Willie Rennie combines the convenorship of this group with his position as leader of the Scottish LibDems. Clearly this is a high-profile post.
This Cross-Party Group has authored the new Scottish tobacco control strategy to be published 'shortly'. They are not messing about:
The CPG was briefed on a draft version of the strategy late last year and Rennie says that while he is encouraged by the ambition within it, there were concerns about the lack of detail. “You can go for a smoke-free Scotland, which is technically below 5 per cent. But you need to have the policies that detail how you are going to get there."The CPG wants to 'bring down' the smoking rate from the high 20s to 5 per cent within 15 to 20 years. This involves a faster rate of decline in prevalance than at any time in the last ten years, and comes at a time when the drop in prevalence has slowed (if the trend in prevalence reflected below has continued into 2013). I am sure that we all look forward to reading the detail on this process of coercing, or persuading, people to drop a habit that they are being persuaded to believe is extremely addictive, and wonder whether this amount of coercion or persuasion will represent better value for money than it has in the past.
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| Figures on tobacco control and smoking cessation expenditure obtained December 2012. Smoking prevalence figures from Scottish Household Survey. Click to enlarge. |
The argument for tobacco control rests on the assumption that tobacco removes people's choice: its addictive qualities mean that people are not free agents and need the government's help to get out of the weed's clutches. Whether people have free will or not is an argument deployed vigorously in all walks of life – it is not unique to arguments about whether the government should offer assistance programmes in smoking cessation. In this field the government fails to respect individual autonomy declaring that tobacco is uniquely dangerous and demands official intervention, and then saying disingenuously to adults: 'Smoke if you like, we're doing this for the children.' If you protest, you're an addict, and if you're kids protest they've got it wrong too (probably because they have followed your evil example). Furthermore recent history suggests that the more money that is thrown at tobacco control, the less effective it becomes in persuading people not to smoke – perhaps because people resent the intrusion, perhaps because the proportion of people who want (or feel the need) to smoke will always be higher than 5 per cent.
