Earl Howe (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Quality), Health; Conservative)
My Lords, [...] we are disappointed that the Commission’s proposal to regulate nicotine-containing products, including e-cigarettes, as medicines was not supported by the European Parliament. We believe that these products need to be regulated as medicines and we will continue to argue for this during further negotiations.
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It is undoubtedly true that we can never do enough to raise our game on smoking cessation measures, one of them being nicotine-containing products.
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My Lords, our position is clear: e-cigarettes should be regulated as medicines. These products need to be regulated for safety and quality, one of the reasons being that, as medicines, we can more effectively control their sale to children and the way that they are advertised and promoted.
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My noble friend is right. E-cigarettes certainly have the potential for being a force for good in helping smokers to quit. At the same time, we do not want them to become a gateway into smoking.Just as an aside, this is indeed the same Earl Howe who happily references tobacco control propaganda denying that a single pub has closed because of the smoking ban; who was in favour of plain packaging of tobacco by the end of 2011 with his puppet-master Debs Arnott viewing from the gallery; and who held clandestine meetings with CRUK to discuss plain packs while the {cough} impartial consultation was still ongoing.
In short, he's firmly in the pocket of pharma lobbyists.
Yesterday, new Under-Secretary of State Jane Ellison revealed a little more about the government's approach to the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) including this on e-cigs.
We are currently considering the detailed amendments that the European Parliament would like to make. We were disappointed that the Parliament did not support the regulation of nicotine-containing products as medicines. We believe that the medicines regulatory regime, applied with a light touch, is the best fit for these products. Although I cannot say too much more about that now, we recognise that there is a lively ongoing debate on that subject, and it is one that we are engaged in.Indeed they are. Because, you see, they didn't think the TPD was dictatorial enough!
We want member states to have the flexibility to make further progress on domestic tobacco control measures in certain key areas, potentially going beyond the new directive, and we have been helping to shape the final text of article 24 to try to achieve that as an objective.Presumably this means striving to ensure that the MHRA - a body only last year described as "an organisation whose activities are entirely financed by a levy from the pharmaceutical industry" - are free to classify e-cigs as medicines regardless, and for the government to ignore half a million of its electorate (or 64% of those they consulted) by introducing evidence-free plain packaging.
Indeed, preserving this sovereign 'freedom' was precisely what motivated Ellison's predecessor Anna Soubry to usurp democratic parliamentary process by voting on the TPD without consulting the EU Scrutiny Committee as she was supposed to do back in the summer.
It doesn't seem to matter whether you're a smoker or a vaper, Howe, Ellison and their Department of Health chums will do pharma-backed tobacco control's bidding whatever you or the EU think.
It comes to something when our own government is more extreme, unaccountable and undemocratic than the EU, doesn't it?
