Endless battle with illicit tobacco market - BBC

The BBC has been waking up to the scale of Britain's illicit tobacco market. Packs of illicit whites sold for a fiver are one of the more visible symptoms of a country in which rules and regulations are treated as optional. We free marketeers have been warning that this would happen for years but were given short shrift. The BBC isn't ready to admit that we were right, but the problem is too big to be ignored completely.

 

The latest BBC story ignores the demand side and focuses on the supply, which appears to be endless. Indeed, the article is titled 'Endless battle': Fighting the crime gangs taking over the high street.

 

Swansea has become a hub for counterfeit rolling tobacco, says Harries. He says the trade is controlled by Chinese gangs in the city who are making "phenomenal" amounts of cash this way.

Chinese migrants, brought in on student visas, are forced to work illegally and stuff hundreds of pouches of tobacco every week, he says.

"The amount of money [the gangs] they can make selling tobacco is greater than if they were selling drugs," he explains.

The counterfeit tobacco is supplied to predominantly Kurdish gangs, who then sell it under the counter in mini-marts, according to Harries.

 

Having attended the scene of the fire, the BBC asks the arsonist for her opinion.

 

The chief executive of the anti-smoking charity Ash, Hazel Cheeseman, says that although the illicit tobacco market has declined over the last few decades, it remains a concern. 

 

The illicit tobacco market has quite obviously grown over the last few decades, which is why it is a news story. It has grown incredibly quickly in the last four years. HMRC's estimates don't reflect that because they based on untenable assumptions. It is a mathematical impossibility for only 10% of the cigarette market to be illicit. The true figure is around 25-30% and the figure for rolling tobacco is considerably higher. 

 

The BBC doesn't challenge Cheeseman's claim despite reporting in the same article that "Illegal cigarettes, tobacco and vape products were seized from 3,624 shops across England, Scotland and Wales in 2024-25". How many were seized decades ago, one wonders? 

 

The recent surge in black market sales has been driven by some exceptionally large tax hikes pushing smokers to breaking point. So what does the fool Cheeseman suggest?

 

She urges the government to pass legislation to toughen licensing rules for the sale of tobacco, and gradually phase it out altogether.

 

Phasing it out is a euphemism for prohibition which would make all sales illicit but, as history repeatedly tells us, would not eliminate the sales. 

 

The article doesn't mention the all-important tax issue, although it did get a passing mention in another BBC article a few weeks ago: 

 

Professor Georgios Antonopoulos, criminologist at Northumbria University Newcastle, believes money is at the heart of it. "Legal tobacco products in the UK are subject to some of the highest excise taxes in the world," he says.

 

Having followed events in Australia, we can see how this will play out. We have just reached the point where fears about the illicit trade can no longer be dismissed as tobacco industry scaremongering. That is a start. The next stage will involve more money being spent on enforcement, which will fail to make more than a dent in the problem. Politicians will then make a big deal about increasing fines and prison sentences for smugglers. That won't make much difference either. We may then see some pointless legislation, such as Cheeseman's suggestion of 'tougher licensing rules'. That will only inconvenience legitimate traders. 

 

The preposterous Tobacco and Vapes Bill will be portrayed as somehow offering the solution even though it will obviously make things worse. Tobacco duty revenues will continue to plummet. The black market may or may not turn dramatically violent, as it has in Australia - it's too early to tell - but a time will come when the BBC and a few MPs start to admit that the root of the problem is the unaffordability of legal tobacco. In Australia, the ABC and the Guardian have been hugely supportive of 'tobacco control' but even they have had to admit that its excesses have led to disaster and that taxes are simply too high.

 

We will only reach that point when the scale of the problem is understood by the general public - a process sped along in Australia by more than 200 firebombings and several murders. That time is not far enough and when it comes, the denialists in 'public health' will have switched from claiming that there is no problem to claiming that the problem is now so big that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle and therefore can't be solved by lowering taxes. Mainstream politicians will agree, saying that lowering taxes would 'send the wrong signal'.

 

And so nothing will change, but the truth will at last be acknowledged.