“We Must Destroy the Tobacco Control ‘Nazis'”

In response to a post by Forest’s Simon Clark that pro-smokers were losing the argument by calling the public health community “Nazis”, Davis replied:

My view is that these people must be called Nazis. Anything else is actually dishonest. They must have respectability withdrawn from them, just as they have themselves withdrawn it from others. They must be treated with the contempt with which they treat other people …. What we have is a state of war. And the sooner that people like Simon Clark recognise it, the better. We must set out not to debate with these people in a civilised manner, because that is impossible. We must set out to defeat them, and to destroy them, and destroy everything that they stand for, everywhere in the world. ²

Attack on Linda Bauld

The Letter to Linda

Davis penned a “letter to Linda Bauld” including the lines: “Those nasty emails and phone calls you’ve been getting weren’t organised or planned by anyone. I shouldn’t worry about them too much. It’s just the trailing edge of the swarm, like the zephyrs on the perimeter of a hurricane. But they’re not going to stop. They’re going to become more and more frequent. You should start worrying when bricks start getting thrown through your window, or messages daubed on your door. They won’t be planned or organised either. They’ll just happen.”
“Better still would be to leave the country .. That way you’ll be out of the country and maybe even living under a new name when your old university department gets torched, and your old colleagues are strung up from lamp posts.” ³
The article, which was also emailed to Bauld by mummybest see Anonymous Tobacco Trolls. For more on this see also:

• Letter to Linda
• Linda Bauld

Comments on Davis’ blog by others in response to this article

“You didn’t really think you could continue forever kicking people in the face with unanswered blows did you? No more hiding behind your protected academic immunity status while raining gutter level vitriol down on right decent folk. All the while you sit back reading and drooling over all of the ‘you stink’, ‘you’re filthy’ and ‘good riddance’ comments you’ve purposely incited. You love it, you cold blooded, majorly-credentialled snake … The dam is about to burst. You have no idea of how much pent up hostility is going to spill over the top when it finally breaks.”

Another posts a link to the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, saying “There are more than enough Tobacco Control “researchers” who may be feeling left out of this controversy and wondering why they have not been contacted.”
Another commentator translates it to German: ” Even if most Germans never heard of Linda Bauld, we have our own “Linda Baulds” who need to read something like this. :-)”
And one says: “It does not surprise me that the quack physicians and the quack professors involved in the Stirling Uni thing are horrified. Their whole cosy universe is about to be blown apart.”
Another says simply: “Need a Rope!”

“Zealot”

This was not the first time Davis had criticised Bauld. In March 2011 he wrote:
“This report is by an anti-smoking zealot called Linda Bauld, and was no doubt conducted by a whole team of similar zealots, who were always going to find that the smoking ban had had next to no social adverse effects.” ⁴

Attacks on Deborah Arnott

Davis’s blog has attacked Deborah Arnott of ASH on more than one occasion:

“I Would Bludgeon her to Death”

Discussing a TV debate between Deborah Arnott and Dave Atherton from Freedom2Choose, Davis commented that “to be quite honest, if I’d been in Dave Atherton’s shoes, I’d have had a hard time preventing myself from strangling Arnott on the spot and on camera, or bludgeoning her to death with a microphone stand. ⁵

“Weaving Fiction” and “Hitlers”

In April 2012, Davis wrote: “And it’s why Deborah Arnott’s experience as a TV director or editor matters: as director of ASH, she’s just as much weaving a fiction as she ever was when she worked for ITV … The Deborah Arnotts (and also the Hitlers) of the world believe that Orson Welles had discovered a way of controlling and directing people”. ⁶.

“Put a Bulls-eye on her Forehead”

One comment posted in reply to Davis’ blog stated: “I just had a brainstorm regarding cigarette cases. My first instinct was to put Arnott or Glantz on the front with a bulls-eye on the forehead and then I thought – wait.” ⁷

References

The post Frank Davis appeared first on TobaccoTactics.

Simon Hills is an associate editor of The Times magazine and columnist for The Free Society. ⁸

Articles

• Simon Hill, No choice, no quality, worse tobacco, The Free Society, 8 February 2012

References

The post Simon Hills appeared first on TobaccoTactics.

Articles

• Suzy Dean, Is anywhere free from the anti-smoking lobby?, spiked, 19 June 2009.

References

The post Suzy Dean appeared first on TobaccoTactics.

Jason Smith is a writer for Spiked Magazine. ¹²
Smith is also convenor of the Birmingham Salon and a member of the Battle of Ideas organising committee. He is a columnist for The Free Society campaign run by the tobacco-industry funded group Forest. ¹³

References

The post Jason Smith appeared first on TobaccoTactics.

Big Brother Watch describes itself as a “cross-party, non-party, independent non-profit organisation leading the protection of privacy and civil liberties in the UK”. It states that it uses both advocacy and campaigns and independent research and investigations to “inform policy and public debate”.¹⁴ It was founded in 2009 by Matthew Elliot, who also founded The TaxPayers’ Alliance.¹⁵

Pro-Tobacco Activities

Against the Point of Sale Display Ban

In November 2010, Mahendra Jadeja, the former president of the Federation of Independent Retailers (NFRN) (formerly known as National Federation of Retail Newsagents), attacked the Point of Sale Display Ban on the Big Brother Website, arguing it would “bring about a growth in the illicit cigarette market” and would force “many shops” to the wall “simply because the excessive cost of changing the shop gantries.” ¹⁶

Risks of Second-Hand Smoke “A Complete Fabrication”

In January 2011, the chair of Freedom2Choose, Dave Atherton wrote a guest blog for Big Brother Watch. He argued that his “area of expertise are the restrictions of smoking”. He then argued that The Tobacco Display Ban would have “no impact on youth smoking.” With regard to the “supposed harm of passive smoking (PS)”, he argued that “best it is exaggerated and at worst is a Labour Party dossier of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, complete fabrication.”¹⁷

The Letter to the Daily Telegraph

On 9 March 2011, Daniel Hamilton, then the Director of Big Brother Watch was one of 11 signatories of a Letter to the Editor to the Daily Telegraph attacking the Government’s position on tobacco control and arguing against further restrictions.

“Tax Doesn’t Reduce Consumption”

Two weeks later, in response to the 2011 Budget, Daniel Hamilton attacked the increase on cigarettes and tobacco. “Drinking beer and smoking cigarettes is a matter of basic personal choice. People should have a right to enjoy these perfectly legal products without the nanny state seeking to tax their personal preferences out of existence. “People’s response to ‘sin taxes’ is, generally, to sigh and pay them – the result isn’t to drive down consumption, but to increase the government’s tax take.”¹⁸

No Longer Involved in the Tobacco Debate

In May 2012, when asked to clarify whether Big Brother Watch was or previously had received tobacco industry funding, Nick Pickles replied: “We’re not involved in the tobacco/health/plain packaging debate and have not made any public statements on the issue for at least six months. I joined as Director in September 2011. We do not intend to do so for the foreseeable future.¹⁹
In January 2018, Big Brother Watch published a press release in response to the news that medical records were given to US firms connected to the tobacco industry by Public Health England. Silkie Carlo, Director of Big Brother Watch, was quoted in the release as saying that it was “appalling” and “unacceptable” that sensitive patient data was given to “a non-medical, corporate outfit paid by the tobacco industry – the very cause of many of those patients’ disease”. Big Brother Watch also supported calls for an inquiry into the issue by the Health Select Committee.²⁰

Personnel

As of January 2020, the Big Brother Watch website lists two staff and five board members.¹⁴

• Silkie Carlo – Director
• Griff Ferris – Legal and Policy Officer
• Lord Paul Strasburger – Chair of Board
• Al Ghaff – Board Member
• Dinah Rose QC – Board Member
• Mark Littlewood – Board Member
• Tim Knox – Board Member

Former Staff

• Matthew Elliott – Former Chief Executive
• Nick Pickles – Former Director
• Daniel Hamilton – Former Director
• Alex Deane – Former Director

References

The post Big Brother Watch appeared first on TobaccoTactics.