More positive news?

[Greigster]

17m 20s in.

This of course does not mean TPD will not be enacted.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06srwfz/prime-ministers-questions-16122015

[nanotm]

he made it sound like he wanted to say "yes" but is having his hands tied behind his back to prevent him doing so ...


but like all politicians he's a snake oil salesman and being the leader of the party he sells his brand better than the rest /

[unclegromit]

He's only saying what he's been told to say. Nothing has changed. TPD will be enacted.

[dagl]

Wonder if he's stalking us?

Daaave!! C'mon introduce y'self!

[djs]

I think 99% of the politicians interested specifically in e-cigs equate TPD with safer e-cigarettes.

They haven't spotted the baby with the bathwater moment.

[nanotm]

the funniest thing I have heard or read about the whole e-cigs debate is over taxation losses,

yet the numbers don't add up, the uk makes around 12 billion a year from tobacco sales as taxation, it spends 13 billion a year on stop smoking products and services and (apparently) another 14 billion a year on tobacco related illness treatment so given those headline figures your looking at a deficit of 15 billion a year, but because I'm generous and government figures are a bit like wading through treacle i'll say that the tobacco related illness figure actually contains the stop smoking figure so its really only a 2 billion a year deficit....

if all those smokers moved over to e-cigs as consumer products the government will make 20% on every item sold from vat, if they were clever and refused to licence any e-cigs as medical products then outright ban all tobacco products get rid of stop smoking stuff and bingo ever consumer will be chugging a consumer e-cig (that they happily bought) and we get rid of the tobacco related income deficit overnight.

looking at it this way would save a lot of arguments all round, the entire TCI would be out of a job, the global poisoners would need to find new ways to kill the population and all those ineffective NRT products could be ignored (at monstrous savings).

now we know the people at the very top of government are actually on side perhaps its time they put their money where their mouth is and did this for all of us, sure they would still need to regulate the stuff that went into our food based products (via the food standards agency) but the country would be healthier and wealthier overnight, they can then ignore the greater part of the TPD and be a beacon of hope to the rest of the world for taking such brave new steps unshackled from the rot of corporate corruption that is big pharma /big tobacco and freeing the country of billions a year in wasted cash!


lets hope dave really does have an account on here and actually reads it maybe it will give him a pointer in the right direction, clearly all his so called advisors are just mouthpieces for those with a vested interstest in smothering the competition of small underdog consumer products companies and one man bands.

[Ron]

politicalscrapbook.net/2015/12/tory-mp-gets-cameron-to-endorse-vaping-after-1650-jolly-from-e-cigarettes-firm/


One seems to be E-Lites

[djs]

Tobacco tax/duty revenue is £28 million per day. Getting on for £13 billion a year.

Stops smoking services bill is around £250,000 per day. Getting on for £90 million per year. 7% of the revenue 'paid back' to help people quit.

ASH say the cost to society is £13 billion but they have thrown everything including the kitchen sink at that. ASH want that figure to prove there is no money either way to discourage/encourage anti-smoking measures based on cost. But, ASH are not trustworthy generally when it comes to painting a picture.

For example, certain 'accountants' estimate we, the people of the UK "lose" £3 billion due to smoking breaks.
So, going for a coffee and a wee costs nothing. Going for a smoke at the same time costs £3 billion.

Figures like this are bunkum. It's the same as a local council saying "if we rebuild this roundabout for £1.5 million, the local economy will be better off by £57,238 per day" (£20 million a year). Bad maths made up to keep people in jobs.

- -

The NHS say the cost to them is under £3 billion - these figure are accurate. £3 billion vs £13 billion, plus HUGE savings on pensions.

Smoking makes a profit for the government.

[nanotm]

tobacco revenue has rarely topped 9.5 billion a year though, the cost of inpatient treatment to the NHS was 1.5 billion in 2005 (and that has risen in line with everything else ever since) the cost of outpatient treatment was reported at 4 billion a year and the cost of prescribed NRT was reported as being 500 million (actually paid to the drug companies for the products) since 2005 the numbers have all grown a lot but not been reported as accurately, furthermore they don't include the cost of the staff or the 423 stop smoking groups that are funded through the back channel methods and cost 6 billion a year to run, its no wonder they don't want to publish more recent figures the cost of running all that stuff has at the very least remained static and it doesn't include the cost of running the various lobby groups (also funded through quango's) or the individual group media costs (paid for by a spate budgetary mechanism to the main national stop smoking campaigns)

the figures are understood to be at least double the previous levels reported recorded more than a decade ago, and yet revenues from tobacco products have fallen year on year as more people turn to alternatives (like e-cigs often after a failed attempt to use pharma produced NRT)

I didn't actually use the ash nonsense for the figures either I took them from various government spokes persons giving statements over the last 6 months when talking at various occasions about the whole thing, none of them deviated from the 12 billion a year tobacco tax though they often swung wildly about how much treatments cost but you would expect the various DoH ministers to get them broadly correct since htye are the people signing the cheques each month /