The usual tobacco control industry stooges were stuck on ASH and CRUK broom handles to spout their mendacious cockwaffle, but this is a particularly grubby response from the debate's proposer - and member of ASH's puppet APPG - Bob Blackman.
Gerald Howarth (Aldershot, Conservative)
As my hon. Friend rightly said, the Government consulted extensively. Some 665,000 people responded to that consultation, of whom 64% opposed what he is advocating.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East, Conservative)
It was not a referendum or a vote; it was a consultation. It is the power of the arguments that matters in a consultation, rather than necessarily the volume, particularly when the arguments are organised by a lobby such as Philip Morris.Just take that in for a moment. A member of the UK parliament is entirely dismissing around 420,000 objections to the consultation simply because he doesn't agree with them. Instead, later in the debate he has this to say:
[...] a February 2013 poll on the issue found that, overall, 64% of adults in Great Britain were in favour of standardised packaging—great public support.
A further poll by YouGov, conducted in March, showed support for the policy from 62% of Conservative supporters, 63% of Labour supporters and 60% of Liberal Democrats.Specifically, this refers to polls by ASH themselves, and a pollster whose President is a trustee of ASH. For Blackman, this is perfectly acceptable 'evidence', whereas a necessarily impartial government consultation is somehow bent.
Plus, note the typical smoke-hater tactic of trying to pretend any objections are solely placed by tobacco companies. No, Bob, they are valid objections - closely scrutinised by the Department of Health - from real people.
Now, we've charted here the disingenuous, mendacious, crooked, and downright corrupt nature of the tobacco control industry's campaign, but surely an MP (who would claim to be a fan of democracy) passing off nearly half a million voters as irrelevant puts a rotten cherry on the top of a very nasty cake, doesn't it?
Like I said, I'm still trawling through the transcript, so please do go read the whole thing and - with the exception of a few honourable MPs in opposition to Blackman - see how many other instances of manipulative language, truth distortions, and bare-faced lies you can spot.
UPDATE: Stone cold lie from Cambridge Lib Dem Julian Huppert:
"I think that we have seen different data sets from Australia. My understanding is very clear that there is a substantial reduction [of people coming forward to smoke] there."
