Magazine Issue 7 - Spring 1998
Cigareets & Houses

Cigareets and whusky and wild, wild women, they'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane!", or so predicts the old country song. Well this story's about cigareets and money and new house building, but the implications for our mental health may be no less bleak. Chris Woodford digs the dirt.

When is a tobacco company not a tobacco company? When it's frantically trying to find something else to do with lung cancer profits.

The tobacco giants are masters of this kind of deception. It's some time since R.J. Reynolds bought the Nabisco food company, and we're almost used to the idea of Phillip Morris owning General Foods - indeed, 'Faggy" Thatcher earned her nasty nickname by working for GF as a consultant. But what about our very own British American Tobacco? BAT is unapologetic: "Our aim is to be the world's number one tobacco company".

Never mind that the market for Brirish and American tobacco is looking distinctly nicotine stained, because there is "good performance" in Poland and the Ukraine.

BAT Polska S.A. is doing very nicely, thank you, and there'll be plenty of kids to kill in the Third World if diarrhoea and malnutrition don't get them first. BAT is raking in a whopping profits every year. But, it's still covering its ass(ets).

In 1997, BAT aims "to be the customer's first choice, whether for cigarette brands or for building and protecting their financial assets".

In other words, there's money to be made - not just from persuading people to smoke - but from insuring them against the risks of smoking (and a whole lot of other risks) at the same time. A stroke of sheer genius.

These days, BAT owns such giants of the insurance world as Eagle Star and Allied Dunbar (for the life you haven't yet smoked away") [1,21. But the plot is slightly more complex. Not content with simply investing in the stock market, insurance companies are themselves dabbling in other kinds of businesses.

Eagle Star is becoming a property developer just when house-building looks set to go ballistic. Since the publication of the Department of the Environment's green paper on housing in 1996, everyone's become obsessed with the idea that we must find a whopping 4.4 million new households before the year 2016 (and many more thereafter).

The UK Roundtable on Sustainable Development (backedby FoE, CPRE, and even, these ~ days, John Gummer) is calling for 75% of these houses to be built on recycled (brownfield) sites. But, property developers, construction firms, and the guys who wrote the Criminal Justice Act, the Country Landowners Association, are calling for lots and lots of big, detached houses on greenfield land (please).

This isn't the place to question the wisdom of 4.4 million new homes; suffice to say that building swanky executive houses on green belt land is not the way to address problems like urban homelessness or the lack of affordable housing for people born in rural areas.

All this new housing is great news for Eagle Star Estates Ltd, which has spent the last few years lobbying for the construction of a massive new town in north Hampshire - in the rolling green gap between Winchester and Basingstoke [5]

This "much sought after location" with ~rural aspects" has become rather more of a runner with the progressive degradation of the Itchen Valley, first by the M3 extension through Twyford Down, and then by a recently approved motorway service station just up the road. The 5000 homes (for starters) in the so-called Micheldever Station "Market" Town would be the housing equivalent of a Wetherspoon pub: instant market town, instant charm, instant urbanized rural life (and plenty of people throwing up outside).

According to Project Manager Bill Bromwich, it would be "planned with the principles of sustainable development in mind" and "has been endorsed by two local housing associations and by the housing charity, Shelter" [2,5]. Why, they've even thought of those pesky protesters: "There will be no point climbing trees - Bill Bromwich says he will not be cutting them down. He has already been planting more to enhance the would-be townscape. A botanist by training, he's ready to take on the environmentalists." Sustainahility is the name of the game.

According to Eagle Star, 5000 new houses are automatically "sustainable" if you build them near a tiny little station where the trains never stop. Never mind the land-take; or the quarried materials for bricks, tiles, and bathroom suites; or the 7500 cars you'd expect to generate with 5000 houses; or the water and sewage burden.

The parent company confirms what it means by sustainable: "We have defined a clear, credible and sustainable market positioning for Eagle Star, and are developing a distinctive brand that supports it" [7]. For "sustainable", read "business as usual" and "immensely profitable".

But what's good for Eagle Star is a shadow on the green lungs of Britain. With massive out-migration from London, there's every chance Eagle Star will succeed, sooneror later, in building a new commuter town at Micheldever, less than an hour from the city. Especially when you consider that it has the backing of BAT, a company whose board reads like a Who's Who of the British economy.

Those with a key to the executive ashtray include Rupert Pennant-Rea, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England; Clayton Yeutter, former US Secretary of Agriculture; Lord Armstrong, once the head of the Civil Service, more recently with his snout in the trough at Shell, RTZ, Lucas, and Rothschild; Lord Cairns, former Chief Executive of S.G. Warburg; and Rosalind Gilmore, former member of the Lloyds Registery Board, the Securities and Investment Board, and Chief Executive of the Building Societies Commission [1]. And its newly-appointed Vice Chairman? None other than former Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke [8].

If these corporate dog-ends are losing no sleep over the immorality of flogging fags in eastern Europe - when the health horrors of tabacco have long been known in the West why should they care about sustainability, in the sense in which environmentalists mean it?

To quote the old insurance company line, it's "cash if you die and cash if you don't" If Eagle Star succeeds in rampantly building unsustainable new towns, BAT will be coining it. And if climate change is hastened by such unsustainalile practices, why worry?

True, insurance companies are getting nervous about climate change, but only because they haven't yet found a way ol quantifying (and thereby profiting from) the risk, or deciding whether, like AIDS, it's something for the small-print. In truth, risk is the lifeblood of the insurance business; a ne~ nsk is a new business opportunity. Whic~ just goes to show that "cigareets" is maybe not such a bad business to be in after all.

References:
1. BAT Industries Annual Review and Summa~ Financial Statement, 1996.
2. "Emotional heights in new town debate", lette from Bill Bromwich, Project Director Eagle Sta~ Estates Ltd, to Hampshire Chronicle, June 1997.
3. Household Growth: where shall we live? DoE 1996.
4. "Stopping the Sprawl" by Friends of the Eartl (1997) is an excellent introduction to the housint debate, although it doesn't cover urbar homelessness, affordable rural housing, low impaci development, and wider aspects of sustaining rura life.
5. "Insurance giant puts its case for a new town" Hampshire Chronicle, 4 July 1997.
6. "A battleground to be", Daily Telegraph, Junt 1997.
7. Eagle Star Annual Report and Accounts, 1996. S "Tobacco tightens grip on Fl", The Guardian, 12 November 97.