The headline features show further restrictions on tobacco without infringing bourgeois right.
1. Ban on tobacco advertising brought forward by one year
2. Tobacco advertising on clothing also to be banned
3. Cost of nicotine patches on the National Health Service to be reduced.
The last argument is presented in an interesting way. No, non smokers are not subsidising smokers by this move. Smoking is the biggest cause of preventable ill health in this country, so in running the NHS, the Government has a duty to reduce it. Reasearch shows that people who use nicotine patches are twice as likely to be able to give up smoking as those who don't.
The patches are going to be targeted for the poorest section of the population.
This move by the government demonstrates their approach to health is substantially influenced by a social model of ill health, rather than the specific disease model favoured by the previous Conservative government with its promotion of the "internal market". [There was some doubt when Labour came to power that they would abolish the internal market, but it has vanished rapidly and invisibly. Indeed within 18 months, private GP fundholders have been swept away into Primary Care Groups of clusters of GP practices numbering 100,000.] Whether you have a social model for disease or a specific illness model, has an impact on the running of society, and indirectly for the battle between capitalism and socialism.
And to revert to tobacco, early in the new Labour Government there was a scandal that they were found to have taken very large donations from Formula 1 Racing, sponsored heavily by the tobacco industry. The trailed government announcement shows that strategically it has not succumbed to that bribe, although it might have done.
On a more personal note, it was a particular pleasure this morning to watch the spokesperson of the UK Tobacco Manufacturer's Association, try despite his advancing spread, to wriggle. This was none other than John Carlisle, Tory MP, and previous champion apartheid spokesperson in the UK, always ready to drop of a crate of South African wine.
No, Carlisle remarked ingenuously in the course of the conversation, he himself was a non-smoker. But it was fallacious to suggest that if tobacco advertising was banned, children would stop smoking. After all, the present advertising is very adult and difficult to understand. Besides what really needed to be done was to stop the smuggling of cheap cigarettes [particularly rich comment in view of the evidence that the tobacco companies have quite knowingly supplied vast quantities of cigarettes to places like Andorra, knowing that they must be colluding in smuggling]. And that the sale of cigarettes to children should be the responsbility of tens of thousands of poor corner shop keepers who rely on the tobacco trade, to police children's age, whereas the rich tobacco monopolists should be regarded as having clean hands. He suggested there need to be more measures to help check on children's age, and this indeed seems a real possibility that children will in the next few years get identity cards. But the weakness and the class hypocrisy of his position was an object lesson. Also the fact that he clearly had no expectation of winning.
No smoker's bourgeois democratic right to smoke will be infringed by these measures, but the UK government will have moved against the profits of the tobacco manufactuers.
Chris Burford
London