Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-06-13-Speech-2-078"
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"en.20000613.10.2-078"2
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"Mr President, as far as debates go, Parliament is familiar with some absolute classics which crop up regularly: human rights, bananas, mad cows, and now tobacco. We are here involved in revising three directives on the manufacture, presentation and sale of tobacco, cigarettes, snuff tobacco and other tobacco products. And, at this point, we have yet another classic debate, the one which concerns the legal basis: is this a matter to do with the market, in which case Article 95 of the Treaty establishing the European Community applies, or the rules of operation or indeed health policy? The matter has been referred to the Court of Justice of the European Communities. The rapporteur from the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market suggests kicking the ball into touch by referring the debate back. Whatever the case, we are required to examine the content of the report before us.
Regarding the content of the report, then, an accurate observation is made and the rapporteur makes some sensible proposals but, in the final analysis, the sideways shift sets in. As everyone recognises, the observation that tobacco causes disease and ultimately death is perfectly accurate, in the same way that the poverty generated by ultraliberalism is also ultimately harmful to health. Cigarettes contain tar, nicotine, carbon monoxide, additives, citrates, tartrates, acetates, nitrates, sorbates, phosphates, even fungicides, and all these end up causing lung cancer, cardiovascular disease and cot death in infants, with 500 000 people dying every year. Of course, many more people die too.
On the basis of these facts, then, some sensible proposals have been made. Tar content must be limited to 10 mg per cigarette and nicotine content to 1 mg per cigarette. There are even sensible suggestions to prohibit ammonia, which increases nicotine ingestion and thereby also dependence, and to earmark 2% of the profits made by tobacco multinationals for scientific research. These are intelligent and reasonable suggestions. There are also plans to provide information on the dangers of tobacco, and to protect children and even the infants at risk from sudden infant death syndrome. This, however, is the start of the sideslip into lack of realism, self-righteousness and fundamentalism. In other words, from an accurate observation and reasonable proposals, we move towards a problem that is even worse than tobacco itself.
What is this sideways shift? In the first place, there is the bureaucratic sideslip with the business of the label. We are putting labels on everything. Indeed, the ecologist’s neurosis is revealed by the fact that the subject of labelling is raised. We have labels on meat, wine, GM products, chocolate. It is the trump card that beats any freedoms. And now, labels on tobacco but, mark you, for labelling tobacco we are talking serious business. The label must cover 30% of the packet surface, 35% if the wording is bilingual, and 12.5% of the outer surface of the wrapping for pipe tobacco. The label must be printed in black on a white background and the borders must be at least 3 mm and at most 4 mm wide, an average of 3.5 mm. The labels must feature text, but not just any old text, it must be printed in black Helvetica bold type, 100% intensity. Thus proving that tobacco affects not only the lungs but also the brain.
The label must also feature a free telephone number for a body which the smoker can call to ask what dangers his habit involves. There must also be a slogan like ‘smoking kills’, ‘smoking is harmful to those around you’, ‘smoking impairs fertility’, and ‘smoking causes impotence’. So, seeing how impotent our governments are to deal with immigration, lack of security, tax problems, and unemployment, we can only conclude that they are heavy smokers.
This is clearly not, however, a sensible measure. Let me give one example: tobacco was introduced into Europe at the same time as the potato. Tobacco farming was started immediately but it took several centuries for the potato to catch on. That is how irrational things can be. Even if there had been a label on the apple to say that there was a risk of being thrown out of Eden, Eve would still have bitten into it!
What does that prove? Well, it goes to show that slogans are not effective, just as a price increase would not be effective, as it would only increase smuggling and crime. This is the sideslip into self-righteousness and hypocrisy. We are told that there are social costs. Yet the smoker pays excise duties of between 75 and 85% included in the price of tobacco. In my own country, revenue from excise duties is greater than that from recording rights. In other words, by smoking, the smoker is paying for the cost of his own cancer treatment. People have said that it is inconsistent to allocate a billion to tobacco farming and then pay out for the campaign against tobacco. True, but it is just as inconsistent to bomb Kosovo and then pay to rebuild it, or to eliminate internal borders and lose customs duties and then set up OLAF to defend the financial interests of the European Union. In demographic terms, is it not inconsistent, ladies and gentlemen, to permit the loss of 5 million Europeans per annum due to abortions and then to weep over 500 000 deaths due to smoking?
Then there is the puritanical sideslip. The rapporteur sends a shiver down my spine when he speaks of social aberrations, social instincts. What I hear is: the Social Democratic Sweden of the 1960s sterilising fifteen year old adolescents because they were social misfits. I hear: moral order, the Salem witches. I hear: the Puritanism of northern Europe, these reformers desperate to reform everything, including the way we eat and drink. I hear: northern Europe banning wine, on the pretext that wines are harmful to health, but not banning injecting oneself with all sorts of substances. It is the same puritanical streak shared by Robespierre, Pol Pot, the Greens and the Quakers. Our rapporteur is a Liberal and should not forget the lessons of laissez-faire Liberalism: let them live, let them be born, let them drink and let them smoke."@en1
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