Every day a no smoking day soon?

Few people need reminding how bad smoking is for you. Even a majority of smokers want to give up. And, the ASA recently rejected complaints of the rather gory effects of cigarettes by the Heart Foundation as being necessarily graphic for public health. Smoking causes over 5M deaths globally each year (no doubt contributing to the 8M cancer deaths in the world each year) and kills more people than war, murder, Aids, TB and malaria - all put together.

And unless smoking rates are checked in China and India (the latter now introducing a ban on chewing tobacco) it will continue to kill even more people throughout the rest of this century. In UK it’s still over 100,000 deaths each year from tobacco, the biggest single killer, with the resulting cost and strain on the NHS. In UK we now have all cigarettes hidden behind cupboards in shops and supermarkets.

While this year should see the introduction of plain packaging – already available in Australia and Eire - to remove Marlboro etc branding (perhaps even the horror packs in Canada and Vietnam showing rotting teeth etc). Vending machine sales of cigarettes have gone and it’s now law to forbid smoking in cars with children.

But shouldn’t we do more? A stated ambition of the NHS is a Smoke Free England by 2020 (Finland estimates by 2025 for their citizens) which is looking unlikely given smoking rates stalled at c.18% and even a slight increase in under-16’s.

Surely there are a few simple ways to improve smoking reduction:

# ban smoking at outdoor tables in cafes and restaurants - one of the quirks of the smoking ban is that every outdoor table now seems to be reserved only for smokers

# designate public smoking and not-smoking spots eg a particular street corner etc – and not in parks or beaches

# end the range of cigarettes supplied to prisons by Aramark etc: why should public tax fund different choices of cigarette brands for criminals? And provide free no smoking patches etc and even early release for quitting smoking as part of a wider reoffending strategy

# issue retail store tobacco permits and specify brands etc – and gradually reduce both stocks and stores. At the very least stores will realise tobacco sales are coming to an end ever more rapidly and can source other more hi-growth products for sale

# create a smoker’s register for over 50’s (a habit that’s difficult to break after years of smoking) for tobacco prescriptions from pharmacies and smoking cessation aids as a full ban is introduced

# ban cigarette sales to under 21’s

# job creation in areas with tobacco factories for when production ceases

# increase the penalty from fines to jail sentences for stores carrying illegal tobacco

# end smoking in all vehicles: a distraction from driving like mobile phones

# redirect DFID and EU aid to Malawi one of the main suppliers of tobacco leaf and poorest nations in the world – for different crop production and subsidy/tariffs. Again if farmers know tobacco is coming to an end then they will seek other more viable crops

Essentially tobacco would then be a limited – and reducing - product and unavailable to be smoked except in the privacy of your home or certain public spots, and no nearer than say 20 feet of the huge majority of people that are non-smokers. And none of these reforms would be costly or complex to implement – with the possible exception of the smokers register – Big Government hardly acquits itself with glory where IT and databases are concerned.

And given at least 50% of smokers die off early, smoking will be a habit largely confined to the elderly, and by 2020 or soon after, rapidly falling to under 10% of rest of the population and then it will simply be banned, except with a medical prescriptions, like any other harmful and addictive drug. The only surprise is that it’s taken 60 years since cigarettes were first proven as the most dangerous product available.

A breath of fresh air for all of us.

@timg33

Meningitis and CSR

With over 700,000 signatures the meningitis vaccination petition is the largest ever parliamentary petition dwarfing the signatories to keeping Donald Trump out of UK. I must admit to being perplexed meningitis wold be routinely refused on the NHS? And it is concerning that any new vaccinations would take months to produce – a real failing of UK health policy. The UNICEF and Proctor and Gamble Pampers 1 Pack-1Vaccine campaign is inspiring in contrast and has rolled out globally with over 300 million vaccines in c.5 years and plans to end maternal tetanus.

Google taxing. A bit.

It does seem astonishing that both Google and the Inland Revenue somehow think a decade of not paying tax in the UK and now suddenly paying £130M – about a 3% tax rate is somehow inspiring. If anything as with Starbucks suddenly about-facing and paying large wodge of tax it does make you wonder what the Board of Directors were doing. Tweaking the tax yield is to be expected – but paying a zero rate of years then a derisory sum when found out? Hardly corporate governance at its best. And worrying that the light-touch regulation that destroyed the banks if not the wider economy is continuing. Only one LIBOR banker jailed despite widespread rigging of the financial rates. And now it turns out that 6 of the main UK companies didn’t pay any tax at all last year. Hopefully the G7 Summit in Japan in May (as Lough Neath began) will end the farce of Double Irish and Dutch Sandwiches and UK Caribbean tax havens and blatant shenanigans such as rebilling Head Offices offshore to reduce profits. Consumers aren’t fooled and have long memories.

Sugar and soda tax not taxing

Surely the writing is on the wall for much of the food and drinks industries and sugar? Just today the latest announcement that an - average - child will eat its own body weight in sugar each year. 22kg of sugar the weight of an average 5 year old imbibed through sodas and sweets and cakes. Surely progressive food an drinks industries should be detailing how and when they'll achieve zero sugar in their products? It's not taxing - but soon will be.

Nurofen pain

The Nurofen scandal seems brought upon themselves. It's quite outrageous using the same painkiller application - and not just in different packaging and prices - but supposedly for different uses such as migraines or period pains. What were they thinking? They may as well have claimed added water? Pharma companies have to be especially careful of not just their brand but how the product is actually used. Brand magic - customers prefer branded Nurofen to the same unbranded commodity painkiller - seems to have been stretched beyond credibility to mere brand pixie dust. It raises another interesting point with the kick-off of the SDG Sustainable Development Goals in January 2016 for completion before 2030. One of the goals is delivering sustainable consumption - to some extent that's fairly easy now with recycled packaging or solar energy becoming far more mainstream. The days of capitalism in effect being subsidised by the environment are over. But without advocating some sort of Stalinist central planning control how far can advertisers - and retailers - deliver the same or very similar products and brands and claim sustainability? Do we really need - and can the planet cope with - 20 different washing powders or 20 different dog food brands for 7BN people? Is it ultimately irrelevant anyway in the next few years if recycling and zero emission delivery trucks remove the Climate factor from consumption? Certainly with the EU spending as much on the various dog food brands as it does on Third World aid there are also questions around both sustainability and prioritisation of resources. But certainly Nurofen as with VW and the emissions scandals (the later losing 20% of share value already) will certainly face consumer and industry backlash over their ethics in prioritizing their customers. Sincerely yours, www.sincerityagency.co.uk

FCO able to boost UK exports?

The Economist and Chatham House calling for a 0.2% GDP target for FCO diplomacy – perhaps useful given aid target, current spend lower than a city council and reorganisation of UK military. But certainly UK foreign policy in the Middle East has bene unbelievably weak from Libya to Yemen to Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the BBC today cites UK foreign investment is, despite all the efforts, at its lowest level for a decade: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34996207 While criticism of a mercantilism strategy for the FCO and UK exports eg for the first time emphasising Creative Industries belies the weak performance of UK in the past – and the current target likely to be overdue by some 34 years. And of course the Commonwealth even after the latest Heads of State meeting last week still somewhat adrift in terms of a role for the nations and UK. Even jaw-jaw has its limits. Sincerely yours www.sincerityagency.co.uk

WPP £43M Sorrell pay and houses and hotels

Some strange points from Martin Sorrell of WPP’s £43M pay package yesterday: • Claiming £50k because he was using his houses in NY etc rather than staying in a hotel for WPP meetings? Is he serious? He has a house in a town where there’s a WPP meeting and he uses that to stay in? And then issues an invoice his shareholders for the notional cost as if he was using a hotel? Presumably a rate based on The Four Seasons rather than a Travellodge too! • Justifying the salary on the basis he created and built WPP? Eh? Without downplaying his Master of the Universe scenario too much WPP was hardly built the way say Ogilvy founded and built O&M from scratch. Sorrell bought existing companies with bank loans. It’s a holding company of existing businesses. They happen to be advertising and PR and design firms but could be any widget manufacturer. Hence WPP originally being a supermarket trolley company. To paraphrase the Gates and Buffett scenarios, Gates built Microsoft into a computer company while Buffett invested in already existing companies. The financial yield may be similar but the effort is qualitatively and quantitavley different and not really comparable at all unless say with venture capital or finance firms. Indeed as a business owner I wonder if Ogilvy or Gates would have considered staying at their own house and rebilling it to their company? Will Martin be having a cup of tea in his kitchen and rebilling the cost of a cup of tea in the Ritz? Paying himself the hotel doorman’s salary because he opened his own front door? Bizarre. And on top of a £43M pay package. As a shareholder I would be rather miffed. And after the Great Crash of 2008 it makes companies seem focused on greed. With over 50 FTSE CEO’s earning over £1M perhaps there is a need for a maximum salary of say £500k or £1M and a cap on bonuses/benefits and certainly bonuses linked to share price for what are very well paid managers of huge and existing companies? Sincerely yours, Tim www.sincerityagency.co.uk PS: • Good news that a soda/sugar tax is on the cards to be introduced and banning fast food ads before the 9pm watershed. Why not? More room then for advertisers of healthier foods as well as other industries. And certainly the smoking ban on television has had no effect on the advertising industries – and the sooner the UK follows Eire and Australia to plain cigarette packs the better.