Forest is a media and political lobby group. Our purpose is to protect the interests of adults who choose to smoke or consume tobacco in its many forms. We do that by lobbying politicians, broadcasters and journalists on a number of issues in variety of ways.
These issues have included included tobacco taxation, tobacco advertising and sponsorship, cross-Channel shopping, and smoking bans. Current issues include amendments to the smoking ban, behind-the-counter product display, vending machines, use of graphic images, smoking while driving, and what the government calls the "denormalisation" of smoking.
Political lobbying
Forest is widely recognised by government and other national and local authorities as the "voice of the smoker". As a result we are regularly invited to present our views to government bodies, either in writing or in person. In the past decade we have submitted reports to and appeared before the Health and Safety Commission, House of Commons Health Select Committee, Greater London Authority Investigative Committee on Smoking in Public Places, Scottish Parliament Community Care Committee and many more, including local council committees in Middlesbrough, St Albans, Plymouth and Poole (to name a few).
In 1999 we were invited by the Health & Safety Executive to share a platform with ASH to help promote the Voluntary Charter on Smoking in Public Places.
In 2000 we launched a successful campaign against the treatment of ordinary smokers by Customs and Excise that eventually led to a change in cross-Channel shopping guidelines.
In 2001 we were invited to give written and oral evidence to the House of Commons Health Select Committee. More recently we have been asked to provide written and oral evidence to a number of government and local council committees throughout the United Kingdom.
In 2004, with legislators increasingly minded to ban smoking in most enclosed public places, we launched a national Fight the Ban: Fight for Choice" campaign. The campaign, which featured extensive lobbying of politicians, journalists and broadcasters, included a series of opinion polls and advertisements in the national and local press. Similar advertisements appeared in the hospitality trade press, political weeklies such as The Spectator, New Statesman and The Week, plus specialist titles such as The House Magazine and Parliamentary Yearbook.
In 2005 we submitted evidence to the government's public consultation exercise and to national and local government committees. We also gave written and oral evidence to Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly committees; we hosted press conferences in both the House of Commons and and the House of Lords.
In 2007 we lobbied the European Commission, responding to an EC Green Paper, "Towards a Europe free from tobacco smoke: policy options at EU level". In 2008 we followed this up by attending a stateholder consultation meeting and contributing to the Commission's impact assessment procedure.
Media work
Forest has been quoted by hundreds of national, international and regional newspapers and magazines at home and abroad, and our comments have been published on thousands of websites and blogs.
Our spokesmen have been interviewed thousands of times on TV and radio. We have appeared regularly on all the major television news and current affairs programmes in the UK including BBCTV News, BBC News 24, ITV News, Channel 4 News, Five News, Sky News and GMTV. We have also appeared on programmes such as The Heaven and Earth Show, The Politics Show, Daily Politics (BBC1), Holyrood Live (BBC1 Scotland), Newsnight Scotland (BBC2 Scotland), Tonight with Trevor McDonald (ITV1), Littlejohn (Sky News), No Ifs, No Butts (Anglia TV documentary) and many local news programmes including Reporting Scotland, Granada Tonight, Anglia News and many more.
On radio our spokesmen have featured regularly on BBC Radio Five Live, appearing many times on every daytime show. On Radio 4 we have been interviewed on the prestigious Today programme, The World at One, PM and You and Yours. We have also been heard on Newsbeat (BBC Radio 1) and numerous local radio stations.
Internationally we have featured on BBC World Service, CNN, Fox News (USA) and RTE (Ireland), plus TV and radio stations in Australia, Hong Kong, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan and Greece.
Forest supporters including Antony Worrall Thompson, David Hockney, Joe Jackson and Ranald Macdonald have spoken out against public smoking bans on a number of TV and radio programmes including Breakfast, Sunday AM (BBC1), Today (BBC Radio 4), BBC World Service, Sky and Channel 4 News.
Last but not least, we have written articles for many national and local newspapers and magazines.
Polls, publications and events
Between 2004 and 2006, as part of our Fight The Ban: Fight For Choice campaign, we commissioned a series of national and local public opinion polls. They were carried out by Populus, a leading opinion research company and pollster to The Times since 2003.
We also published and distributed a series of hard-hitting essays, articles and other publications including Joe Jackson's The Smoking Issue and plus 50-page report entitled Prejudice & Propaganda: The Truth About Passive Smoking.
Other Forest publications have included The Forest Guide to Smoking in London, The Forest Guide to Smoking in Scotland, and Murder A Cigarette by Ralph Harris and Judith Hatton.
Forest is well known for its special events, many of them attended by MPs, peers and journalists. In 2005 we attracted banner headlines when we persuaded artist David Hockney to attend a Forest event at the Labour party conference in Brighton. Interviewed by the BBC on the morning of the event, Hockney famously accused pro-ban politicians of being "boring" and "dreary".
More recently we have organised a series of events in London, culminating in our Revolt In Style dinner at the Savoy Hotel in June 2007, plus some well-attended parties at party conferences in Blackpool and Bournemouth.