Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-10-08-Speech-2-010-000"
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"en.20131008.5.2-010-000"2
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"Madam President, colleagues, the day has come, we are having this debate and we are going to vote at 12 o’clock. It has been a long slog to get here, with thousands of amendments, but I sincerely hope today that this Parliament will do the right thing.
Before going into details about the vote, maybe we should just pause for one minute and remember what this law is really about. The key aim is to stop young people from being recruited as the next generation of smokers. We know it is children, not adults, who start smoking, and despite the downward trend in the number of adults smoking across our countries, in the last few years the World Health Organisation reports worrying upward trends in a number of Member States amongst children. Maybe products such as these have something to do with it: nice pink lipstick products aimed at recruiting young girls as smokers, products called ‘Allure’ with flowers on them, chocolate filter papers. We have got to stop the tobacco companies using gimmicky products like these to recruit young people and we have to make sure that the warnings are highly visible on these packages. You can hardly see them on these tiny little packages.
For me, there are four key issues we are going to vote on today. The size of the warnings: in Canada, large pictorial warnings were brought in just over 10 years ago and the number of young smokers has halved to 12 %, with 29 % in the EU. So please, do not vote to reduce the size of warnings to 50 % – that is a key demand of the tobacco industry and in accepting it we would put ourselves behind a number of EU countries today. The Council has voted for 65 % because they do not want to go backwards on public health, and nor should we this morning.
As regards the position of the warnings: it does matter where the warnings are. The warnings should be at the top of the packet, visible at the point of display and not hidden at the bottom by the displays. If we put them at the bottom, the displays will all hide them. Please do not listen to those siren voices calling for you to move the warnings to the bottom.
On flavourings, the Commissioner said when he introduced this law to Parliament that tobacco should look like tobacco, smell like tobacco and taste like tobacco and I totally agree. Our own Scientific Committee on Health has said that menthol cigarettes act as a local anaesthetic to reduce coughing and actually allow smokers to inhale more deeply. It is a growing market in Europe. The American Food and Drugs Administration finds that tobacco companies are aware of the appeal of menthol cigarettes for younger novice smokers because they are easier to smoke. Let us get rid of the flavouring. Slim cigarettes targeting mainly young women: if you do not believe me, read what the tobacco companies themselves say about slim cigarettes. They are designed to be smaller, slimmer, less masculine, aimed at the female under-30 market.
Those to me are the four main things. And then there is the question of e-cigarettes. We have amendments here, some to have no regulation, and then amendments to have some form of regulation, and we are going to debate what kind of regulation. I hope we can have a sensible calm debate on this issue and not some of the misrepresentations we have seen in recent weeks.
Finally, time is running out in this Parliament. The Council has already agreed a common approach. The group leaders all asked Commissioner Borg to put this legislation on the table. In fact it was a condition of his hearing. He did that in December last year. It would, to me, be totally unacceptable if now this Parliament held up this legislation. How do we explain that to our voters? Colleagues, please support this legislation and please let us start negotiations."@en1
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