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Nigel Farage On The UKIP Campaign Trail
Smoker Nigel Farage says forcing tobacco companies to sell cigarettes in plain packaging is 'bonkers'. But maybe that should be just the start. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty
Smoker Nigel Farage says forcing tobacco companies to sell cigarettes in plain packaging is 'bonkers'. But maybe that should be just the start. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

From fags to fashion to jam – we are addicted to brands

This article is more than 9 years old
Rachel Cooke
The debate about plain packaging for cigarettes points up a truth about us being hooked on labels more generally

Nigel Farage, a man who prides himself on being “rather good” at smoking, once told a journalist about a little game he likes to play in supermarkets. Annoyed that the nanny state should have had the temerity to put his precious Benson & Hedges (I’m not sure what fags he favours; this is just a hunch) behind screens, he revealed that for a “bit of fun” he sometimes asks for defunct brands such as Capstan Full Strength and Craven A.

Needless to say, hilarity does not ensue – or not for the staff in question, who tend to ferret around helpfully in a futile bid to provide him with what he wants. “When they can’t find them, I ask for the manager,” Farage told Asian Trader. Punchline merrily dispensed, he then outlined his “total” opposition to plain packaging for cigarettes, an idea he regards as “nuts’, “bonkers” and “utterly, bloody barmy”.

Oh, my sides. When I read this story last year, several thoughts went through my mind. The first, as you’ll have gathered, had to do with Farage’s baffling sense of humour and how terrifying it must be for those around him. The second was to ponder how the cigarette manufacturers must feel about having the Ukip leader for a pal (with friends like him, etc etc).

But then: a U-turn. Given the effect Farage appeared to be having on the Conservative party – this was less than a month after the defection of Douglas Carswell, the MP for Clacton, to Ukip – it now seemed less likely than ever that the government would press on with bringing in legislation for plain packaging. Cancer Research UK and all the others in favour could just go hang. Farage would be, in a manner of speaking, the hero of the hour so far as the tobacco industry was concerned.

As it turns out, I was wrong about this. Last week, the government announced it would indeed attempt to bring in the new legislation before the general election, spooked, perhaps, by the in-roads Labour has recently made on health.

Farage, meanwhile, is now the least of the tobacco industry’s worries. What a fix it is in. How on earth to argue the case against plain packaging without acknowledging that the highly recognisable liveries of your famous brands are the sole means still at your disposal, apart, that is, from price-cutting, of attracting new customers? This is a tricky one, given that it cannot be seen to be encouraging people to take up smoking. When, last Friday, Axel Gietz, director of corporate affairs at Imperial Tobacco, appeared on Today to make his case, it was a bit like listening to Buzz Aldrin insist that the moon is made of green cheese. Packaging, he argued, encourages no one to take up smoking.

So why hang on to it? Ah, well. It’s all down to how you define “new” when it comes to customers. Gietz likes to use the word “new” only in relation to existing smokers. This, you understand, is a turf war, not a fight to replace those customers who are giving up, or dying off, whether from lung cancer or natural causes.

The sophistry involved in this is mind boggling, not least because most of us are painfully aware of the troubling effect brands have on our lives; we relish our labels (Mulberry! Burberry!) even as they disgust us (what was I thinking when I spent all that money on this?).

And to those who are unaware, or who persist in thinking they’re somehow above it all, our enslavement is ridiculously easy to illustrate. This week, for instance, a new series of Eat Well For Less? begins on BBC1, and while my tolerance for its shouty presenter, Gregg Wallace, is even lower than my tolerance for Gietz and his specious arguments, it has to be said that the show illustrates rather brilliantly the constant crumbling of our resolve in the face of brands, the weird glamour that attaches to even the most quotidian of them. What happens is this: Wallace and his sidekick, a greengrocer called Chris Bavin, invade a regular middle-class home, whereupon they replace all the branded food stuffs inside with generic, white-labelled goods.

Usually, the contents of these new jars and packets will be cheaper and less obviously ritzy than the ones the homeowners normally favour; sometimes, just for a wheeze, they will be exactly the same. The homeowners then spend a few days eating this stuff, their noses wrinkling unhappily at the thought that these are definitely Asda cornflakes rather than Kellogg’s, that this is certainly Tesco ketchup rather than Heinz, after which Wallace duly returns.

He makes them all look ridiculous by revealing that the orange juice they loved – “it tastes like hotel orange juice!” – is just made-from-concentrate in a posh bottle; that the “thin-looking” jam they so disdained as they spread it on their morning toast is their usual brand in a more boring jar; that there is, in fact, nothing much to choose between own brand butter and Anchor.

“I’ve got ‘mug’ written on my forehead,” says Howard Booth, a council manager from Chorley, in the first programme, faced with the evidence of his misguided brand loyalty (oh, he really hated that jam). To which the viewer, covered in recognition, thinks: you’re not wrong there, chum.

But doesn’t this just prove Gietz’s point? Booth is going to buy butter anyway, so why shouldn’t it be Anchor, if it tastes better to him? (Or if, to be more accurate, its manufacturer has taken the trouble to market it effectively?) Again, Wallace comes to the rescue, by secretly observing Booth as he wanders the supermarket aisles. He is Tesco’s dream customer, his hand constantly hovering over exciting new products, his eyes flicking demonically between this kind of pasta sauce and that. Into his basket goes a jar of sumac, a spice of which he has never heard and which he has no idea how to use; he just likes the look of it.

Of course, sumac is an incomparably more benign product than a packet of Lambert & Butler and more fragrant to boot. But the principle is the same when it comes to selling: between the eye and the product, something happens – stupid desire. Any ex-smoker will be able to tell you what brand they first smoked and why. And as they describe the pack, whether purple and white, blue and silver or purest all-over gold, in their voice will be something proprietorial and just a touch superior, even now.

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