To all our friends and supporters ...

To regular readers, and to all friends and supporters of Forest and The Free Society, have a very happy Christmas.

ASH, the DH, and £191,000

Last week the Sunday Telegraph published THIS letter in which I highlighted the ways in which the Department of Health had manufactured the results of its own consultation on future tobacco controls.

In passing I mentioned that ASH had been given £191k by the DH "for its Beyond Smoking Kills report". In this week's paper (21 December) Peter Kellner, president of the opinion polling organisation YouGov and chairman of the editorial board that produced the report, took issue with my letter. Among other things, he wrote:

In his effort to disparage Action on Smoking and Health’s report Beyond Smoking Kills, Simon Clark makes some errors. Mr Clark says that the report was funded by the Department of Health. The report was actually funded by Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation.

If I read this correctly, Kellner is saying that ASH didn't receive money from the DH for its Beyond Smoking Kills report. Fair enough. But let's look at the evidence:

(1) On Thursday 16 October 2008 Conservative MP Nicholas Soames received from health minister Dawn Primarolo the following answer to a written question:

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) received funding from the Department [of Health] in the current financial year in accordance with the 'Section 64 General Scheme of Grants to voluntary and Community Organisations'. ASH has received this grant specifically to carry out a defined project entitled "Capitalising on Smokefree: the way forward".

(2) In its notes to the financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2008 ASH lists a project called "Beyond Smoking Kills - the next steps", thoughtfully adding:

This project provides an information base and communications to support further progress on tobacco control policy and smoking cessation following on from the White Paper "Smoking Kills". The Department of Health made a Section 64 grant of £191,000 to this project.

I may be wrong, but I suspect that "Capitalising on Smokefree: the way forward" is the same project as "Beyond Smoking Kills - the next steps". Not that it matters: the note in the financial statements (2) is pretty clear.

Given this evidence, does Peter Kellner still believe that ASH didn't receive money from the DH for its Beyond Smoking Kills report? I think we should be told.

Obama smokes - call the cops!

The Guardian has surpassed itself today. According to "cultural critic" Joe Queenan, "It is a measure of how desperate the American people are that they do not make more of a fuss about their newly-elected president's filthy habit." Full article HERE.

Best comment so far: "I can see a good opportunity for David Cameron to build his relationship with Obama - next time they meet he can just ask him if he fancies stepping out for a smoke."

They don't like it up 'em

Too many Christmas parties this week - which is why I am only just catching up with the following stories.

Chris Blackhurst, city editor of the London Evening Standard, is the latest journalist to question the nature of the "public" consultation on future tobacco controls. On Monday he wrote:

What also bothers me is how the proposal [to ban tobacco display] was developed. First, in the summer, the Department of Health launched a consultation and then, through organisations it funds, controls or has very close links to (ASH, Cancer Research UK, Smoke Free North East, North West and so on) it launched a campaign to create an appearance of "overwhelming public support" ... Surprise, surprise: the DoH reports that 84% of the 96,000 respondents were in favour of pushing cigarette sales under the counter.

Blackhurst's comments follow THIS press release which was issued by Forest last week. It has also been sent out with the 2008 Forest Christmas card (above) which has gone to journalists, broadcasters, MPs and (of course) the Department of Health.

Meanwhile there is evidence that the anti-smoking lobby is rattled by recent developments. How else do you explain THIS story from Sunday's Observer ("MPs fall foul of 'dirty' tricks by tobacco giants")?

I assume, reading between the lines, that the "story" was given to the paper by ASH. They don't like it up 'em, do they?

Update on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 by Simon Clark

The Tobacco Retailers Alliance has issued its own comment on the DH report. Curiously, despite submitting a response to the consultation (and organising a petition on the No 10 website), the TRA "was not even listed as having given a response". Ken Patel, national spokesman for the TRA, said:

"The Tobacco Retailers Alliance provided clear evidence from both Canada and Iceland which shows that display bans have not impacted youth smoking in those places, while at the same time having a very detrimental effect on retailers. Yet nowhere does that evidence appear in the report. In fact, the Tobacco Retailers Alliance was not even listed as having given a response. Meanwhile the report appears to hang on every word of publicly-funded, orchestrated campaigns. Ministers talk about this being the biggest response ever to a public consultation. Yet over half of all responses came from a publicly-funded organisation, Smokefree North-West, led by the DH Regional Tobacco Policy Manager. We seem to have this extraordinary situation where government is giving public funds to organisations in order to lobby itself, while ignoring the pleas of legitimate small businesses."

Full response HERE.

Just fancy that!

The Daily Mail today reveals that "The ban on smoking in public has failed to increase the number of people quitting". It adds: "A survey of almost 7,000 across all age groups found on average there was no change in the number of cigarettes that smokers said they had. But in men aged 16 to 34, the number rose, by one and a half cigarettes a day." The figures, says the paper, "are a massive blow to Labour's public heath policy".

Full story, including Forest's response, HERE.

Taking liberties with liberty

Since I launched this blog in March 2007 there has been a critically acclaimed film called Taking Liberties, and the British Library is currently hosting an exhibition, also called Taking Liberties. The latter was opened on 29 October by Gordon Brown (who else?) with lots of mutual backslapping.

Thankfully not everyone falls for the idea that Britain is a beacon of tolerance and liberty around the world and on The Free Society website Dennis Hayes, founder of Academics for Academic Freedom, offers his own - somewhat caustic - review of the exhibition.

In Taking Liberties you can join in the historical and contemporary debates by picking up a wristband and answering questions in each section. You even have a Citizen Number. I was Citizen Number 127659. Although you cannot be traced or identified, it is scarily New Labour, with a hint of childish wristband wearing activism.

At the end of the exhibition you can become part of the struggle for liberty by putting ‘Your Thoughts’ on a ‘post-it’ note on a wall. That’s what freedom of speech comes down to in the British Library – freedom of speech as graffiti or litter that no one reads.

Well, I did. The best comment I found was ‘I’m off to the pub’ and there is still more chance in contemporary Britain of getting into an argument about something of substance over a pint in a pub than playing at being a ‘citizen’ in this exhibition. That is until the government bans heated argument and sends free thinkers out to stand and shiver with the smokers.

Full article HERE.

Smoking: the next logical step

Neil Rafferty is not only a spokesman for Forest. He's also one half of The Daily Mash, the UK's No 1 satirical website which he created with fellow journalist Paul Stokes. I sense Neil's hand in THIS article, entitled 'Smokers banned from looking at cigarettes while smoking'. "Smokers will have to hold a large piece of card over their face so they cannot look at the cigarette they are smoking, ministers said last night."

How "public" consultations work

God help me, I have now read the Department of Health's report on the Consultation on the future of tobacco control. According to the DH website, "Over 96,000 responses were received ... the largest ever response to a consultation of this kind. Responses overwhelmingly supported removing tobacco displays in shops, and tough action to restrict access to vending machines. Since the ban on tobacco advertising, retail displays in shops are the main way in which tobacco products are marketed to children."

Is there really "huge public support" for further tobacco controls, as the antis consistently claim? I wonder. Of the 96,515 responses, the overwhelming majority were pre-written postcards or e-mail campaigns. Note where they came from:

I'm pleased that Forest was able to generate over 2000 responses (in just under three weeks), but as you can see this figure was dwarfed by that of the publicly-funded anti-smoking industry which managed to conjure up 79,272 respondents - 49,507 from Smokefree Northwest, 8,128 from Smokefree North East, and a further 10,757 from something called D-MYST.

FACT: Smokefree Northwest is led by the Department of Health’s Regional Tobacco Policy Manager based at Government Office for the North West at Piccadilly, Manchester.

FACT: Smoke Free North East (aka Fresh) is funded by the region's primary care trusts and is linked to an alliance of health, public sector and community organisations.

FACT: D-MYST is SmokeFree Liverpool’s youth organisation (ie yet another public-funded initiative).

Factor in the £191k that the Department of Health gave ASH for its ‘Beyond Smoking Kills’ report (which, surprise, surprise, found a ‘high level of public support’ for a range of tobacco control measures) and you don't have to be a genius to see how the result of the consultation has been manipulated to favour the DH's proposals which included a ban on display and a ban on vending machines.

In fact, this wasn't a public consultation at all. It was a public sector consultation!!

The incredible thing is - for all their resources (including manpower and public money), the antis still failed to get the full package of controls their energetic, high-profile lobbying demanded. They must be gutted.

PS. There's a short piece on this subject in The Times today. Click HERE.

Update on Thursday, December 11, 2008 by Simon Clark

MPs will be debating the Health Bill in the House of Commons shortly after midday today. The debate should feature some comments about the tobacco display ban. This will be interesting, if only to find out which politicians (and parties) are prepared to stand up and oppose the government's proposal.

The truth about youth smoking rates

Repeatedly yesterday I found myself having to respond to the government claim that youth smoking rates in Iceland have fallen by ten per cent since the introduction of a tobacco display ban. Likewise, I was told that similar bans have been just as successful in Canada and Thailand.

Chris Snowdon, author of Velvet Glove Iron Fist: A History of Anti-Smoking (available online), has written a very good response to these claims HERE.

Johnson bows to Mandelson

Quick recap: yesterday, health secretary Alan Johnson (left) announced, in a written ministerial statement, that the government "intends to bring forward primary legislation in two areas of tobacco control to protect children and young people from smoking". He added:

"We will bring to an end the practice of exposing children to the ubiquitous promotion of tobacco products in retail environments by removing the display of tobacco at the point of sale. We also plan further controls on the sale of tobacco from vending machines, by seeking powers to either remove machines or require age restrictions to limit the easy access young people have to this source of tobacco."

For all the gloom and doom being expressed here and elsewhere, this isn't as bad as we feared a few weeks ago. It's not good, obviously, but let's look on the bright side. Not only has the government shied away from banning vending machines and introducing plain packaging, it's worth remembering that the display ban won't be implemented until 2011 (large retailers) and 2013 (small shops). Bearing in mind that Labour may not be in power by then - and the Conservatives are opposed to a display ban - there is reason to hope that it won't happen. (Scotland is a different matter.)

Yesterday's statement was principally about saving face. Having declared, earlier in the year on national TV, that he was in favour of banning vending machines and the display of tobacco, Alan Johnson had to announce something. But the real winner, in political terms, was business secretary Peter Mandelson who demonstrated - not for the first time - where the real power in government lies.

Broadcast news

Well, the government has finally announced that it intends to ban the display of tobacco in shops. I'll comment on this further when I get a moment (probably tomorrow). In the meantime I'm in London, dashing from Television Centre to the Millbank studios in Westminster to Broadcasting House and back to Millbank in order to give Forest's side of the story.

So far I've been on Five Live, BBC1 Breakfast, BBC News, Channel 4 News and three local stations (BBC Radio London, Newcastle and Cambridge).

This afternoon I'm being interviewed for the BBC's Six O'Clock News. After that I'll be alone in a small studio at Western House off Great Portland Street talking to no fewer than twelve BBC local radio stations. Some of these interviews are live, others are pre-recorded. Full running order (with times):

1530 Sussex
1538 West Midlamds
1545 Stoke
1552 Nottingham
1600 Cumbria
1608 Wales
1615 Hereford and Worcester
1622 Northampton
1630 Leeds
1638 Lincolnshire
1645 Derby
1652 Berkshire

After that I hope to go home because I've been up since 3.00am and, worse, I've got an absolutely stinking cold!

BTW, you can see me on the BBC News channel HERE.

Breakfast at the Beeb

Busy day tomorrow. Early risers can hear me on Five Live's Morning Reports, followed by BBC Breakfast. Then, if all goes to plan, Channel 4 News. And IRN. No prizes for guessing what I'll be talking about. I'll keep you posted.

I say, Jeeves, damn fine book

Talking about books (see below), Dave Atherton has alerted me to Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology by Geoffrey Kabat.

Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist who is currently senior epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City (ie he's no fool). He is best known, perhaps, for the Enstrom/Kabat study into passive smoking which was peer reviewed and published in May 2003 by the British Medical Journal.

According to the study (the largest ever of its kind), the link between ETS and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than is generally believed. Together with James Enstrom (University of California), Kabat found that exposure to ETS, as estimated by smoking in spouses, was not significantly associated with death from coronary heart disease or lung cancer at any time or at any level of exposure.

These findings, said the authors, suggest that environmental tobacco smoke could not plausibly cause a 30% increased risk of coronary heart disease, as was generally believed, although a small effect cannot be ruled out.

Kabat's new book would seem to complement this report. "The media constantly bombard us with news of health hazards lurking in our everyday lives," says the blurb. "But many of these alleged hazards turn out to have been greatly overblown."

Hyping Health Risks is available HERE, price £10.89. Amazon customers who bought the book also bought What Risk? by Roger Bate, and The Road to Serfdom by Hayek. Curiously, they also bought Jeeves And Wooster: Complete ITV Series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. What ho!

Reading matters

I don't read as many books as I'd like. Come the end of each day I'd rather read a magazine or watch an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm on DVD. (If I die during the night, at least I'll have died laughing.) Even on train journeys I spend most of my time on my laptop or reading the papers.

For me, the best time to read books is on holiday, and Christmas is no exception which is why I always ask for books, socks, hankerchiefs and more books. (A Sony Reader would be nice too.)

This year, if I get two or three of the following, I'll be happy: Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life by Jeremy Lewis (Harper Press), The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948 by Janie Hampton (Yellow Jersey Press), Frank Skinner on the Road: Love, Stand-up Comedy and The Queen Of The Night (Century), FA Confidential: Sex, Drugs and Penalties. The Inside Story of English Football by David Davies (Simon & Schuster), Killing My Own Snakes: A Memoir by Ann Leslie (Macmillan), and Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson (Orion Books)

There's one other book I shall be reading over Christmas. It's called The Bully State and it's by my old friend Brian Monteith. Brian has spent much of the last year abroad - in Africa and America - and in his free time he's managed to write a 45,000 word manuscript that highlights the state of Britain today.

It's currently going through the editing process but we intend to publish it - with a suitable fanfare - in February or March. Watch this space.

And the award goes to ....

The current issue of Total Politics has an eight-page "advertisement feature" paid for (?) by Insight Public Affairs, "a leading lobbying and public relations agency".

IPA has invited 12 people, including a few D-list politicians, to write a series of articles highlighting "good" and "bad" examples of political lobbying. One of the contributors is that old booby, the Rt Hon Lord George Foulkes, once an MP and now a member of the Scottish parliament and the House of Lords.

As an example of "bad" lobbying, Foulkes writes:

Forest tried to convince me, against a growing avalanche of evidence to the contrary, that smoking was harmless. Since I was vice chair of the All Party Group on Smoking and Health and had tabled a Bill in 1982 to ban smoking in public places, they get my 'Runner-Up Award' for futility in lobbying.

Runner-up? How kind. To the best of my knowledge, however, Forest has never argued that smoking is harmless (although a great many smokers do live long and healthy lives, which raises some interesting questions that the anti-smoking lobby refuses to answer). We have always accepted that there are risks associated with smoking, but why let the facts get in the way of a cheap shot?

What interests me more is that Foulkes is basically admitting that he has long since made up his mind about smoking-related issues, and that's that. Nothing anyone says to him is going to change his mind. Nor is he prepared even to listen to a group whose views don't square with his own. Quite an admission for an elected politician, a so-called "servant of the people". (But not a surprise.)

I'm not naive enough to think that politicians with entrenched views are going to change their minds. (They're human, after all.) But it would be nice to think they could spare a moment to hear what we have to say. Given the alarming impact of anti-tobacco legislation - thousands of pub closures, social lives ruined etc - that's not too much to ask, is it?

It makes you wonder if there is any point to the political process. After all, why bother having all those parliamentary debates, select committee meetings, "public" consultations and private meetings if they have no intention of listening to all sides?

So Forest gets Lord Foulkes' 'Runner-Up Award' for "futile lobbying". I take comfort, however, that the winner of his 'Bad Lobbying Trophy' is (wait for it) the Countryside Alliance. It seems that Lord F is a rather sensitive soul who takes exception to what he sees as the CA's rough house tactics, especially an "angry, loud and abusive march which brought Bournemouth to a halt during the Labour party conference".

Now, if I'm not mistaken, the ban on fox hunting is going to be overturned by the next Conservative government, so I would hardly accuse the CA of "futile lobbying". In fact, the long-term success of their campaign (fingers crossed) gives Forest (and, I'm sure, other lobby groups) every encouragement to continue with our own activities.

Futile? We'll be the judge of that.