Please write to your MP

We are almost at 40,000 signatures on our petition.  Thank you to everyone who has tweeted the Labour shadow health ministers asking for their support for Lord Callanan’s motion to block the TPD’s rules on vaping. 

Now we would like all of you to ask your MPs to write to the government minister in charge of the policy.

Below you will find a draft letter to send to send to your MP. 

You can find their email address though this website:
http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/mps/

Your MP is supposed to work for you - so get writing!  Once you have written to them feel free to add to the forum thread to say which MP you have written to here https://www.planetofthevapes.co.uk/forums/new-users-corner/campaigns-and-social-awareness/threads/please-write-to-your-mp-now.108031/

Your Letter To Your MP

E-Cigarette Regulations

Dear MP,

I live at (YOUR ADDRESS GOES HERE) in your constituency. I am one of the 2.8 million people in this country who use e-cigarettes.

(ADD A SENTENCE HERE ABOUT HOW VAPING HAS HELPED YOU)

We are very worried that the legislation before Parliament that would enforce the Tobacco Products Directive would result in serious harm to many vapers. 

Given the numbers involved and the obvious dangers of this legislation we are surprised that the House of Commons has never debated it. 

Please would you either agree to meet with me at your next advice surgery or write to the Minister of Health, Jane Ellison MP to ask her: 1) to ensure that the House of Commons debates this matter and 2) to announce immediate plans to prevent such serious risks to public health. 

I am aware that unless Parliament acts over the next fortnight we could be stuck with these regulations until the next Tobacco Products Directive comes into effect in ten years time.

Below is a draft letter which may be of help.

Yours sincerely,
(YOUR NAME HERE)

Dear Minister, 

You will be aware that the e-cigarettes regulations before Parliament are subject to a fatal motion in the Lords.

A central objective of your role is to protect public health by reducing the smoking epidemic. Last night’s BBC Horizon programme added to the evidence already provided by the Royal College of Physicians and Public Health England that e-cigarettes should be centrepiece of your strategy given their massive appeal as a much safer alternative to smoking. 

It is very difficult to explain to my constituents why the Department last Friday brought in a ban on e-cigarette advertising a month after the Royal College of Physicians urged the government to “promote e-cigarettes widely.”

There are 2.8 million vapers nationally which means there will be around 4,300 in my constituency. They are increasingly aware that your Department’s own impact assessment outlined serious problems with the TPD's e-cigarette regulations:

• “There is a risk that due to the potential price increase and reduction of choice of e-cigarettes, people will choose to switch back to smoking” (paragraph 207) 
• the number of e-cigarette products on the market could fall 96% from 25,000 to 1,000 (Annex B page 74)
• “There is a risk that a black market will develop with potentially harmful e-cigarette products” (paragraph 208) 
• “if users can’t get the desired nicotine level from e-cigarettes they may switch to cigarettes” (paragraph 200)

The plight of the 252,000 e-cigarette users who use the stronger nicotine levels which will be banned is of deepest concern. Emergency measures must be introduced to protect them.

The complete lack of political support for these e-cigarette regulations was revealed in the comment by your colleague Lord Prior of Brampton who told the House of Lords that he hoped that hoped that “enforcement will be more Italian than traditionally British.” 

I also note that two years ago Jeremy Corbyn described the e-cigarette regulations as “perverse” and two weeks ago his shadow health minister Lord Hunt of Kings Heath said that he could not understand why e-cigarettes had been included in the Directive. 

Our constituents will ask why given the gravity of these measures they have never been debated on the floor of the House of Commons. 

Whether the blame for these measure rests in Westminster or in Brussels is not the point. We have to demonstrate to our constituents that the political process is responsive. 

So would you:

1. Use your offices to encourage a debate to be held in the House
2. Make an emergency announcement to the House on what measures you are taking to prevent this turning into a spectacular public health catastrophe lasting until the next Tobacco Products Directive is implemented in around 2026.

Yours sincerely,

xxxx xxxx MP

Dave Junglist

Journalist at POTV

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Dave Junglist is co-owner of Planet of the Vapes and has been vaping since 2015.  He spent his early years with his head in a bass bin and was a very committed and experienced smoker.  He had his first cigarette at the age of 13 and just knew it was for him.  He did stop briefly with the aid of patches but reverted quickly and became a ‘secret’ smoker, working hard to keep his weak will from the attention of his family.  Vaping made an honest man of him and for this he is forever thankful. He has been involved in websites since completing a degree in Environmental Science in the late nineties.  At that time there was pretty much no contact with computers but on joining the regular workforce and deciding that the world-wide-web was the future he blagged his first job as a web designer and never looked back. As you would expect from a junglist, Dave likes his beats and is most comfortable when the bass is wobbly.