I was pleased – and slightly relieved – to read highlights of UKIP’s Doncaster policy announcements, and find therein:
– UKIP will amend the smoking ban to give pubs and clubs the choice to open smoking rooms properly ventilated and separated from non-smoking areas.
– UKIP opposes ‘plain paper packaging’ for tobacco products and minimum pricing of alcohol.
In their 2010 manifesto, the promise to amend the smoking ban was the very last item.
The Daily Mirror (a Labour party rag, I believe) highlighted the “Five Weirdest UKIP Policies”, with the amending of the smoking ban the fifth weirdest:
5. Changing the smoking ban to allow smoking indoors
UKIP says they will “amend the smoking ban to give pubs and clubs the choice to open smoking rooms properly ventilated and separated from non-smoking areas”. This is interesting because it’s a divisive political topic but also because practically, it’s quite hard to ensure that there’s no risk to non-smokers in pubs.
Would pubs really want to invest money in creating new rooms specifically for this? Especially six years after the smoking ban, as our smoking culture has changed and e-cigarette use is on the rise.
Hmmm, who really would like to come out of the rain and cold to smoke in pubs?
I can’t see that it’s hard to ensure there’s no risk to non-smokers: there was never any risk in the first place.
But they also had a poll, asking which was the weirdest policy, or were none of them weird? Here’s what the result was looking like some 12 hours ago:
So, it seems that nearly 60% of Labour-voting Mirror readers thought none of the proposals were at all weird. And amending the smoking ban was the least weird. All of which suggests that there’s very little resistance to that amendment.
Afterwards, I thought that the Mirror had perhaps done UKIP a favour by picking out their proposal to amend the smoking ban. Because I wonder how many people know that this will be in UKIP’s manifesto? After all, the smoking ban hardly ever gets mentioned by anybody. Even UKIP and Nigel Farage hardly ever mention it. So I wouldn’t be too surprised if quite a few people don’t know about it.
But for me it’s the only manifesto promise that matters. The UK smoking ban was, in my view, a cultural attack on the heart of Britain. In fact it was also a cultural attack on a global culture. It was a piece of spiteful vandalism, which had nothing to do with “health” whatsoever. And, as such, it was something that transcended nationality or race or religion or political affiliation: it was an attack on almost everybody. Which is why I’m constantly surprised that hardly anyone of any note has ever protested against it.
I sometimes think that the promise to amend the smoking ban is the real secret to UKIP’s appeal: They’re offering a cultural restoration which will appeal to almost everybody. And that all the anti-EU, anti-immigration stuff is a bit of a red herring to fool the stupid and deluded political class into launching their counter-attacks on the wrong quarter.
This almost certainly isn’t true, of course, but I like to think it is, and that UKIP will win just not 9 seats next year, but 590 seats, as almost the entire country votes for the restoration of their stolen culture.
Frank Davis 
You might like this latest poll and article in the Mail on Sunday: I know I do:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2789512/record-poll-surge-gives-ukip-25-survey-hand-farage-astonishing-128-mps-puts-ed-miliband-new-low.html
25% UKIP vote and potentially 128 UKIP MPs
Many thanks for that link. Looked at the most popular comments and WOW!
(Beginning to think 128 may be on the low side though – for the record – I’d have preferred to see a statement like this:
“UKIP will amend the smoking ban to give businesses the choice to open smoking rooms properly ventilated and separated from non-smoking areas.”
Tobacconists are the glaringly obvious omission, however I’d very much like to see airports and railway stations, restaurants and such given the choice.
As such I’m not 100% sure I’ll be prepared to trade being able to bring in EU sourced tobacco just to be able to stay out of the cold to smoke the stuff. And I’m not the club type, so it’s only pubs that will apply in my case.
Still, that’s the marvel of UKIP; their grass roots still have a say in policy, and I know for sure that one or two influential bods do visit this place. So, to them, I’d say.
No point in getting grief for a quarter measure. Do it right.)
I am beginning to see a glimmer of hope at last.
It is a poll for a protest party that gains most of its support from not being like the other lot. All these means is that 25% of people don’t like the other parties, not that they positively support UKIP. The LibDems and the SDP got similar poll results when they occupied the role of protest party. UKIP has targeted 12 seats and they might just get a few of them. Not enough to make any difference in government but perhaps enough to cost the Tories victory.
UKIP reminds me of the Cybernats. Like a rash over every online forum, they punch much higher than their weight. They even conned the Westminister parties into thinking that that the independence referendum was going to be a very close run thing, when in fact it was a solid win for “No”. So it will also transpire that UKIP is not nearly as popular as its excitable supporters think it is.
All these means is that 25% of people don’t like the other parties, not that they positively support UKIP.
I positively support UKIP for amending the smoking ban.
I believe a lot more than 25% of people do as well.
Nothing teaches people like cold, hard, personal experience, does it? I truly believe, as I’ve said on here many times before (please don’t all yawn at once!), that the smoking ban was the worst thing to happen to the whole anti-smoking movement. In so many ways, things were better for them before the ban was imposed. Firstly, because although it was all very well for people to talk in abstract terms about the (then) proposed ban being “probably a good thing,” it’s a whole different ball game when the pub which one has used for years, as a non-smoker, suddenly and very quickly in the wake of the ban becomes an empty shadow of its former vibrant self, morphs under new management into a gastro-type restaurant-with-a-pubby-name where casual drinkers are made to feel distinctly out of place, or closes altogether. Even non-smoking pub-goers don’t like that.
Secondly, all those platitudes about bans being “good for business” and pubs thriving with hundreds of new non-smoking customers flooding through the doors have been shown to be nothing but the lies of idealists who wanted everyone to believe that there was a whole untapped market out there just waiting to rush into pubs to fill the void left by smoking customers. With the experience of driving along any city road and seeing every other pub sad, empty, boarded up, and, often, up for “redevelopment,” no amount of hastily-compiled stats about the number of “new licences being granted” in such-and-such a quarter cuts any ice, because those stats are very obviously not matched by legions of new, real pubs opening up (or old ones re-opening), in fact, quite the opposite.
Thirdly, with the ban in place, many politicians, I think, believed that this would put all those screeching, nagging lobbyists back in their box. After all, that was what the lobbyists said they wanted, wasn’t it? Sadly this has proved not to be the case. As commenters on blogs like these have long been saying, these people are never satisfied. They are always looking for the next logical step towards prohibition, so the chance that a mere ban would be enough was always unlikely. It seems that it has taken cold, hard experience – once again, the best teacher – of anti-smoking campaigners’ continued demands and foot-stamping for MPs to realise that they are banging their heads against a brick wall in trying to pacify these people. Might as well start ignoring them now, because that’s the only way to shut them up. As Mrs Thatcher once said about terrorists – don’t give them the oxygen of publicity. That way, on the few occasions that they do make the news with some latest dire, “we’re all doomed” or “smoking causes everything” proclamation it shows them up for the swivel-eyed zealots that they truly are. (Hint to MPs: Denying them the “oxygen of state finance” would be even more successful in getting them off your backs!)
And lastly, and (I think) possibly most importantly, the onward ripple effect of the smoking ban in terms of giving the green light to bullying, harassment and general rudeness from one group of people towards another – in this case minority – group doesn’t sit well with most people in this country. If nothing else, we British do still like to think of ourselves as a tolerant and polite nation, which we generally are, so to see a piece of legislation having such a detrimental effect on the way in which we interact with each other socially – not just in terms of where we can (or rather, now, can’t) do it, but also in terms of how we conduct ourselves with each other by tacitly supporting the minority of people who prefer to interact in a non-polite, intolerant way has, I think, brought a lot of erstwhile “generally ban-supportive” non-smokers up a little short and made them consider that, sometimes, a law can and does have unexpected and unanticipated side-effects which reach far and beyond its original, stated remit.
So, no, it isn’t surprising at all that Mirror readers don’t think it’s at all weird, in fact, I’m surprised that as many as 7% do!
“the smoking ban was the worst thing to happen to the whole anti-smoking movement”
Yet after some seven years it has not proved to be much more than water off a duck’s back for these people, but far worse is on the way for them, and on a global scale, with the upcoming Russian ‘winter of discontent’. Talk about “cold, hard, personal experience”!
“the lies of idealists”
In the absence of inverted commas, the term ‘idealist’, which is very strong from a philosophical standpoint, can not without abuse be applied to people that can best be described as mythomaniacs and fanatics. For a true idealist the ‘Cultural Restoration’ the imminent downfall of TC will bring about will be a mere springboard for a new Renaissance, no less!
Very true about calling scumbags “idealists” – or “nannies,” as I’m always complaining about.
Regarding the relationship between politicians and anti-smokers: In fact, Wisconsin Governor Walter J. Kohler Jr. was Chairman of the Board of the American Cancer Society, at the same time that he was governor. Kohler presided at the American Cancer Society’s 1957 meeting, which urged all public health agencies to take action against smoking. (Society Accepts Cancer-Smoke Tie. New York Times, Nov. 2, 1957.) Those Cancer Society people have always been wealthy “friends of the governor” types and cronies of legislators, who use their ties to influence appointments and legislation.
Realistically all that means is if you want the check………………….dance politician.
As a non-smoker who welcomed the smoking “ban” (sic) I am pleased for you that you think it was “the worst thing to happen” to the anti-smoking lobby. I am simply pleased that I can go into a pub or a restaurant and not have to breathe your smoke. That is victory enough for me. Amazingly enough, the vast majority of us non-smokers were not part of a vast conspiracy to deny you your pleasures. We just wanted our space too.
By the way, if you want to know what a ban really looks like, speak to the cannabis users. This “ban” was simply a restriction on where you could light up. I am not allowed to drink alcohol in a public place thanks to council bylaws. What’s teh difference to restrictions on smoking? I am not such a desperate alkie that I must drink when walking down the street.
I am simply pleased that I can go into a pub or a restaurant and not have to breathe your smoke.
Which you would be able to do if pubs and restaurants had the choice of being smoking or non-smoking. You just choose the ones that have “No Smoking” signs on the door. It’s not rocket science, is it?
And as for making the comparison with drinking alcohol while walking down the street; what’s your point? There is no comparison. I don’t walk down the street drinking alcohol either, because I have no desire to do so, and nor do most people; but I do enjoy relaxing in a pub with a pint of beer and a cigarette. As do millions of others. But the zealots, under totally false premises, took that choice away from smokers in the UK. Which is why, since 2007, more than 14000 pubs have been driven out of business and more than 150,000 people who worked in the hospitality industry lost their jobs. That points to ill-conceived and counterproductive legislation, legislation which any sane government would repeal, although it’s probably too late for all the people who watched their businesses go down the pan.
Which you would be able to do if pubs and restaurants had the choice of being smoking or non-smoking. You just choose the ones that have “No Smoking” signs on the door. It’s not rocket science, is it?
No simple physics on the diffusion of gases is not “rocket science” but it does make the ideas of separating smoking and non-smoking areas unworkable. British Rail used to have smoking an non-smoking areas in the same carriage. It didn’t work because the smoke bled into the non-smoking area. The only way it could work would be for a separate, sealed rooms for smokers, and not many pubs could meet that requirement.
And as for making the comparison with drinking alcohol while walking down the street; what’s your point? There is no comparison.
Well there is a comparison, you just don’t want to confront it. All legal drugs usage is restricted as to where you can do it. You say that you wanted to enjoy a quite pint with a fag. Well all I wanted was to do was the same without having to breathe the smokers smoke. And thanks to the smoking ban I can do that. I do not see why my rights should be any less important than yours.
If separate smoking areas was feasible, why wasn’t this implemented by the pub trade years ago. Frankly I do not believe a word that the smoking lobby says on this subject. They just want public smoking back and to hell with anyone who disagrees.
No simple physics on the diffusion of gases is not “rocket science” but it does make the ideas of separating smoking and non-smoking areas unworkable.
Presumably the same diffusion of gases would preclude a smoking pub on one side of a village, and a non-smoking one on the other? i.e. co-existence is impossible.
If separate smoking areas was feasible, why wasn’t this implemented by the pub trade years ago.
Many of them did have smoking rooms at one time.
Frankly I do not believe a word that the smoking lobby says on this subject. They just want public smoking back and to hell with anyone who disagrees.
And frankly I do not believe a word that the antismoking lobby says on this subject. They just want public smoking banned and to hell with anyone who disagrees. And I have good reason to believe this, because this is exactly what they’ve done.
P.S. I have a nasty habit of banning antismokers from my blog when I get sick of them.
I have a nasty habit of banning antismokers from my blog when I get sick of them.
That’s fine Frank. Let me save you the chore. You can remain in your smoke filled echo chamber, never being challenged on your opinions, becoming more and more bitter and twisted at the venal wicked non-smokers who do not see the world exactly as you see it.
Meanwhile I’ll sup my Taylor’s Landlord and laugh at the saps getting soaked outside because they lack the self control to pass up on a fag when it’s hammering down.
Live long and prosper. Or until the tar gets you. Bye.
I do not see why my rights should be any less important than yours.
Or any more important, eh?
As Frank points out, and as you would have realised if you’d read my comment properly, I suggested SMOKING pubs and NON-SMOKING pubs. That way your delicate little nose would never have to be offended by a wisp of smoke. You could enjoy your Taylor’s Landlord in the funereal atmosphere of your ‘smoke-free’ pub while all the smokers were having a good time in the smoking pub. You’d unfortunately have to forgo your rather unpleasantly smug, self-righteous little orgasms at having ruined millions of people’s social lives and your obvious pleasure watching them stand out in the rain if they want to enjoy a cigarette, but with you being so keen on ‘rights’, that would be a small price to pay, no?
You can see from Stephen’s replies to me that he’ll argue with anyone about anything because he believes himself to be the fount of all wisdom. He is deluded by thinking he has superior intelligence.
It’s gone up to 9%, so I’ve added my vote to ‘None are Weird’
The ‘reckoning’ is starting. Before the internet, the bastards could get away with their persecutions of the poorest people. Now, they cannot. Arnott, Duggan et al must be pursued and hunted down. They absolutely must not be allowed to get away with their manufactured and lying advertising tricks. They must be exposed. They are cruel and vindictive people. The same also applies to various MPs like Williams. Such people care nothing about individuals. They are only concerned about pushing their own ‘miasmas’.
UKIP may be far from perfect, but is has, at its heart, the idea that ‘fairness’ is the greatest ideal of all.
pursued and hunted down.
With dogs and searchlights and Wanted posters.
What no Guns……………
Funny thing about UKIPS statement;
UKIP will amend the smoking ban to give pubs and clubs the choice to open smoking rooms properly ventilated and separated from non-smoking areas.
Its the perfect P.C. answer for the times…………..Its hard to argue against choise and also solving the claim that non-smokers would be in the smoke.
But by the time UKIP might be in a position to do what they said above it could very well be enuf has happened that they just go straight for total repeal………..
That’s what happened last time in America…………All political will died for the bans and it left those for bans after the fact looking like national Memebers of the Insanity Commission.
Not sure when you get your idea from that smoking restrictions are dying out in the US.
“As of January 2, 2014, according to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, 81.5% of the U.S. population lives under a ban on smoking in “workplaces, and/or restaurants, and/or bars, by either a state, commonwealth, or local law,”,[1]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_United_States
I don’t know the date on this, but if it’s recent, it’s perhaps telling about repeal trends in the UK. (If it’s old, it’s just …old.)
The date at the end is 2003, but Boris Johnson was his own man in those days, e.g. two years earlier he wrote, “If gay marriage were OK – and I was uncertain on the issue – then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog.”
Nowadays he is Mr Political Correctness. He has been bought or compromised to be considered the next leader of the Tory Party IMO. He’ll allow pro-homosexual adverts on London Transport, but he personally banned ads by a group who offers treatment for unwanted same-sex desire.
That clip from ‘Room 101’ was four years before the UK smoking ban (three years before Scotland’s), so most people probably assumed it would never happen, but recently, he’s been calling for a smoking ban in cars carrying children – http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-joins-leading-medics-in-calling-for-smoking-ban-in-cars-carrying-children-9118065.html
He became popular for being a bumbling renegade, so he has cleverly cloaked his Machiavellian character who would sell his granny for power.
Nowadays he is Mr Political Correctness.
Well, he is Mayor of London, and I suppose he can’t be his usual self. I doubt he’s changed his mind about smoking. He (or his secretary) sent me a cigar a few years back.
We’ll have to see whether he returns to his usual form if and when he re-enters parliament.
I for one think that Johnson’s been “got at.” Not got at in the sense of being either threatened or bribed to fall into line, but got at in the way that single-issue lobby groups do it these days, which is much more subtle. I believe that what they do is this: they keep a close eye on people whose star is on the rise and they take close note of what they do and don’t do and what they say. In this respect, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are a godsend, because people reveal an awful lot more about themselves on sites like those than they would, say, in an interview with a newspaper. Single-issue lobbyists are particularly interested in their personal lifestyles rather than their political beliefs, because they know that anything which strikes a strong personal “chord” in any individual will be a much stronger “hook” than anything which simply mirrors a political (or party-political) policy which the individual may back at an intellectual level whilst not feeling particularly strongly about it from a personal perspective. In other words, they look to appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect.
Once they’ve got a pretty good idea of an individual’s personal background – whether they smoke or not (and, if so, whether they’ve tried to give up or if they are “unrepentant” smokers), if they drink or not (and how much), if they’re straight or gay, if they’re married or single, if they have kids or if they are childless, if they’re a born-and-bred toff or if they’re an “operation bootstraps” self-made business magnate etc etc – they’ve then got a pretty good idea whether or not that person is ripe for the picking for their particular hobby-horse. Lobbyists, after all, don’t want to waste their time trying to persuade someone round to their viewpoint who has already made it perfectly clear that they disagree with it; what would be the point, for example, of an Animal Rights group trying to gain the support of a rising-star MP who had made it perfectly clear that he regards animals as significantly less important than people? Waste of time. It’s much more beneficial to identify those who are more likely to be sympathetic to the campaign group’s viewpoint and to understand it from their own personal experience and win them round as a supporter of the cause, particularly if they are on an upward curve in terms of political (or other) success in their career, because that way they’ll carry “the cause” along with them, hopefully right the way to the top.
Once a “likely suspect” has been identified, I think that’s when the lobby-group “activists” really go into action. They select someone from (or associated with) their group who is either (a) senior enough to sway the “suspect” because of their “expert” status, or (b) has good enough connections – such as sitting on or acting as advisor to some committee or another or being on the target’s own staff – to “get the ear” of the target. And that person (or several, if the lobby group is lucky enough to have more than one) then “goes to work” on them. Starting quietly and unobtrusively, and probably keeping their real motivations safely under wraps, they gain the trust of the target by flattering them, agreeing with them and issuing information and advice, often on unrelated matters, upon which the individual begins to feel they can depend. Once that trust is established – using the target’s existing predisposal to be affected by the lobby group’s “concerns” by identifying with them at a personal level – the lobbyists then feel that the time is right to begin to show their hand. They introduce “the cause,” they whisper entreaties to them, they issue dire warnings about “such-and-such” an issue being a ticking time-bomb, and they up the ante by appealing to the target’s ego and intimating that their “position as a person of influence” could make a really positive difference in directing policy, and holding out the tempting carrot that they – the target – could even go down in history as “the person who first proposed xxx, and thus saved the nation” etc etc. The more emotional they can make these entreaties (“Just think of the poor children, sir! The children!”) the harder it will be for the individual in question not to subconsciously relate these entreaties to their own situation and to resist becoming swept up in the fanaticism and fantasy that “this” is the most important thing in the world. Which explains why, once these lobbyists have got their hooks into people, targets seem to become almost incoherent in their devotion to “the cause,” to the exclusion of any rational, logical analysis.
Needless to say, the leaders in this field have been the anti-smoking groups, who got it down to a fine art over many years – and upon whose template all other lobby groups now base their tactics. Anti-smoking, in this respect could be regarded as the root of this particular evil. I suspect that in the first instance with Boris, it was the anti-booze brigade who got their claws into him, being as one of the first things he did (and a great disappointment it was, too) after being elected was to ban drinking on underground trains and stations – as if that was going to instantly sober-up a whole lot of people who had been on the lash for the last four hours! And I suspect that was because the anti-booze brigade had clocked the fact that Boris was a fine-wine and brandy man, rather than a lager-lover, and would thus be open to the possibility that lager-drinking youths were a damaging influence who could potentially bring about serious consequences (i.e. restrictions) for responsible, “nice” drinkers (like him). And of course, he’s a bicycle rider, too, so the anti-car lobby were fast in there too (hence the proposal to extend the Congestion Charge shortly after his election). See what I mean? Clever, eh? And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover – given his latest support for the car smoking ban – that he may well have recently given up smoking his beloved cigars, so the anti-smokers will be in there like Flynn, too.
It explains a lot as to how people who, like Boris, seem to have a pretty good grip on reality and common-sense whilst they are still kind of on the sidelines of power, suddenly go bonkers the moment real power comes to them. It’ll be interesting to see, with Farage’s political prospects looking so good, which personal-hobby-horse-riding group will target him?? Any suggestions?
Well, I certainly think that parliament was “got at” by being subjected to intense lobbying back in 2006 when they voted for the smoking ban. There were letters, emails, all sorts. Deborah Arnott was gloating afterwards about their “confidence trick”.
No doubt, as Mayor, Boris has been subjected to similar. I was disappointed by the drinking ban on the Underground too.
@ jaxthefirst. “The anti-car lobby were fast in there too”
I’d really like to learn more about the funding and inner workings of such a lobby. Given the urban/rural divide, had an anti-car ‘lobby’ been extant in the late 1940s-early 1950s, anti-tobacco hysteria would arguably have been nipped in the bud.
@Frank – Morality doesn’t have to fly out the window when one is elected. Johnson is not even fair-minded now.
@Jax – You make a good case for lobbying. It’s big business, so it must get results. I rather think that to betray your country as Cameron, Clegg, Blair, Obummer, etc., have takes more. These people have been chosen because they have been compromised IMO. Maybe filmed having sex with children at the Elm Guest House? Maybe something else so damaging that they’d do anything rather than risk the truth getting out.
Some people say the Bilderbergers choose our PMs. Well, yes, it looks that way when you explore old guest lists at their annual shindigs then see who is elected shortly afterwards. I’ve heard it said that George Osborne is really in charge of the Tory Party and it’s easy to see as he’s been invited to more Bilderberg meetings than almost anyone.
However, the Bilderberg Group strikes me as being a deliberately open secret to try to conceal much darker goings on behind the scenes. That’s why I think Boris was ‘got at’ when it was clear that he could get somewhere and so he had to be made to go with the PC/climate change/healthist/globalist agenda.
Perhaps Johnson has realized that quite a few gays are well off and natural Conservative voters and donors and that mindlessly abusing them over the subject of gay marriage is not a sensible thing to do if you want to win elections?
They don’t care about abusing the concept of marriage though to satisfy the whims of a portion of the one percent of the UK population that identifies as being ‘gay’ (latest ONS study). If the Tories hadn’t been so wet and socialist they would have wiped the floor at the 2010 election instead of being in a coalition with another bunch of wet lefties!
Re. inheritance tax. I knew an old lady who died at almost 100, leaving over a million pounds in her will. Taxing her estate 40% on the lot over the first £325,000 made no difference at all to her, but it made a big difference to those she left money to who don’t pay higher rates of tax. Being quite well off, she must have paid an absolute fortune in taxes over the years anyway, so it is yet another totally unfair and unjustifiable tax IMO. P.S. I wasn’t in the will! P.P.S. I would have thought that 95% of Mirror adherents would have considered this tax a good idea to help give them higher benefits.
So what if she had paid a “fortune” in other taxes. I pay a fortune in income tax yet I am still expected to pay VAT. Better we tax unearned income, such as inheritance, than income obtained through hard work.
Better ‘we’ stop wasting half of all money that ‘we’ collect in taxes and let the beneficiaries of those who have worked and saved and paid huge amounts of tax while living to get to enjoy it without the government stealing 2/5ths of it. How much VAT would a 99 year old, well-off person have paid? How much other tax? She liked her gin. The tax she paid on that alone could have paid for a hospital ward.
She also paid for her own care where the more profligate end up being paid by other taxpayers.
Like I said – she’s dead now, so it doesn’t affect her in the slightest. It affects those far worse off financially, some of whom I know and who could have done with the extra money.
Re. Boris Johnson and ‘no one of any note’ protesting the smoking ban: shortly before the ban I helped organise a letter to The Times protesting it, signed by a dozen ‘notables’ including Bob Geldof, Stephen Fry, David Hockney . . . and Boris Johnson. After a lot of dithering, The Times published the letter on a Saturday (their lowest-selling edition) and buried it halfway into the paper. They then published letters saying things like, this letter is an outrage and should be dismissed because a couple of the signers had some loose connection with FOREST – therefore the letter was a Big Tobacco PR stunt.
It’s only because there were a few big names on it, that the letter was published at all. This is a good example of what we’re up against – people are not protesting because they can see that (a) they will be given all kinds of shit for it and (b) it does no good. I still think we should keep trying anyway, but I think the ‘sea change’ we’d all like to see, will be like the fall of the Berlin Wall . . . it will seem unthinkable until the last minute, when something unforeseen will happen, which will push the momentum in the opposite direction. In the meantime one of the few things we can do is simply refuse to stop smoking. The failure of bans to lower smoking rates any further, must become more and more of an embarrassment, surely?!
I’ve noticed over the last year or so that there has been a slow but inexorable tendency towards scepticism about the hyperbolic claims emanating from TC. These days, in the comments after a newspaper article detailing the latest ‘experts have said’ about smoking, there tends to be a significant number of dissenters, non-smokers included, and those dissenters seem to be on the increase. People are starting to see the anti-smoking movement, with all its shrill demands for ever more sanctions on smokers in the same light as the ‘Global Warming’ scam. And I rather think that it won’t be long before some fairly high profile people start feeling that it’s safe to put their heads above the parapet and say what they really think about the situation.
This shift in opinion is, I believe, down to the advent of e-cigs. The antis have reacted entirely predictably to them, and in doing so have exposed themselves for the ideologues that they are. They can no longer hide behind the smokescreen (haha) of ‘health’ to justify their spiteful bans, and as a result, those not totally indoctrinated are starting to realise that the emperor has no clothes.
I think you are right that something will occur which will bring the whole corrupt edifice of TC down like a pack of cards in a very short space of time. What that something is I don’t know, but I feel the general mood is becoming disenchanted with interfering busybodies dictating lifestyles, and that it won’t actually take much to turn the tide. The rise of UKIP with their ‘small government’ approach is testament to that shift.
They’d argue that the ban was to protect non smoking employees, rather than reduce the smoking rate. We know differently of course. Indeed, they are now stating that even outdoor smoking bans (and indoor/outdoor vaping bans) are part of the denormalisation process. Yet still the public haven’t cottoned on that Public Health and pals are politically driven. Still, what with the alcohol, diet and e cig agendas one can only hope that the public will really start wondering WTF is going on.
when something unforeseen will happen
We may be seeing the unforeseen happening with the Ebola epidemic, which is now revealing just how comprehensively, in their zeal for preventative lifestyle medicine, Public Health organisations like the WHO have dropped their guard against real threats.
I’m currently piecing together an essay along these lines that I plan to post up tonight.
I sincerely hope the transparent lies, slow and bungled responses from our CDC and its director Freiden put him, the Great National Ant, in a catapult ready for firing. He’s been the driving force behind NYC and national denormalization. Lol. My iPad keeps correcting that into “demoralization” but maybe it’s on to something.
Btw, there’s been a second case of Ebola here– a dr or nurse in Dallas who treated the first Liberian patient– and he or she was said to have been cocooned in protective gear and meanwhile they keep saying that it really can’t spread to unarmed civilians and how the hospitals are prepared.
I noticed the reports of the new case in Dallas earlier today.
That’s now two cases of the disease being communicated in two hospitals (the other being Madrid), where nurses were fully suited in both cases.
Ebola 2, Humans 0
As Joe shows us its always something that makes the political will change and literally overnite. Why I say always watch for the signs and the first and biggest sign is UKIP coming out of nowhere doing what they have done, WIN!
Then 2 summers ago Australia kicks out the Green Nazi anti-smokers from govmnt and then we see PM Abbott state over a play that had smoking in it being banned and stated its INSANITY………..
Then The independent Australian Legislator making a speech against the bans………
These are signs that suck laws political life are coming to an end…………
I don’t put it past politicians who are againt the bans to create Folly to make the bans even more politically bad for everyone who supports them.
Of course these are things that take time to build as Joe is suggesting and that pathway is already being laid literally worldwide.
All we have to do is fight back and wait the bastards out………..while we keep on smoking!
Somehow I get the feeling a group of Nazis that found this lil apartment complex to push a ban and use it for a starting point thought they had enuf Nazis in it to pass a ban……………Looks like they thought wrong.
Vote “Snuffs Out” Smoking Ban
WOWT
“I totally am against this ban on smoking, because it is up to the individual if they want to smoke that is their life, not anybody else’s,” Linda Graham said. After a civil debate, the issue finally went to ballot, 47 voted to ban smoking, 54 said keep things the way they are. “We bought into our home just like everybody else did, so we should be entitled to the pursuit of happiness just like everybody else,” Graham said.
Graham is among about 10 smokers in the 190-town home complex. She’s pleased with the outcome of the vote. Others not so much, worried that the issue will continue. “Hopefully things will continue to keep using the right channels, I don’t want to see any lawsuits or anything like that that is not what I think anyone wants to see,” Nate Peterson said.
http://www.wowt.com/home/headlines/UPDATE-Vote-Snuffs-Out-Smoking-Ban-278923001.html
Fighting talk on the West Lothian Question at last.
Agree English home rule within weeks or vote against the plans in the Commons, William Hague tells Ed Miliband
” David Cameron, the Prime Minister, pledged to ban Scots MPs from voting on English laws “in tandem” with handing more powers to the Scots after the independence referendum.
Mr Miliband has so far rejected Mr Cameron’s proposals, despite appearing to accept that the current system is unfair, saying it would divide Parliament.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/11155812/Agree-English-home-rule-within-weeks-or-vote-against-the-plans-in-the-Commons-William-Hague-tells-Ed-Miliband.html
Gordon Brown: Cameron risks breaking up UK with English votes for English laws
“Gordon Brown has warned David Cameron risks breaking up the United Kingdom “by accident” by playing “fast and loose” with banning Scottish MPs on voting on English laws at Westminster.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scottish-independence/11157009/Gordon-Brown-Cameron-risks-breaking-up-UK-with-English-votes-for-English-laws.html
How sickeningly transparent.
It actually brings to lite how world wide political instability is everywhere………..Ive the feeling the future holds a lot of new territorial boundary lines being redrawn and renamed.
Everybody wants there own homeland it appears and to be left alone to live as they desire not as the behest of bayonets and gunfire to make them.
Take the bans and your a smoker. You sit down and lite up as you always did and then the cops get called and they order you to stop and you say no its your law not mine. Then they try and use physical force and you fight back,because smoking isn’t a crime anyway the same as prayer isn’t suppose to be crime. Yet next the cops mace you or pull their guns to force you to comply.
Is there any difference in the end for those already being forced to live a certain way wit bayonets or guns over your simple act of lighting up and the end outcome…………
Nothing at all except Nazis passing laws that can and will end in your death via the same means others arounf the world are forced to comply against their will!
H/T IRO
Iro Cage Canada” Anti smoking exposed – Tobacco Control Out of Control” – Fighting Back
1 hr ·
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In the ongoing Quebec class action law-suit against Big Tobacco, the tobacco industry’s closing testimony has started with Rothman’s / Benson & Hedges lawyer pleading. In summary his defense is based on the premise that although the tobacco industry may be at fault in some instances they always deferred to the government’s directives and regulations in marketing a legal product. He advances that the plaintiffs did not prove that smoking is what caused each individual plaintiff of the class to be addicted or contract a ”smoking related” disease.
He advances that the plaintiffs did not prove that smoking is what caused each individual plaintiff of the class to be addicted or contract a ”smoking related” disease. We cannot legally grant damages to such a diverse group of people who 1) may have smoked simply because they knew the risks but enjoyed smoking anyway 2) may have contracted their disease because of many other confounders which would have to be examined on an individual basis. In other words what he’s saying is that epidemiology cannot be used to prove causation.
http://www.tobaccotrial.blogspot.ca/search?updated-max=2014-10-09T17%3A11%3A00-04%3A00&max-results=1
America is one of few advanced nations that allow direct advertising of prescription drugs.
http://robertreich.org/post/99279814665#.VDLUR-DQaNM.twitter
CVS Considered Banning Candy And Soda On Top Of Cigarettes
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/cvs-soda-ban-cigarettes-candy_n_5965520.html
The Rise of UKIP
https://www.facebook.com/Notoeu
Farage claims Ukip will win in May’s general election
The party leader looked confident as he spoke with voters in Rochester and Strood this morning after suggesting Ukip had ‘enough momentum’ behind it to sway the general election in May.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2789116/we-win-nigel-farage-comes-fighting-hits-campaign-trail-tory-defector-mark-reckless-rochester-strood-election.html
So, it seems that nearly 60% of Labour-voting Mirror readers thought none of the proposals were at all weird. And amending the smoking ban was the least weird. All of which suggests that there’s very little resistance to that amendment.
No, there isn’t. The non-smokers are REALLY getting p*ssed off with the disruption of social life. Quite often I hear: “Why the F*ck can’t they just put in a ventilation system? We all would happily have a night out as we used to….”
And the Mirror did it’s best to ridicule these amendments….
Whenever I can vote I will. For Nigel. He wants to treat us as a person rather than outcasts.
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