# Big tobacco, the new politics, and the threat to public health



## Northerner (Aug 11, 2019)

With several Tory leadership contenders sympathetic to its ideology, the Institute of Economic Affairs is closer to power than it has been for decades. In an exclusive investigation, *Jonathan Gornall* reveals how the organisation is funded by British American Tobacco and has links with senior conservative ministers. After orchestrating a series of attacks on public health initiatives, the IEA may now hold the key to No 10

Whatever the eventual consequences of Brexit for the NHS,12 an article published in the _Daily Telegraph_ in March made it clear that an even greater threat to public health in the UK may emerge from the battle for control of the Conservative Party.

In an essay published on 31 March, titled “The next Tory leader must be a bullish libertarian,” the director general of the free market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) set out what amounted to a manifesto for the new party leader.

The leadership election, wrote Mark Littlewood, was a chance “to rediscover an agenda supportive of . . . free markets and a smaller state.” Theresa May’s successor should ensure that “the plethora of censorious and hectoring measures over what British adults choose to eat, drink and smoke must come to an end.”

https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2164

And now they are in government (Dominic Raab)


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## mikeyB (Aug 16, 2019)

It’s the below the radar influences that bother me. The £100,000 donation BoJo got for his campaign from a Russian oligarch for playing tennis with his wife (that’s not a euphemism). There are other cabinet members who have received donations from some very shady Russian donors. 

Foreign donations are illegal in General Elections, but not in the stitch-up that produced the current cabinet.

When I was a lad, the Tories always baited Labour with saying they were just puppets of the trade unions. Now the Tories are puppets of Russian crooks. Nobody seems to care, apart from Private Eye.


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## Northerner (Aug 16, 2019)

mikeyB said:


> When I was a lad, the Tories always baited Labour with saying they were just puppets of the trade unions. Now the Tories are puppets of Russian crooks. Nobody seems to care, apart from Private Eye.


It's always struck me as odd that the support of millions of trade unionists can be put forward as some sort of bad thing, yet the Conservatives receive the bulk of their cash from a handful (relatively-speaking) of ultra-rich self-interested individuals and large corporations. Apparently BoJo got £650k in donations just to help him in the leadership election which he was pretty much odds on to win anyway  None of it on the scale of the US though, the money involved there is eye-watering


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