Monday 5 June 2017

Everything Changes But ASH

There was a bit of a blast from the past on Twitter today when ASH Wales tweeted this.


"Story" is the operative word here, because - as we have come to expect from tobacco control - it linked to a document containing a succession of fake facts like this, for example.
Some of the industry’s claims, and the facts, used in the campaign include: 
- Standardised packaging (in Australia) has led to an increase in youth smoking 
Data from Australia has been misquoted by the tobacco industry in attempts to substantiate this claim. The data used does not include enough under 18s for the figures to be reliable.
As I have explained before, this is rot. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) did, in fact, describe the data as "considered sufficiently reliable for most purposes".

Still, that's nothing compared with this huge whopper about the cost of tobacco displays
- Shutters to put tobacco out of sight will cost small retailers thousands of pounds 
This is simply untrue and cost-effective covers can be bought for as little as £120.
You'll notice that the link to an ASH London page is a dead one, which is probably for the best because the claim that shutters would only cost £120 is a downright lie which was uncovered by FOI requests in 2009. I wrote about it at the time, as did Chris Snowdon; you can read about how ASH deliberately and grubbily misled politicians in parliament by reading his report, The Dark Market (highly recommended), see the document Lord Darzi used to mislead MPs here, and the email where Debs Arnott was told explicitly that she was misleading legislators here.

Yet here we are eight years later and ASH Wales are still repeating this lie! Shameless stuff.

As it happens, at the time retailer groups told the Evening Standard that a gantry would actually cost around £1,500, and what did it turn out to be? Well, once shops were forced to comply, here was the deal being offered by the National Federation of Retail Newsagents.


Just the fact that the NFRN were offering credit terms to small newsagents should tell you that the £120 figure quoted by ASH - and tweeted again today by their fellow tax-leeching Welsh colleagues - was never even remote true, and they damn well know it.

As a curiosity, the dead link which ASH Wales's reiteration of the £120 fabrication once took you to was an ASH PDF which is still available on the Wayback Machine. The source for ASH wales's £120 is therefore an ASH APPG briefing and was put forward by a retailer from the North East called John McClurey.
During the debate over legislation to end retail displays of cigarettes, I remember seeing lobbying claims from trade bodies claiming that the legislation could cost retailers over £10,000. I’ve just worked out the bill for the curtains I will need to put over my gantry for cigarettes – it comes to only £120.
Isn't it uncanny that he "just worked out the bill" and it came to the exact same false and fraudulent figure that ASH had deceived MPs with, eh?

But then I've written about John McClurey before too. He is the only retailer in the entire country that ASH can find who despises smokers enough to agree with their hideous bullying of tobacconists, hence why they use him for absolutely everything.

In fact, he even turned up today in ASH's timeline too, again bemoaning the fact he has to sell those pesky fags that he makes profit from.
The truth is that selling tobacco for me is a burden not a benefit and one I wish I didn’t have to shoulder. I have to tie up lots of money in stock — money which I could spend more usefully elsewhere, and space which I could put to better use.
Well stop selling them John, you melt, no-one is forcing you! But then, do you think that - just as with the £120 lie he faithfully parroted back in 2009 - someone was putting words in his mouth or, more likely, writing the article for the dozy twat?
I hope the incoming government will continue to prioritise working towards a smokefree future and publish a new strategy to achieve this without delay.
Is this the same 'strategy' that ASH have been screaming about since last summer, by any chance? I think it might be you know.

People say that life moves on and everything changes over time, but perhaps not in the ASH echo chamber. Just as they are still trying to lumber e-cigs with medical registration like they were back in 2010, they are also still using the same useful idiot as they were in 2009 - who is still selling tobacco 8 years on, by the way - to try to pretend that their policies don't hurt newsagents, and are still regurgitating the same £120 gantry lie which was an abuse of the parliamentary process back 8 years ago and has been proven comprehensively to be false in the meantime.

It's astonishing that government is still willing to lavishly fund, with our taxes, such a comprehensively dishonest bunch of self-serving charlatans. 



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