I'm talking about the money, because that is the only reality. Nobody cares who 'owns' something if they are a 9% stakeholder in the end result: the money. And as I said, it is the perfect arrangement if someone else owns something and you take all the money.
Look: in 2012 (or around that time, plus or minus one year - no one can agree on the exact annual figures), total tobacco sales in the UK including tax were £14 billion.
The industry took £2bn, the government £12bn, so government was an 86% stakeholder on the OTC value.
Keeping in mind that the UK is a fully-socialised state where all healthcare and social care is free:
Government had to pay about £3bn for healthcare costs for the sick and dying smokers.
(About half that goes in drug costs to the pharmaceutical industry - chemotherapy drugs, cardiac drugs, COPD drugs etc. - this is the drug cost specifically attributed to mainline smoker treatment and *not* the cost of the overall boost to drug sales caused by smokers, such as for diabetes, blood pressure and cholesterol drugs).
Government saved about £7.5bn on pensions due to smokers dying up to ten years early.
Government saved about a similar amount on payments for all other social care costs for the elderly due to smokers dying early.
Government saved about the same as it had to spend on smoker treatments, on medical care for the elderly, as smokers die early.
Government had to pay £?bn for increased drug costs in the general population due to smoking. No one has ever calculated that figure. (It is the overall cost to a socialised state of 20% to 25% of the population having a greater tendency to require diabetes and cholesterol drugs etc. - a 1PAD smoker is 60% more likely to be diabetic).
Adding together tax revenues and savings, the UK government is a greater than 90% stakeholder in tobacco sales. You buy your cigarettes from the government, in effect, as almost all the money ends up in their pocket. Smokers are a good source of revenue and account for at least £20bn in revenue and savings annually, versus the £2bn that goes to the tobacco industry. In fact, in the UK, the pharmaceutical industry probably make more from smoking than the tobacco industry.
It seems generally agreed that a totalitarian government is the same whatever its political colour is. Communists I know tell me that the Soviet Union was not a communist government but a totalitarian dictatorship, because it did not represent communism at all. I think it is fair to say that communism is a gentler and better style of dictatorship than fascism when in its infancy, or at very small scale, but neither are particularly attractive when mature. No communist state can work without it becoming a large-scale prison with walls around it. It might work on a smaller scale but not at state scale. You can easily feel sympathetic to the young when they support communism, but hardly for older and wiser people: communist government is a prison state. So is a fascist one to a lesser extent, perhaps, though each is murderous in its own way. We have a great deal of practical experience of communism in Europe, and it is easy to recognise its attributes every time it resurfaces. I won't labour the point that US residents have no experience of this, because it is a little unfair.
Most of the current political adversaries of vaping are on the left, and the fiercer their opposition, the further left they are. Vote left/socialist/labour and you'll get ecig bans. Vote right and you'll get high taxes.
There is no win for a population group with no power - power is everything, in survival. We'll eventually get 20% of the population and it will be a good day when it comes. A 15% vote swing to a non-mainstream party in local elections has recently terrified UK politicians, so it seems that 15% and up will be a usable number for us. Even a 10% grouping will be useful (a bit less than half of tobacco users in the UK), and we'll get that with no problem. It can't come soon enough. This is one reason why I have mixed feelings about restricting ecig access for younger potential smokers - it is politically expedient to support restriction of access for youth, because policy tends to be made for a perfect-world scenario. In the real world, young people will become smokers no matter what legislation exists, and a better option would be to innoculate them against smoking by allowing ecig access. Politics isn't about real-world solutions though, it's about image and money.
but all the communist attributes were pretty much in place. They just never got to that part where "the gov't withers away". That's the part I'm waiting for in the US 
