News: Cutting cigarette intake 'of no benefit'

I Will not be joining my fellow smokers who try to give up today. This is partly because I am perverse, like so many Britons, and recoil from doing what the Government advises me to do. "National No Smoking Day", indeed! Pah! The cheek of it! How I admire all those non-smokers and ex-smokers who for 18 years have lit up only on this day, to show successive governments what they think of being nannied by the state.

I confess that a more compelling reason why I will not be giving up on this 18th No Smoking Day is that I am a hopeless addict, with no more will to resist than a moth drawn to a lightbulb. But a third reason is that I have always found smoking an invaluable aid to concentration and thought. For this last reason, I strongly advise Tony Blair and all his Cabinet to take up smoking, if only for this one day in the year. It is clear that they have an awful lot of thinking to do about smoking - and so far they have done absolutely none.

The first question that they should ask themselves, as they draw deeply on their Marlboros and Capstans, is this: what is the purpose of the Government's policy on tobacco? Is it to discourage the British people from smoking? Or is it to raise as much money as possible from smokers, by way of taxes and duty on tobacco?

Either of these aims, on its own, is respectable enough. Smoking is quite clearly bad for us, and it is at least understandable that a government concerned about the nation's health should wish to stop us all from doing it - just as successive governments have sought to stop us from taking heroin or buying poisoned food. But if the Government were seriously determined to stamp out smoking, why does it not seek to ban the sale of tobacco? Of course that would be politically very difficult, and no doubt the country's 12.8 million surviving smokers would have something to say about it at the polls. But at least it would be possible to respect a government that acted upon its convictions, instead of confining itself to preaching about them.

God knows, ministers have been quick enough to ban the sale of beef on the bone, or to destroy huge stocks of suspect cheese, on the thinnest evidence of a health risk. The case against smoking is much stronger, yet not the slightest attempt has been made to ban it.

It would be perfectly understandable, on the other hand, if the main purpose of the Government's policy on smoking were to extort as much money as possible from us smokers. If mugs like me are prepared to pay £4.37 for a packet of Marlboro, of which more than 80 per cent goes to the Treasury in excise duty and VAT, then more fool us - and so much the better for non-smoking taxpayers. But if this were the Government's aim, it would surely fix tobacco duty at a rate that would yield the maximum return for the Exchequer. It is not doing that either.

The trouble with this government is that it cannot decide whether its purpose is to discourage smoking or to maximise the tax yield from tobacco. It is trying to do a bit of each - and in the process it is failing in both aims.

The damning evidence for this is that in the four years since New Labour came to power, the number of smokers in Britain and the number of cigarettes smoked have actually gone up, after 25 years in decline. This is in spite of Mr Blair's attack on tobacco advertising, and the £100 million he is spending on his three-year campaign to dissuade us all from smoking (the No Smoking Day office alone has a full-time staff of five and a budget of £600,000 to stage its annual one-day event). Meanwhile, the amount raised from taxes and duty on tobacco has declined sharply - from £10.25 billion three years ago to roughly £7 billion today. And this during a period when the Government has increased the levy on cigarettes by more than £1 a packet.

It is now undeniable that tobacco duties in Britain have reached a level at which they are counter-productive: the more the Government increases the duty, the less money it receives - and the more people take up smoking. The reason for this, of course, is the great boom in tobacco smuggling.

The Tobacco Manufacturers' Association estimates that no UK tax is paid on as many as a third of all cigarettes now smoked in the United Kingdom. In some parts of the country, some 40 per cent of cigarettes smoked are imported from continental Europe, either legally or illegally. This is hardly surprising, when a popular brand retailing at £4.30 a packet here at home can be bought for only £1.80 over the North Sea in Belgium, or £1.40 in Spain. A vast smuggling industry has grown up, costing the Government by its own estimate some £5.7 billion in lost revenue between 1996 and 1999 - £4.2 billion in the last two years of that period alone.

The Government's only answer to this crisis so far has been to promise an extra £209 million to Customs and Excise, in the hope of recruiting an extra 1,000 Customs officers. Meanwhile the Customs have been persecuting smokers who choose to buy cigarettes abroad for their own consumption, as they are legally entitled to do. The strategy is not working, and it has no chance of working. The scale of the smuggling is so vast that even an extra 10,000 Customs officers could barely begin to tackle the problem.

What is needed is a bit of intelligent thinking by the Chancellor. Yet all he did in his Budget last week was to raise the price of a packet of cigarettes by 6p, in line with inflation. He neither cut the price to stop the smuggling, nor increased it to discourage that dwindling minority of us who pay UK duty on our cigarettes from smoking. In short, he chose to do nothing.