A proposed EU tobacco tax hike risks fuelling organised crime, illicit trade, and people smuggling across Europe and into the UK, says Tom Pursglove

Recent headlines suggest that up to 50,000 illegal migrants could cross the Channel this year – a figure that provokes a palpable sense of dread amongst the British public. People have had enough: of the crossings, the hotel bills, and the rank unfairness of it all. Add to that senior policing leaders persistently warning of increasingly overstretched forces and the rising threat from organised crime, and it’s clear we face a growing national challenge.

As a former home office minister, I’ve seen how these threats interact – and how they can escalate from a failure of governments to treat them as a complex interconnected ecosystem, and having not confronted the brutal facts early enough. This risks responding with one-dimensional policies that fall apart under operational pressure, and often throwing up an array of unintended consequences.

This brings me to an unlikely but important example coming up on the horizon.

According to a leaked draft, the EU is planning to raise tobacco excise levels massively across the bloc; 139 per cent on cigarettes, 258 per cent on rolling tobacco and 1,092 per cent on cigars.

The apparent goal is to recover lost tax revenue due to illicit trade, and Wopke Hoekstra, Brussels’ Tax Commissioner, is lobbying his colleagues hard to raise EU excise rates, hoping to neutralise cross-border incentives by making tobacco more expensive everywhere, not just in his native Netherlands.

This matters to the UK, and we should be worried, as this broad-brush simplistic proposal is a huge potential gift to........

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