ASH are up to their old tricks

The masters of the manipulative survey are back

Former public health minister Steve Brine has written in support of Sunak’s tobacco ban for Conservative Home. Like nearly everyone who goes to the Department of Health, Brine went native and has never recovered. His article is the usual blinkered prohibitionist nonsense - he even denies that the ban will boost the illicit trade - but he starts with a statistic that sounds credible.

Two-thirds of adults in Britain back the Government’s smoking ban plan, including nearly three-quarters of Conservative voters, in a representative poll carried out by YouGov for ASH.

He returns to this poll in his closing paragraph.

The public understand that the Government’s smoking ban will save lives and improve the health and wellbeing not just of individuals and their families but also of our economy. That is why the overwhelming majority of the public and parliamentarians support the legislation.

Since 87% of Britons do not smoke and the UK has become an oppresively intolerant country in recent years, this claim wouldn’t surprise me. But I know better than to trust an ASH survey. Before the smoking ban, they conducted several polls claiming that most people wanted a total ban on smoking in pubs. They achieved this by giving people a binary option between smoking everywhere versus smoking nowhere. But when other polls gave people the option of allowing separate smoking rooms, most people were happy with that (and remained so for years after the ban was introduced).

The question ASH used in their latest survey is almost unbelievable:

“How strongly, if at all, do you support or oppose a goal to make Britain a country where no one smokes?”

You will have noticed that there is no mention of ban there. There is no mention of any policy, coercive or liberal, let alone the gradual prohibition of all cigarettes, cigars, heated tobacco, shisha and cigarette packs. It doesn’t show that ‘the overwhelming majority’ ‘support the legislation’. It is just an aspiration, a ‘goal’. It would be quite possible for a liberal who supports tobacco harm reduction but hates the nanny state to agree with this ambition.

71 per cent of the respondents said they agreed with this vague statement, rising to 72 per cent among Conservative voters and 76 per cent among Labour and Lib Dem voters (don’t ask me how the average came out at 71 per cent). Since the policy aspiration is less popular with Tories than with those who vote for the other two main parties, it is misleading of Brine to say “Two-thirds of adults in Britain back the Government’s smoking ban plan, including nearly three-quarters of Conservative voters.” How is 71 per cent two-thirds while 72 per cent is three-quarters?

But that is not the real issue. The real issue is ASH and Brine citing a poll that doesn’t even mention the tobacco ban as support for the tobacco ban.

It makes you wonder how popular this policy really is now that people have had time to think it through. The question ASH used seems like the kind of weasel words question that a pressure group might resort to when the results from an earlier poll that used a more specific question failed to produce the desired outcome.

The smoker’s rights group FOREST also has skin in the game, but they used a more accurate question in their poll when they asked ‘Do you think that when a person is legally an adult at 18 they should or should not be allowed to purchase cigarettes and other tobacco products?’ 64 per cent of respondents said they should and only 26 per cent said they shouldn’t.

Are the results of another poll lying around the ASH office, never to be published, I wonder? And if the Sunak prohibition is as popular as they claim, why are they resorting to such shenanigans?