No, I do not. We are getting slightly off the mark here, but the hon. Lady has the freedom to take her nose somewhere else if she does not like what she is smelling. That is the whole point of freedom and choice.
We have heard from the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras that he is the friend of the small retailer, and that he thought that the only people who would suffer from banning the display of tobacco at point of sale would be those in some of the biggest companies in the world. As somebody who worked for one of those big, nasty supermarket chains for 12 years before entering Parliament, I can tell him that cigarette sales are a very small proportion of their income and certainly a very small part of their profit margins. The proposal will not have any major impact on Tesco, Asda or any of the other companies that he seems to have in his firing line. The people who will be fundamentally affected are small retailers. The big supermarkets can afford to change their displays and the way that they display products. It is the small retailer who cannot. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman does not go around pontificating to his small businesses on how he is so supportive of them and wants everybody to shop at their local shops, when he is trying to introduce a measure that would do more damage to small newsagents than anything else he could imagine.
Health Bill [Lords]
Proceeding contribution from
Philip Davies
(Conservative)
in the House of Commons on Monday, 12 October 2009.
It occurred during Debate on bills on Health Bill [Lords].
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