Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)

I rise to speak in favour of the first amendment, proposed by my noble friends, and against the second amendment: Amendment 180. On actors and their ability to smoke on set, in my view, this is something that needs further refining. I ask the Minister to go back slightly on the previous amendments discussed, but intertwined with those is this question: what is an offence and what is not an offence? If I were to be playing myself, as I may be now, would I be able to light a cigar in an authentic fashion in order to prove that point? Where are we talking about these regulations being relevant and effective? How far do the regulations intend to go when people are posting on social media, which is a far cry from the adverts of the 1970s promoting the joys of smoking? If they put themselves on social media smoking a cigar and talking about its delights, is that advertising the genre, as the Minister said it was? Would that be a criminal offence? If that is the case, we are going to find ourselves in extreme difficulty, aside from the absurd attacks on our liberty. I am afraid that I will also speak very firmly against Amendment 180, with the greatest of respect to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey of Wall Heath. She made a strong case for how she saw these processes, but the reality is that this is an exemption temporarily used by premises to enable people to sample tobacco. The idea that this is something that somehow Parliament should be focusing on is a little bizarre when there is so much going on in the world. The anti-smoking lobby has found somebody somewhere somehow smoking a cigar, and the entire machine has focused its gaze, like the great Eye of Sauron, on this activity that is, at worst, fringe and, at best, quite relevant in ensuring that people can legitimately engage in the trade and sale of occasional cigar smoking, which we have established has no factual health consequences at all, regardless of the desire of many who want to see the end of smoking and a smoke-free generation. I disagree with that fundamentally but can see the point of it; this is contradictory to that point. It is important that, as legislators, we understand the facts and take a fact-based approach to the way we legislate.