Party leader brands UK’s standardized pack proposals as “utterly barmy”

Moves to introduce standardized packaging for tobacco products have been labelled as “utterly barmy” by UKIP (UK Independence Party) leader Nigel Farage, according to a BBC News story.

Farage, who called the plans a “counterfeiter’s dream”, was speaking ahead of his party’s conference, which was due to start today in Doncaster.

He reportedly told Asian Trader magazine that he was “totally opposed to tobacco plain packaging with no compromise of any kind at all”.

And he said he was “watching with incomprehension” what was being done to electronic cigarettes. These products had been a huge success and presented a big marketing potential for small shops, “and yet we are doing our best to ban them everywhere”.

Farage added that tax on cigarettes was too high and encouraged smuggling and illegal tobacco products: “It is just nuts, it’s bonkers,” he said.

The leader of UKIP, which has no MPs in the House of Commons but has 24 of the UK’s 73 seats in the European Parliament, said that a “wet middle class” in Westminster and Brussels would also pursue measures against alcohol and sugar, adding: “There is no end to this, absolutely no end to this”.