To Play The Game, You Should Really Understand The Rules

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but then some with very little knowledge have made a lucrative living on the back of their ignorance.

Take Simon Chapman, for example. Fresh from a triumphant tour of Europe including a London stopover - on expenses, natch - chatting to a dozen of his pals, the increasingly irrelevant fossilised tobacco control brick-brain has been pouring forth again. This time about the upcoming industry GTNF conference.

Ahem, Simon, here is what that link says.

"... in setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, Parties shall act to protect these policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry in accordance with national law"

Parties, Simon, parties. In this context, parties are national governments, not individuals.

Looking down the list of speakers to which the geriatric Aussie plonker links, there is not a single one who is affiliated with any national government anywhere in the world! So his pointing to the WHO's article 5.3 is entirely irrelevant, as is mention of 180 nations who are collectively sending no government officials there.

We should be careful not to be too harsh on poor old Simon in case this is a dementia thing, of course, but it does kinda help if someone involved in the tobacco control scam were to actually know something about the rules that his grubby profession created. Doncha think?

I do sometimes wonder where these strict tobacco control scruples disappeared to when UK and hundreds of other national government officials attended COP6 in 2014 in a country which had just blasted a packed passenger plane out of the sky and was under worldwide sanctions.

It's a puzzler, isn't it?