---

Liverpool City Council (Prohibition of Smoking in Places of Work) Bill [HL]

My Lords, the proof of my case lies in the total failure of ceaseless well-funded research by multiplying anti-smoking lobbies, over 25   years and 80 reports, to find persuasive evidence of harm to others that is consistent or statistically significant. My exposé is set out in a recent monograph called Smoking out the Truth, which included a direct personal challenge to the CMO. His response, though courteous, was frankly pretty feeble. Consider the unconvincing methodology of all the research. It relies on questionnaires which seek to detect what they call the elevation of exposure to   environmental tobacco smoke. The method is to compare two matched samples. One is a control group of healthy non-smokers, such as the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, and the other is made up of the cases of non-smoking wives with lung cancer who live with smokers. The test is almost as hilarious as the classic cartoon of a bobby who arrests someone in a pub because, in the words of the caption, ““I thought, m’Lud, I could smell alcohol on his breath””. With so-called passive smoking, there is no pretence of scientific measurement. The least whiff of tobacco smoke is sufficient proof of guilt. The aim of all this research is to establish a single statistic called relative risk which purports to measure the comparative long-term exposure to ETS of the two groups, the controls and the cases. In brief, a relative risk of 1.0 implies equal exposure to ETS of the two groups, whereas, let us say, 2.0 would imply a doubling of the hypothetical risk of cancer. One hundred per cent more of very little is still not very much. There are at least three ways in which this pseudo-research fails. First, reputable epidemiologists require a relative risk of at least two before they take any risk seriously, and some of them look for one of three or four. Secondly, answers to questions on lifetime exposure to ETS must always be wildly unreliable—a dubious mix of guesswork, vague recall, subjective impressions, exaggeration and plain untruths. Let us imagine trying to estimate, tabulate and calibrate such esoteric data in order to calculate a relative risk, with spurious precision to two decimal places, that ignores the wide range of ““confidence intervals”” which indicate statistical significance. Can any noble Lord present honestly say, even on a rough scale of one to 10, how much tobacco smoke was   around his family home in his youth and ever since? Professor Robert Nilsson, a Swedish academic toxicologist, reckoned that typical domestic exposure might be equal to the effect of an individual smoking one or two cigarettes a year. Yet one of those earnest questionnaires on exposure actually asked the next of kin of a spouse who was dying of lung cancer how many months a year she left her windows open. How is that for cod science? If that were not enough to discredit the whole hocus-pocus, let us consider a third gaping flaw in this ramshackle methodology. Cancer is known to be a multi-factorial disease, which may be traced to diet, heredity, lifestyle, alcohol, urban location, car exhausts and so on. All such ““confounders”” are conveniently ignored in those crude health warnings on television and cigarette packets. Instead, all cancers are blamed on smoking. We heard some of that this evening in totally ridiculous, individual, personal, family examples. How scrupulously is all the research conducted and reported? Publication bias leads zealous researchers to seek big, eye-catching results. In today’s political climate, researchers who claim a high relative risk of exposure to lung cancer will more easily attract headlines, publication and further research grants, as well as frequent mentions in your Lordships’ House. From this arises the practice of ““data dredging”” or torturing the statistics until they confess the answer that you want. I turn finally to the report of the Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health. After admitting ignorance of the numbers exposed to ETS, it puts relative risk at a piffling 1.2 or 1.3 and estimates that exposure could account for ““several hundred”” extra lung cancer deaths a year. Several hundred in population of 40 million is completely laughable. It is not to be taken at all seriously. I shall not dwell on the BMA press release last March which claimed that ““second-hand smoke”” kills more than 600 people every day. That is 200,000 people a year. This was later withdrawn as a clerical error, but it nicely indicates the feverish world in which the BMA’s staff live their smoke-free lives. My emphatic judgment on passive smoking is: ““Relax. There is absolutely nothing in it””. The whole invention is nothing more than a stupendous confidence trick. I hereby nominate the victims of the spoof as ASBOs; that is, anti-smoking belief obsessives.