Friday 12 July 2013

Plain packaging officially ditched

You may have heard the news. I've written a blog post about it at the IEA Lifestyle Economics blog.

The Department of Health public consultation on plain packs has also been published. The BBC reports that "53% of those responding to the consultation were in favour of plain packaging while 43% had urged the government to take no action on the issue". This is not true. There were 666,233 responses, of which 2,444 (0.4 per cent) were detailed submissions. 53 per cent of those 2,444 submissions approved of the policy—unsurprising since many of them came from state-funded public health lobbyists. Indeed, it's a shock that this slender majority wasn't larger.

Of the 99.6 per cent of respondents who voiced their opinion through co-ordinated campaigns, nearly two-thirds opposed plain packaging. That, surely, is the relevant figure.





2 comments:

Junican said...

Couple that with the Mirror poll which found that 80% are against the smoking ban and the Bolton smoking shelters fiasco, and it might just be the case that the people are waking up.
Few of them will know the word 'fascism', but they know it when they see it.

Unknown said...

Such write-up may likely be mind-numbing. Whilst when i realize that evaluate, Many people once-in-a-lifetime.

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