Tobacco Products (Plain Packaging)
Debate between Mark Field and Stephen Williams(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Stephen Williams (Bristol West) (LD)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on securing the debate. He is my honourable friend in a different context, as an officer in the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health, which I have chaired for the past three years.
We have two debates in Parliament that will attract public attention today—this one and the debate on lobbyists this afternoon. I think that we could move seamlessly from one to the other, because the fact that the Government have stalled on this important public health measure is proof positive of the effectiveness of the lobbying industry. The industry must see it as a triumph that it has caused the Government to stop and think again.
Over the past 18 months or so there has been frantic and frenetic lobbying by the tobacco companies to stop the Government introducing legislation to standardise the packaging of cigarettes. That is because it is the last remaining marketing ploy that the tobacco companies have. They have used the same arguments they made about the ban on smoking in public places and the display ban: that it will destroy small shops, and lead to a huge increase in smuggling and criminal activity. Those arguments were wrong then and they are wrong now.
Stephen Williams
The hon. Gentleman has spoken, so I will follow the Chair’s mandate and not give way.
Other people are lobbying against the policy, such as Unite the Union. I took part in a debate during the recess on BBC Radio Bristol with a shop steward from the tobacco packaging factory in east Bristol. He said that if legislation went ahead that factory would lose hundreds of jobs. I say to the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) that I see no problem at all with being a constituency MP—Imperial Tobacco, one of the largest tobacco companies in the world, is based in Bristol—and arguing against the tobacco trade, because tobacco kills people in my city and kills people from poorer communities. It is a public health tragedy that smoking now disproportionately affects poorer people in society. The middle classes have largely followed all the health warnings and given up smoking.