralisers try to use the power of the state to prevent them.

Far from creating “new Tobacco Control Plan”, politicians should realise that they have already gone too far by preventing smoking rooms in pubs, and abandon the ludicrous, moralising “smokefree by 2030” agenda, which is an attack on people’s free choice and would just expand criminal activity.

A little over 20 years ago Alex co-founded the Liberty Club at St Andrews University. Having gone to school in St Andrews I leapt at the chance to speak to the group and I remember the occasion with fondness.

But I was only one of many who made that pilgrimage. Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox), director of the Academy of Ideas which runs the annual Battle of Ideas, was another.

Claire, I think, would consider herself to be on the libertarian left (a term that some people on the right used to sneeringly consider an oxymoron) but in my experience the libertarian left is far truer to the spirit of the word than their counterparts on the right who are more driven by market trends than libertarian or even classical liberal principles.

Anyway, thank goodness for individuals like Alex Singleton who have stayed true to the libertarian values they espoused when they were younger.

As I have always said, supporting the rights of smokers - even if you don’t smoke yourself - is the true test of a genuine liberal.

Abandon the rights of adults who choose to smoke and you abdicate the right to call yourself a liberal, let alone a libertarian.

As for Wes Streeting’s comments, I don’t think we should be too alarmed just yet. Labour, after all, isn’t even in power.

Nevertheless, when politicians fly a kite to see what reaction they get it’s best not to ignore it. Just saying.

See also: End of the cigarette? Labour unveil plan to wipe out smoking by 2030 by banning sale of tobacco (LBC)

C-stores slam Labour’s proposal to consult on cigarette sales ban (Convenience Store)

Campaigners slam threat to ban UK cigarette sales (Tobacco Reporter)

Below: The Liberty Club of St Andrews on No Smoking Day, 2002

The fascinating story of Britain’s working men’s clubs

I don’t normally listen to Radio 4’s Book of the Week but I shall be tuning in this morning and for the rest of the week.

The featured book is Clubland: How the working men’s club shaped Britain which I read last year and enjoyed enormously.

Written by Pete Brown, an award-winning journalist best known for writing about beer and pubs, it was published only after a long and frustrating search for a publisher.

According to Brown:

The rejections, all from London-based publishers, were always based on the same assumption: only old people in the north of England would be interested in reading about working men’s clubs. And the problem with that is, they continued, old people in the north of England don’t read.

This intellectual bias against the culture of the working classes is itself an integral theme that runs through the entire story of the working men’s club movement.

I am delighted that not only did he eventually find a publisher but this labour of love is now getting the national exposure it deserves.

I’m curious though to hear how the book has been abridged for radio because it’s a long and fascinating story with numerous twists and turns.

A tremendous amount of research has gone into the book so I learned a huge amount about the history of the working men’s club ‘movement’ - which began in the middle of the 19th century - how it evolved, and the long-running rivalry with pubs.

At its peak in the 1970s there were over 4,000 clubs affiliated to the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union (CIU) and over four million club members, '10 per cent of the UK’s adult population at that time'.

Since then, Brown notes, working men’s clubs have been in decline.

Today in Britain there are over 100,000 clubs of all kinds, 40,000 of which operate from licensed premises. Most are sports clubs, but around 6,000 are social clubs, and of these, 2,000 are working men’s clubs. Just 1,500 of all these remain affiliated to the CIU, compared to 4,000 in the 1970s.

I should explain that my own interest in the subject is driven by two things: one, an interest in social history, and, two, the smoking ban.

In 2009, two years after the introduction of the ban in England and Wales, it was clear that land-locked inner city pubs, many of them working class backstreet boozers, had suffered disproportionately from the ban.

At the same time there were reports that working men’s clubs were struggling too. I had never been to a working men's club and knew little about them but after the ban was introduced we were contacted by the manager of a club in Luton, which I was invited to visit.

It was very similar to some of the clubs Brown describes in Clubland. Anonymous on the outside, cavernous on the inside, and – mid afternoon – almost empty apart from a handful of elderly members nursing a pint and a packet of crisps.

That visit was one of the reasons why, when Forest launched the Save Our Pubs & Clubs campaign in 2009, we were determined to include working men’s clubs. It took a while but eventually we persuaded the CIU to support the campaign following which I was invited to attend a CIU dinner and AGM in Blackpool, the former at Blackpool Football Club, the latter at the famous Winter Gardens.

That was when I first began to fully understand the Union and the struggles their member clubs were having, as I wrote here.

In truth, as Brown explains in some detail, pubs and clubs have been bitter rivals almost from the get go and although it isn't mentioned in the book this was no more evident than when the pubs demanded a level playing field when it was suggested that private members' clubs, including working men's clubs, might be exempted from the smoking ban.

The ban is mentioned several times in Clubland but I get the impression that while Brown accepts that ‘its effect is still felt’ he isn't entirely convinced by what some see as its devastating impact on clubs (and pubs):

The smoking ban and Covid hit everywhere, but while the smoking smoking ban is still blamed for the closure of many pubs and clubs, many more survived.

A bigger problem facing working men’s clubs today, Brown suggests, is their image:

In the popular imagination, if the gentlemen’s club belongs to the late Victorians, the working men’s club remains stranded forever in the mid-1970s, the preserve of dinner-suited comedians doing dodgy gags about ‘the wife’s mother’ to a smoke-filled room of flat-capped men swilling pints of bitter and munching chicken in a basket, their wives beside them growing impatient for the bingo.

If you are unable to listen to the abridged audio version on Radio 4, do read the book. It’s a treasure trove of social history - from gin shops to bingo to snooker to popular entertainment (and much much more) - and I loved it.

PS. Pete Brown grew up in a working class family in a house with an outside toilet and was, I believe, the first member of his family to go to university.

I suspect we might not agree politically but, by coincidence, he went to St Andrews where I was at school and an even bigger coincidence is that while he was there he worked in The Niblick, the very same pub where I bought my first under-age pint, aged 15, in 1974.

As I never get tired of saying, it’s a (very) small world.

Smoking in church? Might boost the numbers

One of my favourite TV programmes in 2022 was Slow Horses on Apple TV.

It’s based on a series of books by Mick Herron that I had never heard of until I watched the first series, broadcast earlier last year.

It’s a very British spy thriller that doesn’t take itself seriously and each episode absolutely flies by.

The main character is an ageing, uncouth MI5 agent called Jackson Lamb, played brilliantly by Gary Oldman.

Lamb is a heavy smoker which led to this exchange in the sixth and final episode of series two that ‘dropped’ a week ago.

Entering a church, Lamb comments:

“These places haven’t been the same since they banned smoking.”

“Yeah,” mutters his young colleague River Cartwright (Jack Lowden). “You were never allowed to smoke in a church.”

“Well they should reconsider that,” shoots back Lamb. “Might boost the numbers.”

Another programme I’ve just finished watching is Strike: Troubled Blood (BBC One) which is based on the fifth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, written by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling).

Again, the leading male character is an habitual smoker. I mentioned this when I watched the first series in 2017, noting:

There was an amusing scene in the second episode of Strike: The Cuckoo's Calling, on BBC One last night.

Set in a central London pub, it featured Tom Burke, playing private investigator Cormoran Strike, and Holliday Grainger as Strike's "intelligent and resourceful new temp" Robin Ellacott.

Confessing he was a "wee bit pissed", Strike had a cigarette between his lips and was asking "Have you got a light?" when it was gently removed by his assistant who reminded him, in a non-hectoring way, "You can't smoke in here."

To which Strike groaned and replied: "They've ruined pubs. Pubs used to be bloody brilliant."

Interestingly (spoiler alert!!) the suspected killer in Troubled Blood was a cross-dresser but that was apparently too controversial for the BBC so the character in the TV series has been changed and doesn’t dress like a Cornish version of Norman Bates.

With that in mind let’s just be grateful that neither Strike nor Jackson Lamb have been forced to give up the fags. ASH must be fuming.

Creeping prohibition - a warning from Washington

At the Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum in Washington last year I was on a panel of speakers that discussed the pitfalls of banning tobacco and nicotine.

The January 2023 issue of Tobacco Reporter has a full report here. It includes this passage:

Clark observed that the threat of prohibition has never gone away. The temperance lobby from the start of the 20th century, he said, has simply reappeared under the guise of public health and devised a new strategy - creeping prohibition. As examples, Clark cited public smoking bans, which in some jurisdictions have expanded to include outdoor areas and even social housing, preventing people from smoking in their own homes. Britain’s ban on menthol cigarettes, he observed, has outlawed a product category that accounted for 20 percent of the domestic market.

Meanwhile, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland have all set dates by which they want their countries to be “smoke-free,” by which they mean less than 5 percent of adults smoking. According to Clark, those targets can be achieved only by further and excessive regulation. He was particularly disturbed by Philip Morris’ call on the UK government to ban the sale of cigarettes by 2030 - a step that could very well backfire, according to Clark. “The day will surely come when alternative nicotine products, including e-cigarettes, will also be targeted for prohibition - as indeed they already are in some parts of the world,” he said.

Politicians don’t need much encouragement to favour prohibition so it’s worth noting that there’s an interview with Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, in The Times today that notes:

Streeting is ready to take on the libertarian right over smoking. New Zealand has introduced a law which means that nobody now under the age of 14 will ever be legally permitted to buy cigarettes, and he is interested in doing something similar here.

Leaving aside the fact that there are many on the left who are equally incensed by the increasing intrusion by the state in our daily lives and habits, it’s significant that Streeting also wants to clamp down on vaping, thereby proving the point I made in Washington and have consistently made on this blog and elsewhere for several years.

Tobacco control (and politicians) will never settle for the eradication of cigarettes. Their long-term goal is the eradication of all recreational nicotine products so it’s worth reading Streeting’s comments about vaping:

“I’m deeply anxious about the fact that having reduced smoking, particularly among young people, we’ve sleepwalked into the growth of a new industry in vaping, which has seen enormous take-up among children and young people who otherwise would not smoke,” he says. “My instinct is to take the same approach with vaping as we did with smoking in terms of packaging and marketing, because I’m concerned that the vaping industry is now growing exponentially and there may well be risks associated with it that are not yet clear.”

You have been warned.

See also: GTNF 2022, my report of last year’s event.