Electioneering starts but public increasingly interested in anti-smoking money trail

The Scottish general elections will take place this May. Scottish Liberal Democrats chose the occasion of No Smoking day to address the nation. How can they fail to win enormous numbers of seats with a message like this? All available resources must be used to help people stop smoking? Is this really a national priority? It's nice to know that Mr Finnie took his role on the Health & Sport Committee so much to heart though.

In another neck of the political woods Big Brother Watch discusses 'The vested interests of the anti-smoking lobby', and speculates about the money trail that sustains the likes of Action on Smoking and Health and ASH Scotland. There is no doubt that there is an enormous conflation of interest between those who campaign to restrict smoking and those who stand to benefit from the sales of nicotine cessation medicines. Look no further than this website: those giving the presentations, the delegates, the sponsors (and check the archive pages from last year), all have a career interest in anti-smoking. We were outside the hotel in Glasgow as the delegates emerged last year, over 600, mostly publicly paid anti-smoking careerists, sporting a memento jute UKNSCC bag for their briefing papers and notes, and travelling from all four corners of the UK.

The money spent on this exercise is formidable, and let us remember that some of those who receive this public money think nothing of excluding ordinary members of the public like Mr Gilligan from public health policy discussions, simply because their path in life took them into a sales role instead of public health. It's a case of some being more equal than others.

The money trail does need to be more widely understood. At the bottom is a battle between drug companies and the general public. Drug companies seek a monopoly position and they compete against tobacco for the same customers. The state and the World Health Organisation help them out, even though their track record is compromised. Why is the state taking sides with pharmaceuticals against their own people, and why is the World Health Organisation doing exactly the same thing?

Why is everyone saying that the bastards running the tobacco companies are beyond comparison rent seeking and careless of public health, when disregard for public health goes with the territory of many big companies – and small ones – in all walks of life.

In the words of detective novelist Ian Rankin: 'We spend most of our time chasing something called "the underworld", but it's the overworld we should really be keeping an eye on.'