Cigarette smoking and nuclear power generation are expensive, dirty habits that the head of state should not be promoting.



What every little boy wanted from Father Christmas fifty years ago

Milos Zeman began a speech at the Brno technical university yesterday with the words, “I am a dictator, Russian agent and destroyer of parliamentary democracy.” The students were supposed to laugh. Instead, they responded with applause to show just how much they agreed with the president's jocular assessment of himself.

He might well have added that he is a lobbyist for Philip Morris and Rosatom. Half a century since the first atomic power plant went into service at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, and the launch of the Marlboro brand of cigarettes, the president of the Czech Republic is an enthusiastic champion of both smoking and nuclear power generation.

Milos Zeman, like his predecessor Vaclav Klaus, has long been a Marlboro man. The Brno students have probably forgotten his remarks made as prime minister in 2001: "As a smoker, I support the state budget because I pay tax on tobacco. Smokers die sooner and the state does not need to look after them in their old age."

Zeman’s performance last week in Brussels was no less crass. Attacking the introduction of tougher restrictions on tobacco products, the president called for ‘common sense’, by which he meant the sense to protect the still fabulous though declining profits of Philip Morris. As if 1,500 jobs in Kutna Hora justify the 18,000 deaths each year from smoking-related illnesses in the Czech Republic, or the public health costs of treating diseases caused by smoking and the unavoidable inhalation by children of their parents' smoke, or even the harm done to the political system by tobacco industry donations to ODS and the Social Democrats over the last twenty years.


When Milos was a little boy, smoking was actually good for his mother!

The claim that smoking is good for the economic health of the state is as foolish as the claim that nuclear electricity is ‘cheap’.

And this brings us to that other twentieth century prejudice of Zeman, his partiality for a power generation technology developed when he was still in shorts. Add up what economists call the externalities of smoking and nuclear power, and the true cost of these expensive and dirty habits makes both unsustainable.

Little wonder then that students regard the president with a mixture of revulsion and derision.