A climate sceptic and Liz Truss ally is behind a mysteriously funded campaign with links to the tobacco industry that is opposing a ban on disposable vapes, openDemocracy can reveal.

Global Britain, which describes itself as an “anti-EU think tank”, has run hundreds of ads across Facebook and Instagram under the name Save My Vape in the last five years, including a campaign urging people to lobby their MPs against new rules announced today restricting the sale of e-cigarettes.

The government says today’s ban on disposable vapes will tackle the rising number of young people taking up vaping and help curb the environmental impact of five million being discarded every week. 

Stewart, one of its two directors, is a climate sceptic who wrote in 2021 that human-caused climate change was a “contested theory”. Last year, he authored a report published by the think tank Civitas that claimed achieving net zero emissions would cost the UK £4.5tn, or £6,000 per household per year, by 2050.

Civitas was forced to take down the report after commentators pointed out that Stewart’s estimates were completely wrong because he had mistaken the electrical measurement units MW (megawatt) and MWh (megawatt-hour). The think tank said it would release a “revised report” but as yet none has been published.

Global Britain’s other campaign, Say No to WHO, is also running more than a dozen adverts calling on people to write to their MPs to oppose what it claims are plans by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to recommend the banning of vapes altogether.

The WHO says that vapes are harmful to health and that it is “concerned that these products have been allowed on the open market as consumer products and aggressively marketed to young people”. 

The organisation oversees an international treaty which aims to block the tobacco industry from interfering with health policymaking.

Since 2018, Global Britain has spent £363,320 on social media advertising as part of both campaigns, despite declaring it had just £17,160 in cash in its latest accounts filed on Companies House in August 2022.

Ewen Stewart is also one of several figures who joined the so-called “Growth Commission” set up by disgraced former prime minister Liz Truss after she was booted out of office in October 2023.

The commission has lobbied the government to adopt policies that Truss proposed in her “mini” budget, such as slashing corporation tax, which sparked economic turmoil and led to her resignation.

Truss criticised the government’s announcement today, which also confirmed plans for a generational ban on the sale of the tobacco products, calling it “profoundly unconservative”.

Global Britain’s other director, Brian Monteith, is a former Scottish Conservative and Brexit Party politician.

Monteith was also “a veteran campaigner against tobacco control policies”, according to the Tobacco Tactics research unit at Bath University and a spokesperson for the tobacco advocacy group Forest in the mid-1990s.

Save My Vape’s advertising campaign is run by Conrad Young, who alongside Maximilian Young and Monteith also spearheaded a group that spent thousands of pounds on Labour attack ads at the last general election.

The ironically named Capitalist Worker spent £50,313 on ads opposing Jeremy Corbyn, targeted at men aged between 18 and 34 and living in so-called ‘red wall’ seats during the 2019 election. The page was created a month before the election and stopped posting altogether a few months later.

Global Britain was founded in 1997 by three peers: former UKIP leader Malcolm Pearson; Ralph Harris, the former head of right-wing think tank the Institute for Economic Affairs; and David Stoddart, a former Labour peer and Eurospectic.  

The group, which campaigned to leave the EU during the 2016 referendum, received £233,329 in donations during the campaign.