Thursday 20 January 2011

Stunning Stat Of The Day

You find some real jaw-droppers wandering round TheyWorkForYou.com - via a question from ex-Pubs Minister (when he could be bothered) John Healey last week, we find that Department of Health tobacco control advertising for 2005/6 accounted for a staggering 75% of total spend.

That's three times the amount the DH spent on everything else they deal with ... combined.

Overall in the past five years, the DH has spent 42.57% of its entire advertising budget on stopping people smoking.

Considering the government shovels its TV and radio expenditure towards the Central Office of Information, who spent ten times that in 2009, it's to be assumed that this doesn't include the eye-watering sums chucked at wall-to-wall media ads.

Nice to see they've got their priorities right, eh?


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wrote to Lansley a few months ago to complain about the 'take 7 steps out, advert. What I was complaining about was the crap science.

His rep replied justifying tv ads re smoking on the grounds of the 100 000 deaths and considered the money well spent.

Needless o say, he totally ignored the real point of my letter - the crap science.

Dick Puddlecote said...

How many people can even make 7 steps outside their homes before either climbing a fence or, like most I know, falling a few floors?

Not something Lansley, or those who advocate the 7 steps, would ever experience.

Anonymous said...

It might also have to do with this idea. If you wish to have influence and control over the media, enough so that they will never question a thing they are being asked to say, to never question the junk science and never turn down broadcasting and printing propaganda - then what better way to insure that cooperation other than providing huge advertising revenues, which is where the money goes to, to buy media space and time. So getting the propaganda out there serves multiple purposes, the propaganda itself being one, but creating the symbiotic relationship between government and media reliance on government based ad revenue, makes it financially lucrative and in all involved parties' best interests (health officials and employees, media owners and employees, others involved) to just keep the whole ball of wax going - indefinitely if they can get away with it. That is the real reason I think so much money goes into health propaganda spending for ads - not because of savings lives but because it oils the machine of the media and they are much better accomplices that way to hiding the facts and reporting as they are told - basically. Otherwise, the ludicrous and unproven SHS Fraud would have been disclosed as the fraud it is decades ago, not have injury added upon insult by MSM now taking up the cause of THS unquestionably.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and did I say, the taxpayer actually pays for this - also unquestionably. What a racket, isn't it - but they used to put mobsters in jail. Now they just put them in the health department and call them anti-smokers.