The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - a well known self-help book - has thoughts on scheduling. “The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule”, according to its author Stephen Covey, “but to schedule your priorities”.
The European Parliament has its own way of taking that advice. If a vote takes place at the end of the day on a Thursday, when most MEPs and journalists are on a plane home, that gives you some idea of how important that vote is in the grand scheme of things.
And so it is that the non-binding European Parliamentary resolution on the non-binding European Council Recommendation on banning vaping everywhere will have its moment in the sun last thing this Thursday afternoon. Attendance is expected to be less than stellar.
A quick recap: The European Commission wants to advise EU Member States to ban vaping in all public spaces, indoor and outdoor. The European Parliament has to express an opinion on this, which both the Commission and Member States can and will ignore. MEPs will vote on that opinion on Thursday.
For a particular kind of public health culture warrior, this kind of pointless virtue signalling is important. And so the Parliament’s proposed resolution simply takes the gospel according to anti-vaping NGOs and formalises it into a resolution riddled with nonsense.
The nonsense in question mirrors the nonsense of the vape ban Recommendation itself. And the nonsense that’s in the Recommendation is rightly described as nonsense because the Commission, which proposed it, couldn’t even be bothered to do its own homework.
The EU last passed judgement on smoking in public places in 2009, when it recommended that lighting up indoors be prohibited. Vaping didn’t exist back then, so the impact assessment that accompanied the proposal didn’t look at it. Fast forward to today, and the Commission hasn’t even bothered to do an impact assessment on whether banning vaping in public spaces is a good idea, choosing instead to refer to the 2009 version which - as we mentioned - was written when vaping didn’t exist.
It doesn’t need a new assessment, it says, because it did a study in 2021 on which it’s basing its new proposal. The thing is, that study concluded that more research was needed on the subject. No further research has since materialised. That kind of research would have been provided by the impact assessment the Commission couldn’t be bothered to do.
If this was about getting the policy right, the Commission would have been happy to do the work. The fact that they chose not to tells you that this isn’t about good policy. If it were, then they’d be promoting harm reduction, as their own data shows that Member States that embrace harm reduction are doing better at combatting smoking.
No, this is about supporting the ideological preferences of the Commission’s pet NGOs, consequences for smokers be damned. We’ve seen this before, with the European Commission making sure its ideological bedfellows are in charge of writing the next round of tobacco products laws.
Italy and Romania have pointed this out, and Spanish vapers have made a complaint to the EU Ombudsman to the same effect.
Some MEPs aren’t happy about this either, and the EPP Group has tabled an amendment that regrets the lack of Impact Assessment, while reiterating that vaping helps some smokers to quit. Many in the EPP want to go further, with Peter Liese MEP, a practising doctor, going on record with his disapproval of the plan.
Even these rather modest amendments will be resisted bitterly by many on the left who decided long ago that they don’t like vaping and anyone who disagrees with them is an agent of the evil Big Tobacco. MEPs must pass these changes for their report to make sense even on its own terms.
But quite frankly, if the Brussels Bubble made any sense at all, Parliamentarians would simply say to the Commission “if you can’t be bothered to put in the work, then neither can we”.
The thing is, this Recommendation will actually have far reaching implications. The EU can’t ban smoking in public spaces, but Member States will use its recommendation to do so as a permission structure. Once again, the people who actually use vapes to quit smoking - whose lives will be most affected - will have no say on the matter, and Brussels will be saddled with the blame when they get angry.
It’s almost like Europe’s strongest proponents actively want to turn voters against them for no reason whatsoever, and are happy to do so last thing on a Thursday, as if it doesn’t even matter.
