Another conspiracy theory dashed

I have been asked to comment on a story that appears in some newspapers (and on the BBC website) today: "Menthol has been used to make some US cigarette brands more appealing to the young, say researchers" (see HERE).

I don't really have much to say on the subject. Obviously, I have no idea what the manufacturers talk about in the privacy of their research labs. All I know is, the tobacco industry is one of the most highly-regulated industries in the world and there is virtually nothing it can do without the approval of the authorities, so for the story to be spun as an example of the immorality of Big Tobacco is rather nauseating.

Funnily enough, when I was 16, and one or two of my friends smoked, the only brand I quite liked was "cool, clean Consulate ... Britain's largest selling menthol cigarette". I only smoked the odd one but I liked it more than a non-menthol cigarette because it had an edge, a flavour, that I could actually taste.

I'm not sure it was "as cool as a mountain stream", as the ads would have us believe, but to my tastebuds it was an improvement on a regular cigarette. Despite that, I never got hooked so the menthol made no difference whatsoever.

Truth is, I am struggling to think of any smokers I know who prefer menthol cigarettes. And yet, if this allegation is correct, surely lots of people would be smoking menthol flavoured tobacco?

Frankly, it sounds like yet another conspiracy theory. Lucky for the researchers, it must be a slow news day.

Joe Jackson Down Under

Joe Jackson first toured Australia in 1983. He liked it. "The people," he writes on The Free Society blog, "were laid-back, with a dry sense of humour, and the culture had a nice mix of American and British influences." Recently returned from his latest tour, he found the country "stifled by American-style paranoid health-freakery and a very British-style nanny state".

Most disturbing, writes Joe, was the email he received from a journalist from the Melbourne paper The Age, shortly after doing a telephone interview.

He'd been sympathetic to my views on smoking, and wanted to tell me that his article had been 'butchered' by his editor on instructions from their legal department. It seems there are now laws governing what can and can't be printed about tobacco, and it's actually illegal to say anything which might be construed as positive.

Full article HERE.

Why Roger is hopping mad

By coincidence, Conservative MEP Roger Helmer has sent me a copy of a post he has written for his blog. It concerns a hearing he has just attended in the European parliament. (Note: the hearing is NOT the reason I am in Brussels, although it could have implications for an initiative we are working on with our European partners.)

Roger writes:

A series of anti-smoking campaigners vied with each other to vilify the tobacco industry, accusing it of dreadful things like lobbying, and seeking to influence legislation, and promoting the interests of its shareholders, and doing other cynical things like awarding prizes for Corporate Social Responsibility and contributing to anti-AIDS programmes. The sort of things that just about all major industries do, in fact.

The World Health Organisation has initiated the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which the EU and 26 member-states have signed up to (The Czech Republic, God bless it, has declined to sign). They are now producing "guidelines for implementation". Anti-smoking lobbyists are proposing that the guidelines should preclude legislators from speaking to the industry. Yep. You read that right. They want to ban MEPs from speaking to tobacco companies.
 
Frankly, I was hopping mad when I heard this proposal. It is absolutely fundamental to any kind of good governance that legislators should discuss proposed legislation with those affected, and that parliamentarians should talk to businesses in areas they represent. I represent the East Midlands, home to Imperial Tobacco. Hundreds of their employees are my constituents, and a quarter of my constituents smoke. I personally hate smoking, but I respect the right of my constituents to make grown-up choices. Imperial has already been hammered by the EU's Tobacco Directive, which like so much EU regulation had the primary effect of moving jobs, production and investment out of the EU altogether.
 
The WHO proposal is an assault on democracy. Listening to constituents, and to businesses, is a key part of what I am paid for, and I shall continue to do so without let or hindrance from the WHO.
 
If we start with tobacco, where do we stop? Many of my colleagues would like to start restricting the drinks industry. They believe that "Big Oil" is frustrating their attempts to curb global warming. Packaged food companies contribute to obesity. Cars cause accidents and pollute the atmosphere. They have problems with the pharmaceutical industry.  This could grow into a full-scale assault on business and capitalism - which of course is exactly what many in the green lobby want.

The full post should appear HERE shortly.

Update on Thursday, July 17, 2008 by Simon Clark

Full blog post HERE.

Food for thought

Last night we ate at Tribeca, a delightful French restaurant on the famous Avenue Louise. If you're a vegetarian or animal rights' campaigner, look away now because one of my companions insisted that I order the foie gras as a starter. Unexpectedly, I got a double helping because the waiter then recommended that I have foie gras sauce on my Argentinian beef - and before I could say "Enough, think of the birds!", there it was on my plate.

It was a warm evening so we sat outside on the terrace. This was one of two smoking areas - the other was inside, on the first floor. (In Belgium restaurateurs can allocate rooms for smokers as long as no food is served there.)

In fact, smoking continues to be permitted in many cafes and bars, so for most smokers there isn't really a problem. What a pity British politicians aren't as sensible about this as most of our European neighbours.

How long this will last remains to seen. Dick Engel, a colleague from the Netherlands, was also at last night's dinner, and we know what has happened in Holland. Sadly, an attempt to delay or reverse the ban failed in the Dutch courts last week, and the anti-smokers march on.

So, plenty to talk about over dinner. And the food wasn't bad, either.

Lost for words

I absolutely love the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras. I was here in March but today - a bright, sunny morning in July - it looks and feels even better.

I arrived at 7.30 and even then the place was alive with people - businessmen, tourists, students - bustling to catch a train to Brussels, Paris or beyond. How different from the old St Pancras with its dreary locomotives setting off for Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield.

For my generation, though, travelling on Eurostar will never be as romantic as the old boat train from Victoria with its rickety, post-war carriages that rocked from side to side and left you feeling ever so slightly travel sick. I remember crawling through south east England en route to the ferry where we would disembark in some cold, unwelcoming shed (usually in the early hours of the morning). Minutes turned into hours as we waited to board some rusting old vessel that would take us across the Channel.

Eventually, in the dead of night, we'd be on our way. Dawn would break and we'd find ourselves herded from ship to shore, and then on to another train, this time in a distinctly foreign country where no-one (least of all the ticket inspectors and immigration officials) spoke a word of English. Now that's what I call travel.

Now, it's almost too easy. Take this morning. I turned up at St Pancras (I didn't even have to travel across London - I just had to walk a few hundred yards from Kings Cross), collected my pre-paid tickets from a machine, waltzed through passport control, and minutes later I was sitting in Coach 11, seat 51, with a cup of coffee in one hand and an egg and salmon brioche in the other - and off we went. Two-and-a-half hours later I was in the centre of Brussels, checking into my hotel.

In many ways this is great. I'm certainly not complaining. But something has been lost, and sitting here, in my hotel, I can't quite put it into words.

Sex in the city

I haven't, until now, commented on Max Mosley's case against the News of the World, but reading the papers this week I am obviously not alone in believing that what people do in private (as long as it's legal and between consenting adults) is a matter for them.

Whether the paper is right to argue that what Mosley gets up to in private is of "public interest" is another matter. It's titillating (of course it is), so from that point of view there is an element of "public interest" (and we can't forget his F1 connections), but what's more important - his right to privacy or our "right" to know?

If there was a Nazi theme (as the NOTW claims), that may change our perception of his behaviour, but surely the charge would be gross insensivity rather than “gross sexual depravity”.

Talking of sexual festishes, shortly before the introduction of the smoking ban in England, I received an email from the organiser of the London Fetish Fair. She told me that, as a direct result of the ban, the LFF was moving to a new venue "with a large, closed off courtyard to accomodate the rights of our smoking fetishists and regular smoking visitors".
 
Things like the smoking ban, she added, "diminish the rights and freedoms of all kinds of people from different walks of life". I agreed, and suggested she write a press release which we would circulate to our media contacts. She did, and it included her comment that:

"My entire staff smoke. How am I supposed to have a happy, chilled-out team if their requirements are not taken into account? Unlike so many other minorities, there is already a dwindling number of welcoming places for people from the alternative side of life to have a chance to meet others. This ban will only drive people out of the social scene and back into feeling cut off from the chance to meet their peers."

There is a serious point here and it is this: all minority groups have to stick together and defend one another's interests. Who knows, but in 30 years' time I wouldn't put it past the anti-smoking movement to brand ALL smokers as fetishists guilty of "gross depravity".

Update on Saturday, July 12, 2008 by Simon Clark

There are a couple of interesting articles on the subject of Max Mosley in today's papers. Stephen Glover, in the Daily Mail, seems rather affronted by Mosley's behaviour; Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review, adopts a lighter tone in the Telegraph. See HERE and HERE.

Update on Monday, July 14, 2008 by Simon Clark

Intelligent discussion of the subject on the BBC website HERE.

Labour are the biggest losers

A lot has been written about the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, much of it negative, but Iain Dale - David Davis's former chief-of-staff - makes some good points on his blog HERE:

[Davis] won with an overwhelming 72% share of the vote (the highest in a by election since 1997) on a 35% turnout, which was far higher than most of the so-called Westminster village 'experts' had predicted. Considering he had no real opposition, I think that is a very creditable turnout in the circumstances. It is roughly the same as the turnout in Sarah Teather's by election in Brent East in 2003, but far higher than Michael Portillo's (29%) or Hilary Benn's (19%). When you consider that 9,000 students were away, it is the summer holiday season, and it rained, I am not sure anyone could have expected a much higher turnout than that.

In a few weeks we may have forgotten all about the by-election, and the point David Davis was trying to make. I hope not. Civil liberties deserve to be near the top of the political agenda. For years we have been sleepwalking towards a more restrictive type of society. If DD, and allies such as Bob Geldof (who wrote a spirited article in the Daily Telegraph this week), can keep the issue alive, they will be doing everyone a huge service.

The real losers, meanwhile, were not the 23 candidates who lost their deposits, but the Labour party. Refusing to put up a candidate, the governing party showed themselves to be cowards, unwilling to defend in public a policy they were forced to gerrymander through parliament. The Haltemprice and Howden by-election may have resembled a pantomime at times, but by declining to take part I believe that Labour gave up their right to run this country.

PS. There was good news and bad news for Hamish Howitt, the anti smoking ban campaigner. The bad news? He got 91 votes and (like most of the candidates) lost his deposit. The good news? He got ten times more votes than Tony Farnon, the anti-smoking candidate who got, er, eight.

Test match special

I don't think I will be blogging today. Instead, I shall be at Lords for the first day of the Test against South Africa.

According to the invitation I received back in March, "We are taking hospitality in the Nursery Pavilion, a short walk from our seats in the Mound Stand. We plan to meet around 9.00am for morning tea and a pre-match breakfast.

"Play starts at 11.00am and champagne will be served prior to lunch at 1.00pm. We will be serving refreshments throughout the day with afternoon tea at 3.40pm."

Weather permitting, I might even see some cricket.

Welcome to The Freedom Zone

Just back from Birmingham where I spent the day with Simon Richards, director of The Freedom Association. This year's Conservative party conference is in Birmingham and with the facilities available to us it seemed a good opportunity to join forces and launch a new venture, The Freedom Zone.

The Freedom Zone will be open for two days from 8.00am to 9.00pm during the conference in September. Venue is Austin Court, a short walk from the International Conference Centre. It has a modern auditorium (the Kingston Theatre, above) that seats 140 people, a comfortable lounge area which we are converting into an all-day coffee bar, and a sheltered courtyard where we intend to host a smoker-friendly reception with a barbecue and live music.

A full programme of events will be announced nearer the time. It's a big undertaking but we hope to attract some top names. If the project is a success, I would like to think we can eventually rival the long-running Health Hotel which is such a feature of the three main party conferences.

For the moment, watch this space.

It's a crazy mixed-up world

"It’s not only national politicians who make one think the world is galloping mad," writes Allan Massie in today's Scottish Daily Mail." (Massie, for those of you who don't know, is one of Scotland's most respected writers and journalists.)

"One Scottish newspaper yesterday ran an interview with the campaigns manager for ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), the occasion being the BMA’s recommendation that the portrayal of smoking be taken into account when classifying films. Now, as a happy smoker for more than 40 years, I should perhaps tread warily on this one, for it’s now generally held that smoking is not only wicked, but, after knife crime, perhaps the deepest and darkest blot on society.

"But then again, perhaps not, for the campaigns manager touched agreeable heights of craziness. Asked his opinion of the portrayal of smoking in movies, he said: ‘It isn’t very realistic. Although you often see actors smoking on screen, you rarely see the consequences. So while you see someone stub out a cigarette, you do not see them having a heart attack or dying of cancer.’

"Well, no, you don’t – and it wouldn’t be ‘very realistic’ if you did because, no matter the possibility – or likelihood – that a smoker may die of a heart attack or lung cancer, you don’t often actually see one doing so each time he stubs out a cigarette. But in the mad world of ASH, I suppose we should have movies in which every cigarette smoked is followed by the actor clutching his throat and dropping down dead.

"Laughter," Massie concludes, "is often the only sane response to the lunacy of the modern world."

I couldn't agree more.

PS. See also Neil Clark ("Anti-smoking hysteria reaches new heights") on Comment Is Free in the Guardian HERE.

Ways and means to a free society

Wearing my Free Society hat, I have been invited to contribute to a new think tank blog on the Telegraph website. My first post can be found HERE. Comments welcome.

Kerry McCarthy - an update

When I blogged yesterday I intended it to be my last post on the subject of Kerry McCarthy. To recap: the member of parliament for Bristol East wrote about the smoking ban on her blog on June 29 but I only mentioned it here (on July 3) when I discovered that she had published a second post on July 1 in which she made specific reference to Forest and linked our champagne tea party at the House of Commons to Libby Brooks' class-based critique in the Guardian.

Not unreasonably, I feel, I invited readers and supporters of Forest to respond. Come Saturday night there were 200+ comments on her blog. (To put this in perspective, most of her posts attract no comments at all.) On Sunday she responded to those comments with a further post. To my mind, we had stretched this particular thread as far as it would go. So yesterday afternoon, to wrap things up, I sent her a rather cheery email:

Dear Kerry,

Thank you for your response to the comments that appeared on your blog. For your information, you may be interested to see [HERE] the original blog post that encouraged people to write to you.

The reason [your] post came to our attention - unlike your previous posts on smoking - was the reference to Forest. I have now added THIS post:

I won't go over all the issues again, but I hope we have demonstrated that, in some quarters at least, there remains a great deal of anger and resentment at the extent of the smoking ban, which I don't think will go away this side of an election.

In our experience, based on thousands of emails, blog posts, telephone calls and letters, most of the anger comes from "lifelong Labour supporters" who say that they "will never vote Labour again" as a result of the ban.

They may change their tune after a few years of Conservative government, but it indicates the deep sense of betrayal that many natural Labour voters feel as a result of legislation that went much further than promised in the 2005 Labour manifesto.

Should you be interested:

1. A short video of the recent Forest/Boisdale party is on Friction TV HERE:
2. An equally short video of the Forest reception at the House of Commons can be viewed HERE:
3. A report of the HoC event is on our Free Society blog HERE:

Boisdale, I should add, is NOT a private members' club as you stated more than once. It's a very public bar and restaurant where you would be very welcome to join us for lunch or dinner at any time.

Kind regards,

Simon Clark
Director, Forest

To my surprise (I wasn't expecting a reply), I received the following email which I reproduce in full:

I think it's quite clear that your strategy is to mobilise supporters to hound those who have publicly supported the ban, with often quite abusive emails, until they decide that it is simply not worth the hassle of saying anything in public about it again.
 
As some of those posting comments said, the normal response is for the subject of their attention to post a statement and then close down the blog. It says a lot for your commitment to free speech that you encourage such behaviour.

To be honest, I was a little taken aback. My second impulse was to ignore it. My third reaction was to draft this post and sit on it overnight. This morning I thought, "To hell with it."

So, let's get this right. It's OK for elected representatives like Kerry McCarthy to praise the smoking ban (and imply that Forest is an elitist organisation), but it's not OK for Forest to alert people to her comments in order that they can give her a different perspective. In her eyes, that amounts to hounding.

Worse, she claims that "it's quite clear that your strategy is to mobilise supporters to hound those who have publicly supported the ban, with often quite abusive emails [my emphasis]". If McCarthy had bothered to read the posts on this blog she would know that I have gone out of my way to ask people NOT to send abusive emails.

Yes, a few went a bit too far, but the overwhelming majority were well within the bounds of civil debate. She should see what we have to put up with from anti-smokers. One local councillor - from Bristol, funnily enough - once sent me a scrawled note declaring "I hope you die of cancer". He's not the only one.

To top it all, she suggests that we "encourage" people to target blogs which then have to be shut down. Excuse me?! Is it too much to ask that she provide evidence of a single blog or website that has been closed down as a result of our alleged "behaviour"?

What we have here is an MP rattled by the fact that 200 people have had the audacity to take issue with her comments on an open blog - so she shoots the messenger.

Free speech? Don't make me laugh. The anti-smoking lobby doesn't know the meaning of it.

PS. If you have anything to add on this topic, please post your comment here, not on Kerry McCarthy's blog. We have made our point. There is nothing to be gained by posting further comments there. Let it lie.

Nuts about the smoking ban

The Rt Hon Hazel Blears, MP for Salford and Secretary of States for Communities and Local Government, famously loves motorbikes. (Dangerous beasts. Should we ban 'em?!)

Today, alluding to something completely different, blogger Iain Dale has published the final paragraphs of a speech Blears gave last week to the Local Government Association. They include the claim that:

In my time in parliament, we’ve seen controversies such as Academy schools. Opposed tooth and nail at the time; now an increasingly accepted part of the local education system. Or the smoking ban. One year one, considered a great success.

Clearly, Hazel hasn't been reading Kerry McCarthy's blog!

Now, I have no wish (no wish at all) to inflict upon Hazel the same avalanche of comments that Kerry received. Or to ask you to write to yet another MP who considers the smoking ban a "great success". (You'd never get any work done and we'd be here all year.)

On your behalf, therefore, Forest will drop Hazel a little note - with some of the comments that have appeared either here or on Kerry McCarthy's blog. (We will invite her to view Kerry's blog post in its entirety, comments and all, but I doubt she will bother.)

If you wish to add something that has not been published on either blog, you can add a comment to this post. Note: comments forwarded to MPs may be edited for reasons of space - and brevity. Where possible, please use a real name, even if it's only your Christian name.

Tighter controls needed, say doctors

Today's newspapers report that the British Medical Association wants tighter controls to "de-glamorise" smoking among children. Anti-smoking adverts should be shown before programmes and films that feature people lighting up, and censors must consider smoking scenes when classifying films and video games.

I can't help wondering ... if smoking in films is to be targeted (ie with an anti-smoking ad before the film starts), what about movies that feature violence, promiscuous sex and heavy drinking? At this rate, the public information ads are going to be longer than the main event!

PS. Metro reports that the BMA is calling for Britain to be smoke-free by 2035. I assume they mean prohibition. In 2035 I shall be 76. Just old enough to start smoking in a final gesture of defiance before I pop my clogs. I can't wait.

Kerry McCarthy replies

Kerry McCarthy has now replied HERE to the comments (207 at the last count) that appeared on her blog after I drew attention to her post praising the smoking ban and her chippy, class-inspired response to Forest's events at Boisdale and the House of Commons.

To her credit, at least she's read them and taken the time to reply. There is no meeting of minds, but I didn't think there would be. She has responded as any canny politician would - by remaining calm and riding out the storm without giving much away.

Don't be disheartened, or frustrated. The nature of the response will have been noted (even if she isn't saying as much). One, no other post on her blog has received a fraction of the comments that this one generated. Two, having implied that Forest (and by association our supporters) are a bunch of toffs with a taste for champagne, the response she got refuted that completely.

In fact, many of the comments supported what we have noted for 12 months - the overwhelming majority of comments, emails and telephone calls that Forest has received in the wake of the ban have come from "lifelong Labour voters" who insist that they "will never vote Labour again".

Finally, the anger and the resentment expressed by many people is clearly genuine. I don't doubt that Kerry McCarthy has met smokers who support the ban. But she will find it very difficult to argue that the ban is overwhelmingly popular with smokers and Labour's core vote. Our job is to make sure that she doesn't keep this information to herself but shares it with her colleagues.

As it happens, Kerry (and every other MP) will today receive copies of our documents (available on the Forest website) that highlight the economic and social impact of the smoking ban. They will also receive a Forest card with the message, "Labour isn't listening".

Kerry McCarthy and her fellow Labour MPs can stick their heads in the sand if they want. But this issue isn't going to go away. We'll see to that.

PS. As requested, most people kept their comments on the right side of civil. Thanks for that. Politeness costs nothing and - remember - we're trying to influence not alienate people.