Chris Snowdon has written a paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs suggesting that consumers should fight back against the nanny state.
Consumers, he argues, are the biggest losers from excessive lifestyle regulations, yet their views are largely absent from policy decisions.
This, he adds, is because debates about lifestyle issues - whether it be smoking, drinking, eating, or gambling - are framed as ‘industry vs. public health’.
I was interested to read Snowdon’s paper because it raises issues that Forest has wrestled with for 46 years.
As the recipient of tobacco industry donations that account for most of our funding, Forest is not a grassroots organisation, and has never claimed to be.
But nor are we an ‘astroturf’ organisation, the derogatory term used by opponents to smear us as a puppet of industry.
According to one definition of the term, an astroturf organisation is an ‘artificially-manufactured political movement designed to give the appearance of grassroots activism’.
Forest was the brainchild of Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris. A former Battle of Britain fighter pilot and pipe smoker, he was retired when he came up with the idea of a smokers’ rights group that would defend the interests of smokers.
I’ve no idea whether, at that stage, the long-term plan was an independent grassroots organisation. If it was, it was soon abandoned because Forest has always been a lobby group funded primarily by tobacco company donations.
Individuals do donate but the sums are quite small, and they are donations not subscriptions or membership fees.
In 1979, when Forest was founded, approximately 44 per cent of people aged 16 and over smoked cigarettes, so we could perhaps have done more to attract consumers to ‘join’ the cause via a membership fee.
However, chasing members and fundraising can be a time-consuming and expensive business (many organisations employ professional fundraisers), and both my predecessors and I took the view (I think) that Forest’s time and money was better spent on our core activities, political lobbying and media work.
Nevertheless, Snowdon’s idea of a grassroots consumer organisation that invites prospective members to pay an annual subscription of, say, £10, is not, in theory, a bad one.
50,000 members, he says, would provide a modest annual income of £500,000, which would be enough to hire a handful of staff to engage with the media and lobby politicians on policy issues.
Consumers, he adds, would be incentivised to join with the offer of discounts on relevant consumer products, in the same way that the real ale group CAMRA offers members ‘discounted copies of its Good Pub Guide, free copies of BEER magazine, £30 of real ale vouchers and discounts on beer festivals’.
Other examples mentioned by Snowdon include the AA and the RAC, but I would argue that neither is a consumer group in the accepted sense, far less a grassroots organisation.
(The AA and the RAC are both service providers and I’m pretty sure that one or both are now owned by private equity firms.)
A hypothetical Vapers Association, Snowdon suggests, could emulate CAMRA by engaging with e-cigarette manufacturers and retailers to offer members discounts on vaping products.
Likewise a Drinkers Union could offer ‘discounts on beer, wine and spirits offered by participating pubs, clubs and manufacturers’.
Similar financial incentives couldn’t be offered by a smokers’ group but he acknowledges that, to be fair.
Either way, Forest’s purpose was never to encourage or facilitate smoking but to defend two important principles - the right to smoke, and the freedom to choose - a subtle but important difference.
CAMRA might be the best example of a grassroots consumer organisation in the UK. (According to Snowdon, it has 100,000+ members.)
In the USA there are two big consumer groups that come to mind - the National Rifle Association (NRA), which is said to have five million members, and AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), which is reported to have nearly 38 million members, a staggering number.
Politically that gives both those organisations enormous influence and clout.
In a perfect world Forest would have tens if not hundreds of thousands of fee-paying members, giving us complete financial independence from third parties, but without significant investment in marketing and membership services that was never likely to happen so the idea was never actively pursued.
It is worth adding though that grassroots or membership organisations are not without their problems.
For example, internal politics. This is not exclusive to such organisations but the odds on internal politics getting in the way is exacerbated because the smaller ones are often run by an elected committee whose members may have been voted in by a very small minority of members, most of whom can’t be bothered to vote.
Such elections can throw up some freak results, including the election of ‘activist’ candidates - unrepresentative of the majority of members - whose primary aim is to disrupt the status quo.
Sometimes that can be a good thing. More often than not it’s like a cancer that threatens to destroy the organisation from within. Either way, it can be hugely disruptive and often very damaging to the organisation.
Two, once you’ve enticed people to join or renew their membership with the offer of the sort of incentives Snowdon suggests, they will expect more of the same every year, so membership services become the defining factor for people joining or renewing their subscription.
Consequently most of your income is used to employ staff to ‘service’ the membership. That’s fine unless the principal purpose of the organisation is to lobby politicians on various policy issues.
As for the potential for a genuine grassroots organisation to represent smokers, I’ve discussed this many times with different people.
Mark Littlewood, director-general of the IEA from 2009 to 2023 (and a former smoker), was and perhaps still is an advocate of a grassroots organisation for smokers.
My own view is that it is and was an impossible dream, and if it was ever possible that time came and went a long time ago.
The best we could achieve, I argued, was an organisation, like Forest, that represents the views of many ordinary people without actually being a grassroots campaign.
I based this on several factors, but mostly personal experience.
One, the vast majority of smokers are not motivated to campaign for smokers’ rights or join an organisation that defends their rights (even though many are happy that Forest exists).
Two, there have been many attempts to launch grassroots smokers’ rights campaigns, here and abroad, and none has succeeded.
I vaguely remember a UK group that called itself the Smokers Liberation Front. (That name alone was enough to condemn it to oblivion.)
In Ireland, in the year prior to the introduction of the smoking ban, two groups were set up - Smokers Against Discrimination (SAD Ireland) and European Smokers Against Discrimination (ESAD).
Apart from sounding like the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea, neither achieved any traction beyond a handful of people.
Freedom 2 Choose, a UK-based group that emerged to fight the smoking ban at home, was a little more successful in terms of numbers and media appearances, but it never really progressed beyond an online forum that was initially quite active before running out of steam a year or two down the line.
Without money F2C was reliant on volunteers and could never employ someone to build on its core support.
One problem with using volunteer spokesmen is that it is difficult to control the message, including language that occasionally crosses a line and brings the organisation into disrepute.
If funding enables you to move beyond that, a large and active membership will undoubtedly add credibility, but it also brings problems - disagreements, infighting, admin, the need for membership services to retain existing members and attract new ones, and so on.
The fact that Forest receives donations from tobacco companies is often said to be our major weakness. In reality, it’s arguably our greatest strength because, in a strange way, it gives us the credibility that other groups lacked.
I saw this first hand in Ireland. Neither SAD Ireland nor ESAD were taken seriously by media or politicians because they had no funding.
In contrast, when Forest Ireland was launched in 2010 its credibility wasn’t questioned precisely because of the link with the tobacco industry (and Forest UK).
The same went for Forest EU, a four-year project launched in Brussels in 2017 with well-publicised support from Japan Tobacco International (JTI).
Anyway, you can read Chris Snowdon’s paper here:
‘The People Vs. Paternalism: building a consumer-led movement against lifestyle regulation’
Worth reading if only to stimulate debate.
Sunday, March 9, 2025 at 10:25 
