Nigel Farage loves tobacco [money]
Nigel Farage’s assertion that he will repeal the generational smoking ban should Reform win the next election is entirely unsurprising given the large swathes of funding he receives from Big Tobacco firms. Writing in the Telegraph this week, Farage called the law, which will make it permanently illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, “pious grandstanding that is masquerading as legislation.”
He added there were other ways to dissuade young people from taking up vaping and smoking. “As for those like me, known to enjoy a pint and a cigarette,” he wrote, “we have been told the risks and we are prepared to take our chances.”
We are sure he also enjoys the funding his party has received from the likes of Japan Tobacco, one of the largest tobacco companies in the world, which helped sponsor a panel and last year’s conference titled “Revitalising the Great British High Street – how to reverse decades of decline” at last year’s Reform Party conference. Another panel called “The Politics of Prohibition: The Fight for Choice” was hosted and sponsored by Forest Online, which lobbies against regulation of smoking and has received money from several major Tobacco firms including Phillip Morris and Japan Tobacco International.
It isn’t the first time he’s pulled a move like this. In 2024, links were found between Farage’s anti-WHO pressure group, Action on World Health, and tobacco interests. And, a decade earlier in 2014, Nigel Farage made a high-profile appeal in support of electronic cigarettes shortly after UKIP received donations totalling tens of thousands of pounds from Pillbox 38, an e-cigarette manufacturer.
Reform Watch: Nigel Farage's smoking gun
Plus: Matt Goodwin's latest blunder, Farage's football folly in Ipswich, and a PMQs pity party.
(national.thelead.uk)
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