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Donna Edmunds: How an obscure Swedish tobacco product could hold the key to reversing Cameron’s EU problems

­­­­­Donna Edmunds is the Head of Media for the Bow Group and Director of Research at Progressive Vision. Follow  @bowgroup and @ProgVis on Twitter

Screen shot 2013-05-27 at 16.50.43When Cameron and his team contemplate their policy shift in response to UKIP’s popularity, they ought to consider not just the message, but how it is delivered. The media loves to portray Farage with pint and cigarette in hand – indeed, the pint has become something of a motif in recent weeks, whilst a recent BBC report featured a lingering shot of a slowly burning cigarette. Presumably the left-wing media assumes that this will in some way degrade Farage in the eyes of the public. ‘Look at this lout, he drinks and smokes! How could anyone expect him to run a country?!’ In fact, it is his ‘man of the people’ persona that really drove people to UKIP in the polling booths at the local elections, not any one policy on immigration or Europe.

So how to counter? Whilst Obama is occasionally snapped cigarette in hand, taking a fag break round the back of the White House to contemplate the trickier problems of state (and somehow makes it look cool), it is unlikely that Cameron could pull off the same look. He has spent too long trying to appeal to the organic tofu-eating, husky-hugging Notting Hill set to sport smoker chic successfully.

Intriguingly, the answer could lie in his heavy handed promise to renegotiate the European treaties. There is much scepticism from all sides that any such renegotiation could be managed; the Continentals are too wedded to a federal Europe to contemplate letting little old Britain pick ‘n’ mix its way through the treaties. This may well be true, but Europe does still have a Parliament, and a Council, and therefore the means for negotiation on a case by case basis.

Whilst not part of a treaty, the Tobacco Products Directive, which is currently being reworked, offers ample opportunities for Cameron’s team. Last broached ten years ago, the current directive is deemed out of date thanks to the arrival of new non-tobacco smoking products such as electronic cigarettes. Consequently the Commission has decided to revisit this area in the name of public health, yet the current proposals fly in the face of scientific guidance.

The most controversial and damaging part of the Commission’s draft concerns the EU’s approach to reducing harmful impacts of smoking. The Commission’s proposals effectively crush all products that provide smokers with less risky choices, killing the electronic cigarette market, providing no serious legal framework for new, less harmful tobacco products, and maintaining the EU-wide ban on the Swedish tobacco product known as snus.

The arguments against plain packaging and in favour of allowing electronic cigarettes are well known by now, so let me instead discuss snus. The ban on snus was imposed in 1992 following the controversy about a different smokeless tobacco product known as Skoal Bandits and justified on health grounds. But as Sweden managed to negotiate an opt-out from the ban when it joined the EU, we have a good basis for comparing actual health outcomes. Sweden has similar overall levels of tobacco consumption to the rest of the EU, but has managed to achieve the lowest rates of smoking of any member state along with the lowest rates of smoking-related death in the developed world. How has it managed to do this? Countless studies point to the same conclusion. Since the 1980s, large numbers of Swedes – particularly Swedish men – have managed to quit smoking by using snus as a substitute.

The European Commission’s own scientific advisers acknowledge this. They also point to evidence showing that snus is at least 90% less harmful than smoking, does not cause lung cancer and is not a risk factor in oral cancer. At the same time, they dismiss the idea that snus acts as a gateway to smoking. In short, the availability of a tobacco product with a far lower risk profile than cigarettes has enabled many Swedish smokers to switch, leading to a significant net improvement in health.

Current UK policy on snus favours the status quo, as it did when the last Labour government was in. If the Conservatives in Europe (both in the Parliament and the Council) can steer a reversal on the ban on snus through the European Parliament, this would allow the Cameron administration to make a stronger argument that reasoned negotiation with our European brethren is possible.

Moreover, there is a strong case to make that tobacco products and smokers’ health should be removed from Brussels altogether under the principle of subsidiarity as defined under Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union. If the Conservatives could successfully persuade the Brussels machine to drop legislation at European level on tobacco entirely, they would be able to make a much stronger case back home that a change in the balance of power at EU level is possible.

Finally, these measures specifically would allow Cameron to paint himself in a more libertarian, smoker-friendly light, something more of a man of the people, and to distance himself from the Notting Hill set. Win-win-win all round for Cameron and snus. 

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