ASH: The government in drag

I recently mentioned the possibility that ASH (England) may have lost its government funding. Maybe they have, maybe they haven't, but the anti-smoking pressure group was certainly sucking on the teat of the state in 2010/11, as its latest accounts show.

Department of Health: £220,500

ASH International: £152,657

Supporting charities: £393,833

Donations: £15,365

Total: £782,355

ASH International is funded by Pfizer, which perhaps explains ASH's eagerness to promote Pfizer's psychotic stop-smoking drug Chantix/Champix.

The supporting charities are the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK, so if you don't like indirectly funding neo-prohibitionist pressure groups, you might want to avoid them in the future and donate to other charities.

The Department of Health grant is for a project called 'Capitalising on Smokefree'. This is the third year in a row that taxpayers' money has been diverted to this mystery project. Although we pay for it, no details have ever been made public. If I was a cynic, I would say that it involves ASH being given money to manufacture support for Department of Health policies.

And that leaves £15,365 of donations from the public, meaning that one of the country's most powerful and influential "charities" gets less than 2% of its income from the general public's voluntary donations. However, it gets 28% from involuntarily donations through the tax system and a further 50% from donations given to different charities which are then diverted to ASH.

I do believe that means that ASH continues to be what it has always been: a fake charity. They are the government in drag; they are the Department of Health's sockpuppets; they are the state lobbying the state. Why are smokers being forced to pay for their own vilification?


UPDATE:

Number 11 in ASH's list of 'objectives' for 2010/11 is:

To be sensitive to the concerns of the smoker.

Wow. Just wow.