TabakNee, the Dutch anti-tobacco watchdog, spent the first week of June calling Clearing the Air’s EU consultation tool “manipulation,” in the same paragraph as Philip Morris and British American Tobacco. Eight days later, a poll of 602 Dutch adults found 82% think doing exactly that is a citizen’s fundamental right.
The TabakNee piece, published 4 June, named three campaigns running ahead of the deadlines on the TPD/TAD revision consultation: Philip Morris’s “Your Voice Your Choice” posters and AI response generator, BAT’s “Share Your Voice” push, and Clearing the Air’s own Fix the Flaws tool.
All three do the same thing – help someone turn an opinion into a formatted submission to Brussels in a few clicks. More than 70,000 responses went in on the Call for Evidence before it closed on the 15th. We’ll do an analysis of those just as we did for the tax consultation (Hans is already hard at work on the data), but it looks like a landslide in favour of safer nicotine products.
TabakNee’s specific gripe with the Philip Morris tool is that of roughly fifty answer choices on offer, only one supports tighter rules – the other forty-nine argue against some restriction or another. A lung pathologist quoted in the piece goes further: this isn’t neutral citizen participation at all, she says, it’s an influence campaign dressed up as one. Hans Snijder, who runs the Hartstichting, called the whole thing “an orchestrated lobby campaign” by an industry he (correctly) says kills millions a year.
And none of it stayed rhetorical. A group of doctors and health charities filed a complaint against the Philip Morris posters with the Dutch advertising watchdog, reported the campaign to the data protection authority for asking people about their smoking habits, flagged it to the food and consumer safety regulator, and stood outside a vape store in Utrecht to make the point in person.
Now the poll.
Asked to choose between two statements on what happens when new laws are proposed, 82% of Dutch adults polled picked the one holding that every citizen has a fundamental right to be heard, and that a campaign template should never invalidate someone’s submission. Eighteen percent backed letting officials disqualify a contribution they judge to have been produced that way.
Eighty-five percent backed a right to use templates, guides or outside editorial help with EU regulatory text regardless of whether it came from an NGO, a company or a charity.
And 60% said policymakers should weigh contributions equally whatever the source – the actual survey wording put it as “anti-nicotine NGOs” against “industry organisations” directly, before CCC’s press release softened that to generic non-profit-versus-company language for the Dutch papers. But the point is pretty clear. And that’s the bit TabakNee’s framing can’t survive contact with.
Sixty percent of their own country thinks a Hartstichting-mobilised submission and a Clearing the Air-mobilised submission should count the same. TabakNee treats one of those as civic participation and the other as a manipulation campaign serious enough to need an advertising complaint, a data protection complaint, a food-safety referral and a protest outside a shop. Both can’t be the considered view of the Dutch public, because the Dutch public just got polled, and that’s not what they think.
Hartstichting, KWF Kankerbestrijding and Longfonds – the same three charities behind the complaint to the food safety regulator – run a joint campaign of their own, De Rookvrije Generatie, lobbying for the same restrictions this consultation is weighing. Nobody at TabakNee calls that manipulation. If mobilising people to push one point of view at a consultation is an offence, why don’t the rules don’t apply to both sides?
And as I’ve argued before, the failure of the tobacco control movement to mobilize their base is evidence that they don’t really have a base.
Your average citizen is directly affected by banning safer nicotine products if they use safer nicotine products. Most others shrug because it doesn’t affect them, so it’s not really their problem. Most people will tell an online survey that they support “strong” tobacco control measures, whatever that means, but they won’t go into battle for prohibition when confronted with specifics. Those being asked to pay up will. This should be fairly obvious.
CCC’s Francesco Janse puts it best: “The answer to organised participation is transparency, not censorship.” TabakNee would presumably disagree, given what it just asked three different regulators to do about PMI’s.
No margin of error is published, the only cuts released are gender and age, and CCC funds this site, so weigh the evidence accordingly. But TabakNee can keep calling Fix the Flaws manipulation. Eighty-two percent of their own country just told them what a citizen’s right to be heard actually means. Fix the Flaws isn’t going anywhere.
