At last year’s Conservative party conference, prime minister Rishi Sunak declared the UK government planned to increase, year by year, the legal age of smoking to achieve a “smoke-free generation”.
The announcement gave the impression the prime minister was taking on Big Tobacco.
However, the UK has consistently failed to rein in the activities of Britain’s biggest tobacco company, British American Tobacco (BAT), which predominantly operates overseas.
BAT is a blue-chip company, one of the few genuinely transnational British businesses. Operating in some 180 countries, BAT says it is “one of the world’s most international businesses”.