Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am afraid that I am totally unconvinced by the retailers’ campaign. I will not repeat the arguments, but I thought that they were very ably put by my noble friend Lady Northover. I, too, am a cynic and I have seen many such campaigns before. I am more convinced by the arguments of Professor Hastings, and particularly his surveys of young people’s behaviour, which is backed up by my observations of the behaviour of my own children and their friends and, indeed, the behaviour of the young people I dealt with when I was in clinical practice. It is also backed up—I do not think that anyone has mentioned this so far—by every medical body, medical college, NHS federation, nursing college and cancer research campaign. Every medical organisation you can think of is backing the Government’s position. That should not be dismissed lightly. If you have any doubt at all in your own minds, my attention was drawn to something that I found in my background reading: British American Tobacco’s guidelines on marketing. Those state that point-of-sale displays set out, ""to generate interest and excitement about the brand and to stimulate trial and re-purchase"." To generate interest and excitement—that is what point-of-sale display is for. It is drug pushing, is it not? That is what it is about. They are pushing their product and they do not consider the consequences. The argument that we all have individual freedom and we must not interfere with individual freedom is all very well, but when the Government, with our taxes, are paying for a free health service at the point of delivery, is it not then the duty of that same Government to ensure as little disease as possible, so that our taxes are used wisely, so that they use their money on preventative measures too? Finally, I will just share with you my advice—I do not know whether they took it, I think they did—to my own children when they were experimenting with smoking. They asked me why it was such a bad idea: Granddad had lived till he was 90 and he was all right and he smoked 60 a day—you know the story. I used to say, "That is fine; he was very lucky then, though he does have a much higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease". Smokers do have a much greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease. I said, "When you are pregnant, dear, you are likely to damage your unborn child and make it much smaller and weaker than it otherwise would be. If you are lucky and you carry on smoking, you will probably die of a nice, swift heart attack—cardiovascular disease. It kills you but it need not be that painful. It can be quite quick and there are treatments nowadays, so there is a lot of hope. If you attend the doctors and the surgeons and they do lots of things to you, there is hope; but cardiovascular disease is something that could happen. If you are not so lucky, of course, you will get cancer of the lung, which is a very nasty business indeed. Again, there is hope. Some people can be cured, but the treatments are often pretty awful. They make you very ill and you are unlikely to live a normal life afterwards. If you still think that it is worth it, you should consider what is most likely to happen to you if you carry on smoking, even moderately". The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, mentioned all the things that are bad for us, and indeed they are, but they are not necessarily bad for us in moderation, whereas smoking, I am afraid, is bad for us in moderation, too. "If you carry on smoking, you will almost certainly get chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema and bronchitis. You will gradually suffocate for lack of oxygen and eventually drown in your own green sputum, as we have already heard. That is what will happen to you. It is your choice. You make up your own mind, but those are the options if you carry on smoking. I am easy about it". None of my children now smokes.