Smokers’ paradise: French turn to Belgium for cheap cigarettes: French tobacconists are fuming about Belgians stealing their customers. But they are fighting back, reports John Lichfield
Afew years ago, Adinkerke was a forgotten, dilapidated village of red-brick houses, just inside the Belgian border with France. In the past four years, however, it has been transformed into a glittering mini-Las Vegas: a village full of garish signs reading “Smokey River”, “Eurobaccy”, “Tobacco Alley”, “Smugglers’ Corner”, and “Coronation Street Tobacco Shop”.
The village stands less than a mile from the long ribbon of dunes and beaches, stretching north of Dunkirk, from which the British Army was evacuated 69 years ago. The opening this month of yet another tobacco shop in the village - a garish cigarette supermarket called Real Tobacco XL - has ignited a new Battle of Dunkirk: a potentially noxious legal row between France and Belgium over the rights of EU citizens to dodge national anti-smoking policies by crossing European borders to buy cheap fags. . . .
“For three or four years, we have had to watch them [the Belgians] opening more shops selling cheap cigarettes, and we could do nothing,” said Patrick Falewee, president of the Dunkirk area tobacco trade association. “Over there they have no system of tobacco licensing, anyone can start a tobacco shop. You just buy an abandoned house in a border village and you start selling cigarettes. Now, at last, we can fight back. They have broken the French law against advertising tobacco and we are going to make sure that they are punished for it. We are going to pursue this case to the end.”
This is much more than a local quarrel. . . .
Earlier this year, the British American Tobacco company estimated that more than one in five of all cigarettes smoked in France was bought abroad. Much the same problem exists in Germany, which has very cheap tobacco neighbours in Poland and the Czech Republic. There is a growing trade in smuggled cigarettes in Europe and an equally illegal growth of sales over the internet. But many French and German smokers have discovered the pleasures of perfectly legal, or almost legal, cigarette tourism.
“They come to the shops in Belgium, not just from Dunkirk and Lille but from as far south as Paris and Rouen,” . . .
“The French are making a big hoo-ha about our shops here but the real price difference is not between France and Belgium but between here and Britain. Eighty per cent of our customers here are not French but British,” he said. Was he suggesting that the French were being a little hypocritical? That Calais had been making a living for years from the thirst of Britons for cheap, low-tax booze and the cross-Channel hunger for lower-tax tobacco? Yet, now that the cigarette tax pattern had started to favour Belgium, they were complaining.
