Ecigs discussed during Parliamentary showpiece PMQs
Ecigs discussed during Parliamentary showpiece PMQs.
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by Dave Cross
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PMQs take place each Wednesday while Parliament is in session, and offers the opportunity for MPs to quiz the Prime Minister about matters they consider to be important. This Wednesday, Tory Mark Pawsey raised the subject of electronic cigarettes and asked the PM if he would support raising awareness of their benefits.
Pawsey, as we’ve reported here, set up the All-party Parliamentary Group to support ecig users and appraise the evidence being generated. If anyone was going to raise the subject during PMQs then it was always going to be the MP for Rugby.
“By the time the house next meets many people will have started their new years resolutions,” Pawsey began. “Given that Public Health England has declared ecigs are 95% safer than smoking and that half the population are unaware of this, would he [David Cameron] join me to highlighting the role ecigarettes can play?”
Cameron has previously spoken about how he has struggled to quit smoking himself, claiming that he had given up in 2008. The PM responded: “Certainly as somebody who has been through this battle a number of times, eventually relatively successfully, lots of people find different ways of doing it and certainly for some people e-cigarettes are successful.”
"I think we do need to be guided by the experts,” he added. “We should look at the report from Public Health England but it is promising the see that over all, one million people are estimated to have used e-cigarettes to help them quite or have replaced smoking with e-cigarettes completely.”
It is a very positive and welcoming attitude to vaping and he continues: “So I think we should be making clear that this is a very legitimate path for many people to improve their health and the health of the nation.”
Unfortunately, The Daily Mirror doesn’t share our perspective. Having come out with some outright lies about vaping in the past, this time they turn their mendacious eye on Pawsey himself. “A Tory MP heaped praise on the e-cigarette industry at PMQs today,” they write, “but didn't mention he'd been treated to a lavish day out by a global vaping giant.”
The failing newspaper has been in continual decline over the course of 2015 and, in their recent financial report, attempted to paint a further 9% decline in the third quart as a positive move – because it wasn’t as dire as the preceding quarters. This poor attempt at a smear article is the result of an organization thrashing around in its death throes, attempting to drum up sales from salacious coverage.
The ministerial code demands that all politicians register their external interests, something that Pawsey has done. “As the MP for the town where the game began, it was a great honour to be the Parliamentary Ambassador for the Rugby World Cup this year,” he explained. "I was fortunate to be invited to attend a match during the tournament and I have declared it transparently on the Parliamentary website.”
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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