Vapers urged to vote UK out of EU

One of the problems facing those hoping to convince the UK public to vote to remain within the EU is that many people are concentrating on what might be described as peripheral issues.

Some are concerned that the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being negotiated between the EU and the US will allow corporations to make money out of the much-loved but under-pressure National Health Service – to take taxpayers’ money while possibly avoiding paying tax themselves.

And their fears are being inflamed by the secretive nature of the negotiations and, especially, by the Investor State Dispute Settlement provisions of the TTIP, which seem unaccountable and therefore undemocratic.

And according to a Daily Caller story relayed by the TMA, a new campaign group called Vapers for Britain (VfB) is urging British electronic cigarette users to vote in the June 23 referendum to leave the EU.

VfB is urging an out vote so as to avoid the ‘damaging impact’ of the revised EU Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), which will take effect on May 20 and require electronic cigarette businesses to spend ‘a fortune on filling in tens of thousands of meaningless forms … and changing [e-liquid] bottle sizes down to fiddly 10 ml’.

The UK government has apparently said that domestic electronic cigarette companies will have to spend £1.3 million to comply with the revised TPD, while the electronic cigarette industry has said the new regulations could mean its spending £988 million.

‘The Prime Minister told the House of Commons in December that vaping had got one million people to quit [smoking],’ the VfB was quoted as saying. ‘Yet despite this stunning public health achievement, we are heading to the TPD Disaster starting on Black Friday.’

Clive Bates of The Counterfactual was quoted in the story as saying that the revised EU TPD governing electronic cigarette regulation was a ‘catalogue of poorly designed, disproportionate and discriminatory measures that will achieve nothing useful but do a great deal of harm’.

One problem for those wanting the UK to remain within the EU is that anti-TTIP campaigners and vapers form well-connected, vocal groups of people who are likely to turn out to vote.