Tobacco Products (Plain Packaging) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
Tony Baldry
Main Page: Tony Baldry (Conservative - Banbury)Department Debates - View all Tony Baldry's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
Tobacco Products (Plain Packaging)
Tony Baldry Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)
When I was a child and until I was about 18, I spent every Christmas day on the wards of my father’s hospital. They were old Nightingale wards with beds on both sides. On one side of the male wards were the old soldiers whom my father and GPs had conspired to bring into hospital to give them a good Christmas. On the other side were men who were dying of lung cancer, which is a bloody awful way to die. In effect, sufferers drown because they cannot breathe. It is degrading, they fight for breath and they need oxygen tanks. It is a horrid way to go.
In the 1950s and 60s, many of the chaps who were dying had started smoking during the great war when the link between cancer and smoking was not clear. That is clear now, and although smoking rates have dropped significantly since the 1950s when my father was appointed a consultant, it is a striking and sad fact that one fifth of adults in the UK still smoke. More disconcerting is the fact that more than 200,000 children a year start smoking.
The point I want to make to the Minister—I understand her position of wanting an evidence-based approach—is that, having read the Library briefing and the briefing from various groups, which sensibly sent it to colleagues for the debate, it is not clear to me what research the Department of Health has done. We all know the desperate impact of smoking on people’s long-term health and the risks of dying prematurely, not only from lung cancer but from other illnesses. What research has been done to understand better why so many youngsters still take up smoking and what more can be done to discourage them from doing so?
Having a father whose study was full of cancerous lungs in jars was a pretty significant disincentive to taking up smoking, in addition to seeing people dying from cancer. There is a disconnect here. Human beings are supposedly rational and sentient, yet each year some 200,000 youngsters make a decision that will have serious long-term consequences on their health and that of others.