H/T Rose for this editorial in the Sunday Express backing UKIP:
It invites change with its far-reaching, fully costed and independently verified manifesto based on old-fashioned common sense:
Establishing grammar schools in every town, where academically bright children can benefit from a demanding education.
Reforming our smoking laws, which are so draconian that they have led to pubs, the social hub of most communities, shutting at a rate of 31 a week.
Using the £11.7 billion we pay in foreign aid every year to help fund important projects at home.
Recognising the importance of Armed Forces veterans and rewarding them with affordable housing – 500 to be built every year because one in every 10 homeless people served Queen and country.
Down the years, I’ve seen quite a few isolated opinion pieces in newspapers griping about the smoking ban. But I think this is the first time I’ve seen an editorial in a major newspaper describing the ban as so draconian as to be causing pubs, the social hubs of communities, to be closing in droves.
Since an editorial represents the view of the newspaper, rather than the opinion of an individual commentator, it suggests that it’s a consensus view among a number of people. And, unless the Express has always been anti-smoking-ban, it also represents a shift in the consensus.
Furthermore it’s the first time I’ve seen the smoking ban being given the same weight as concerns like education, foreign aid, and the Armed Forces. It’s seen as something that seriously matters. And that’s new too.
Maybe, 10 years late, there’s a beginning of the public debate about the smoking ban that was never held a decade ago. Perhaps because, 10 years on, the social and economic damage caused by the smoking ban has become clear to many people in ways that weren’t foreseeable a decade ago.
Yet it was in fact all perfectly foreseeable. Deborah Arnott had foreseen it when she wrote, 6 months before the smoking ban came into force, that “smokers will be exiled to the outdoors”. The fracturing of the social hubs, and the bankrupting of pubs, was a inevitable consequence of that exile.
Anyway, that’s probably the most heartening editorial I’ve read in the last 10 years. And it suggests to me that public opinion on the smoking ban is changing, even if it is with glacial slowness.
Frank Davis 
That’s one of the signs I been saying to watch for……………..
Hopefully the tide is beginning to turn. This today and yesterday the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s editorial lambasting university campus bans. let’s make the the beachheads from which to prosecute a new Operation against antismoker tyranny!
yepper!
:)
That’s all… just….
:)
MJM
Also good to see not a single voice amongst the comments from the anti-smoking brigade, screeching “It all sounds good except ……. what’s that about the smoking ban? Think of the cheeeeldren!” It looks as if most Express readers aren’t much bothered by it either way, and certainly aren’t put off voting for UKIP because of their anti-ban stance. So amending the ban becomes a vote winner (from people like commenters on here, who despise it), but not a vote-loser from the rest of the (largely non-smoking) population. What’s that all the anti’s keep telling us about the ban? “Hugely popular,” “overwhelming public support,” “massively successful policy?” Err, seems that maybe “damp squib” might be a better description …
Like I was saying if tomorrow the ban was lifted most folks would just ok its back, move on.
The editor has the common sense to finally see that the ban is draconian.
Lovely.
Q: what are the Express’s politics in general? Who are their readers? What I’m asking is, will this editorial reach the habitually left-leaning average Joe/janes it’s attempting to speak to?
The Express belongs on the political right, along with the Telegraph and the Times and the Sun. It’s a tabloid newspaper these days (I can remember when it was a broadsheet), and I think its readership is largely to be found among the right-leaning average Joes/Janes. So it probably doesn’t reach the left-leaning ones.
This raises the question of whether the average British Joe/Jane is left-leaning or right-leaning, progressive or conservative. I’ve always thought of Britain as being a rather conservative country. Perhaps even a deeply conservative country. And I say that as someone who started out on the progressive left wing edge of society, and has been moving rightward ever since.
In fact I think that all countries are almost inherently conservative (including places like Russia). People want to keep what they have. They don’t want change. Not everybody is hungry for a brave new world in which all the rules have been rewritten. There are only ever a minority of people like that. But they are also the people who usually go into politics, because people only ever go into politics to change something. And so the result seems to be that a country like Britain consists of a vast mass of rather conservative people with a radical political class. e.g. the left wing BBC.
I almost agree with you. But, maybe, people are a little more mixed in their views. Certainly, a great many British people are conservative when it comes to things that affect them, but they seem to be much more radical about things that affect only others.
The smoking ban was enacted precisely to close down pubs ,they are hated by the left !
This ‘left’/’right’ business is very confusing to me – the words don’t seem to mean what they used to mean (‘right’ used to be Conservatives, ‘left’ was Labour – now I haven’t a clue what they mean). The Express usually supported the Conservatives, now it’s gone to UKIP. I think it’s the paper that’s being/been sued by the McCanns for printing lies about them?? It’s always favoured conspiracy theories (re the Royals in the Diana days, for instance) and always been anti the EU.
Right or left doesn’t really matter,the fact is it made it to the main stream………….That’s where change takes place.
UKIP is, in my view, simply a conservative party that is saying the sorts of things the Conservative party should be saying, but won’t while it’s led by ‘progressives’ like David Cameron.
The confusion of language is, I think, deliberate. “Liberal” used to mean what “libertarian” now means, but has been co-opted by killjoys to mean more or less exactly the opposite of what it used to mean.
I think we’re currently in the situation once described by G K Chesterton:
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
Rick S
I agree.
Totally agree.
You are wrong…
The pubs are hated by the trendy, PC, new labour, middle-class, because working class people congregate there (or used to anyway) and working class people are despised by the trendy, PC, new labour, middle-class, why do you think they’re all flocking to UKIP? – It’s class war and it’s not being waged by “the left”. And since when was Tobacco Control “left wing”, when it’s financed by billionaire philanthropists (capitalists), Big Pharma (corporate capitalism) and all their money-laundering compliant governments.
It’s both, Marvin. Anti-smoking is largely supported as an ideology by the left-leaning, trendy, right-ons that you mention, because control of the common masses is the left’s “way” of doing things – the collective being more important than the individual and all that. So they’re the ones that do all the bleating and whining and stampy-footed demanding, and who trawl the media and the internet for opportunities to astroturf and give a false impression of “massive grassroots support” for anti-smoking measures.
But it’s financed by hard-nosed industrialists, simply because they’re the ones with the funds to do it and, of course, because – being hard-nosed industrialists – they can spot an opportunity to make-money-by-investing-money a mile off. Because that’s what hard-nosed industrialists do.
The aforementioned left-leaning shriekers permit their “movement” to accept this funding from those wicked capitalists because in fact they are just Champagne Socialists who love to talk the PC talk and preach to “the lower orders,” but they’d run a mile from any genuine socialist movement which threatened to encroach on their comfortable lifestyles, their ample salaries, their posh houses, their company cars, or Jemima and Tarquin’s private school fees. To themselves, they excuse this deviation from their proclaimed “principles” as being necessary for “the cause.” But in truth, they accept the money because that means they don’t have to fork it out themselves.
That’s why anti-smoking is such an unholy (and, in all honesty, not altogether comfortable) alliance. It’s represented by the very worst elements of two opposing ideologies – the holier-than-thou, self-oriented, “we know bests” of the left, and the “make money at all and any costs” of the right. No wonder their policies are always so divisive and spiteful – they’re the products of some of the most unpleasant people on Earth!
I have to agree, Jax. It took me a long time to work out what was happening to us, this sort of thing was new to Britain, but just after the ban was introduced, I noticed that all the antismokers on the newspaper comment threads seemed to change tack at the same time.
So I went looking.
“In America, they call it ‘astroturfing’: the faking of grassroots support for a politician or a product whose popularity is on the slide.
Now it emerges that a tactic invented by US pharmaceutical firms to promote drugs – and promptly adopted by the Republicans to shore up George Bush after 9/11 – was imported to Britain to help get Tony Blair re-elected.
A documentary to be screened on Channel 4 tomorrow, filmed by an undercover journalist who got a job in Labour’s war room, reveals how party members and supporters were systematically used to create the impression of ‘real people’ passionately backing the government.
Model letters were drafted for them to ‘write’ to local papers, as if they had been spontaneously roused to complain about Michael Howard’s tactics – while party staff were drafted in to represent ‘local people’ whom Tony Blair could meet on campaign visits. ‘Spontaneous’ demonstrations against rival politicians were also organised, with activists instructed to use handwritten homemade-looking placards.”
“She was dispatched to a press conference addressed by Milburn to help ‘fill out’ the audience after embarrassingly few journalists turned up – and was filmed shaking hands with Tony Blair as an ‘ordinary’ person at a photocall. She also helped compile model letters for supporters to send to local papers, complaining that ‘as someone who has worked for a number of years in the NHS’, they found that Michael Howard’s use of the case of pensioner Margaret Dixon – who had her shoulder operation repeatedly cancelled – had not ‘accurately represented’ the state of the health service. The letters later appeared virtually word for word in local newspapers, under the names of local party activists who did not declare their allegiances.”
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/may/22/uk.election2005
It’s not class war, it’s war against British culture and a tidy profit for the drugs companies, pubs have always been where people of all ages and classes mix.
I’ve visited a lot of pubs in my life, from the biker pubs of my youth to tap rooms in country pubs where old gentleman have instructed me the best way to grow runner beans.
That’s what I think the “aforementioned left-leaning shriekers” hate most, we are all meant to know our place and stop deciding things for ourselves.
Waltham Forest council has put up signs in play areas across the borough encouraging people not to light up
http://www.guardian-series.co.uk/news/12927549.Speaking_Out__Dr_Andrew_Taylor_on_banning_smoking_in_park_areas/
Note the last sentence………….
Dr Andrew Taylor is the director of public health at Waltham Forest council.
He is speaking out on implementing a voluntary smoking ban at children’s play areas across the borough.
New signs warning against smoking have been installed across 30 fenced-off plays areas in Waltham Forest.
Dr Taylor has said it is not the council acting as ‘Big Brother’ and is a voluntary ban.
Health Beat: Here’s One Doctor Who Isn’t Sold on Raising Legal Smoking Age to 21
There’s no doubt 18- to 20-year-olds are better off if they never light up, but how far do we want to push the criminalization of unhealthy behavior?
Hawaii is just a gubernatorial signature away from becoming the first state to ban the sale and possession of tobacco and electronic cigarettes to anyone under the age of 21. Public health advocates declare it another victory in their quest to eliminate smoking in the general population and to save lives.
Such a ban would reduce the number of smokers by 12 percent by the year 2100, according to an Institute of Medicine report. While reports vary, many show that smoking often starts in adolescence for those who become habitual nicotine users.
As a physican, my first inclination is to champion the ban. After all, we know smoking causes cancer, and although it often takes decades to develop, the overall public health concerns outweigh everything else.
But do they really? What happened to freedom of choice?
At the age of 18, people are considered adults who can vote, join the military, get married, rent an apartment, buy stocks, buy real estate, sign contracts, drive without license restrictions.
What is the one thing you cannot do? Buy alcohol. But how effective is that ban on 18- to 20-year-olds?
Besides, restricting alcohol makes sense because drunk people have impaired judgment, and those who drive can kill innocent victims. In that regard, smoking is clearly less dangerous, and society has already taken many appropriate steps to cut down on the threat of second-hand smoke.
It’s still dangerous, of course, in terms of the significant long-term health risks for those who make it a habit. Cancer, emphysema — no one smoking today can honestly claim he or she didn’t know smoking is bad.
http://www.civilbeat.com/2015/05/health-beat-heres-one-doctor-who-isnt-sold-on-raising-legal-smoking-age-to-21/
At the age of 18, people are considered adults who can vote, join the military, get married, rent an apartment, buy stocks, buy real estate, sign contracts, drive without license restrictions. What is the one thing you cannot do? Buy alcohol. But how effective is that ban on 18- to 20-year-olds?
So, they are ADULTS then? HOW COME they can’t BEHAVE like adults until they are OVER 21 years of age?
Is an 18 year old legally an adult or not?
But then, politicians (?especially Labour) want 16 year olds to be able to vote for the next government. Voting is reserved for ADULTS, isn’t it?
The mind boggles….
The Illegal tobacco business is booming across Australia
ILLEGAL tobacco is booming across Australia with a 30 per cent increase in black market trade in the past two years costing taxpayers more than $1.35 billion, a new report has found.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/the-illegal-tobacco-business-is-booming-across-australia/story-fni0cx12-1227333175420
ILLEGAL tobacco is booming across Australia with a 30 per cent increase in black market trade in the past two years costing taxpayers more than $1.35 billion, a new report has found.
Illicit tobacco continues to fund international crime syndicates with record tax increases and plain packaging fuelling the demand for cheap counterfeit and contraband cigarettes, according to the report released today.
The report, compiled by international auditing firm KPMG, found that shops are continuing to sell illegal tobacco despite threats of fines of up to $340,000 for selling just one packet. Retailers in Cabramatta, Campsie and Fairfield were found to be Sydney’s most brazen offenders.
The report revealed that the 2.6 million kilograms of illegal tobacco consumed last year represented 14.5 per cent of Australia’s total tobacco consumption and, if sold legitimately, would have attracted an excise of $1.35 billion.
The unprecedented growth in illicit tobacco came during a period which had two 12.5 per cent tobacco excise increases and follows the introduction of plain packaging in December 2012.
The KPMG report was commissioned by the three big players in the tobacco industry.
British American Tobacco Australia (BATA) spokesman Scott McIntyre said people were down-trading from legal brands to the black market “in droves”.
“Illegal tobacco is mainly smuggled into Australia from overseas and sold at much lower prices than legal cigarettes, avoiding tobacco excise tax obligations,” he said.
“They’re normally under $10 a pack, have no health warnings and aren’t plain pack compliant.”
The Australian Crime Commission has previously reported that organised crime is heavily involved in the importation of illegal tobacco.
Australian Customs and Border Protection detected 178 tonnes of illicit tobacco and 147 million contraband or counterfeit cigarette sticks were intercepted in sea cargo last year, the haul evading $139 million in taxes.
Consumption of unbranded loose leaf tobacco, or chop chop, grew by 43 per cent in 2014 and accounts for 53 per cent of total illicit consumption. Illegal chop chop is grown in Australia but is most commonly smuggled in from overseas.
“Smokers are literally walking into their corner store and asking for the cheapest pack available,” Mr McIntyre said.
Surprise, surprise, eh Harley? We didn’t see that coming, did we?
So now we wait for the response from Chapman, who will first say that because the report was commissioned by the tobacco companies, it must be disregarded as per article 5.3 of the FCTC. Then he’ll start spinning like crazy, quoting all sorts of ‘official’ figures which will, of course, show that there is no black market in Australia, that youth smoking has plummeted since the introduction of plain packs, that every smoker is eternally grateful to the government for adding more than 25% to the tax on cigarettes (because naturally they all want to quit and this will help them), and that all is hunky-dory in the parallel world of Tobacco Control.
The trouble is that the MSM (with possibly now the exception of the Express) will publish Chapman’s opinion as fact, and that’s what the public and the politicians will take away with them.
No, it’s not “costing taxpayers over $1.35 million,” it’s saving smokers over “$1.35 million.
Surprising footage from Brighton.
Green activists in Brighton Pavilion rip off UKIP newspaper ads
“On the reception desk in the entrance to Sussex Heights, the tallest residential building on the south coast, was the regular delivery of Brighton & Hove Independent, the city’s favourite weekly newspaper.
There was, however, something that did not find favour with a trio of visitors, including one who appears to be wearing a Green Party badge. They are thought to be Green activists down from London – and among 40 or so who had earlier picked up leaflets from an apartment occupied by a local party member.
What had caught their eye? The front-page advert for UKIP.”
Quickly and neatly, they tore out every single one of the UKIP advertisements.”
“So proud were they of their actions that the two young women took photographs of the carefully-arranged mess.
Unfortunately, they did not realise that they, too, were being filmed.”
http://brightonandhoveindependent.co.uk/video-exclusive-green-activists-in-brighton-pavilion-rip-off-ukip-advertisements/
lol
@ Harley
You’ll doubtless have seen that a famed neurosurgeon who spent several years at John Hopkins University has announced his intention to run for President. Name’s Ben Carson. And Ben wants to make all Americans terribly healthy.
Nicely done – in Detroit.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/05/04/ben-carson-president-announcement/26860637/
Now whom, or rather what’s going to bankroll his campaign I wonder!
—-
And… surprise, surprise His Royal Highness, Chief Executioner, All Round Mr. Nasty, Kim Jong-un has declined to attend the end of WW2 celebrations in Moscow. Instead he’s decided to send a senior lackey, a certain Mr. Kim Yong Nam.
The Telegraph ponders why in detail, however this one seems the most likely:
“Analysts have suggested that the North Korean leader is still concerned about the degree of genuine support for his regime in political and military circles at home and is reluctant to give his rivals an opportunity to plot against him.”
Well blow me down with a feather duster, the rotund bastard (and I use that word in its correct context) can’t go around having senior officials executed by being torn to shreds by dogs, or being shot by a howitzer, or being drowned in a sealed glass tank (while being watched by Kim and others), then expect “genuine support” for him or his regime.
I note he only seeks that in political and military circles. The rest of the proletariat are utterly inconsequential.
Pretty similar to Tobacco Control really!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11581041/Kim-Jong-un-sends-head-of-state-to-Russia-in-his-place.html
I believe Carson is in it to up the conservative voice on the team of candidates against the team of Rino’s It appears the Preacher of Arkansas is tossing his hat in the ring today Huckabee who signed the Arkansas ban…………..Huck tries to act like a conservative but he’s a Nazi thru and thu just like Jeb or Hillary.
Not really down with the whole democracy thing, lefty/green/fascist types, are they. Something that I would have thought obvious to anyone with a pulse. And yet people – supposedly rational adults – still just take the ‘green = fluffy bunny huggers’ thing at face value and vote for them / pollute the internet with thought-free pro-fascist baa-ing.
Extremely depressing.
Rose, priceless!!!!
What had caught their eye? The front-page advert for UKIP.”
Quickly and neatly, they tore out every single one of the UKIP advertisements.”
“So proud were they of their actions that the two young women took photographs of the carefully-arranged mess.
Yep, that is one reason to be cautious of all the “Green” things we encounter. Selfrighteousness adds wings to their ill-thought-out actions.
@Margo…
Yes it was Richard Desmond who had to pay the McCanns £500,000 and he is not a happy man.
As well as donating £1 million to UKIP, he has also publicised Goncalo Amarals donation website, for GA’s appeal against the recent damages awarded to the McCanns.
I don’t know if you have followed this case and whether you’re a “pro”,”anti” or “undecided”, but one thing is certain, the government interference, media manipulation, PR spin, demonising of anyone who questions the official McCann line (calling them “vile trolls” and hounding one poor woman to death!!) the jingoistic bile spewed out towards Portugal and its police (PJ), all of this makes Tobacco Controls lies, distortion and manipulation look absolutely pathetic by comparison.
The latest joke goin around is how many jobs do you have to work to get a 40 hour work week. One guy working at 3 burgerflipping jobs was told on his day of work at McDs that he was need at a store 30 miles away from his normal store 5 miles away just to work a 4 hour shift……He quit!
15 miles to the gallon x 4 gals = 60 miles that entails at 7.40 an hour x 4 =29.60 – 10.24 in gas to and from = 19.36 cents for the effort less taxes……………….
Marc Faber: Stocks are about to fall 40%—at least!
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102633564
Dr. Oz to critics: My show and I ‘will not be silenced’
From the sole idiot of daytime TV and lets not forget Dr. Phils BS themed tv show
Dr. Mehmet Oz says he “will not be silenced” by a group of 10 prominent doctors who are calling for him to resign from Columbia University.
In a special episode of “The Dr. Oz Show” he taped on Tuesday, Oz — arguably America’s best-known doctor — addressed the 10 doctors directly and accused them of trying to intimidate him.
The episode will be televised on Thursday, but the show released a preview clip on Tuesday evening.
“This month, we celebrate my 1000th show,” Oz says in the preview clip. “I know I’ve irritated some potential allies in our quest to make America healthy. No matter our disagreements, freedom of speech is the most fundamental right we have as Americans. And these 10 doctors are trying to silence that right.”
He concluded: “So I vow to you right here and right now: we will not be silenced, we will not give in.”
About two-thirds of the episode will be devoted to Oz’s rebuttal, according to a spokesman for the show.
The doctors wrote to Columbia last week, challenging Oz’s position as a faculty member at the university’s college of physicians and surgeons and accusing him of “promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”
The letter honed in on what the doctors called Oz’s “baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops.” Some of the letter-writers have ties to the genetically modified food industry.
Oz says he’s not against GMOs, but promotes more thorough labeling of them.
According to the spokesman, one of the overarching messages of Thursday’s episode is, “I’m going to keep fighting for your right to know what’s in your food.”
By preparing an on-air rebuttal, Oz is confronting the controversy head-on — but also risking giving more attention to the doctors’ assertions. Regular viewers of his show, about two million on an average day, presumably already trust him and may not need to hear his response.
Thursday is, coincidentally or not, the start of the May “sweeps” season when television ratings are measured even more closely than usual. “Sweeps” matters a lot to the local TV stations that carry Oz’s daytime talk show.
After the episode airs on Thursday, Oz will follow up with a Friday interview on NBC’s “Today” show.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/21/media/dr-mehmet-oz-accusations/index.html
FosterNostrand
11 days ago
Hey Dr. Oz, the physicians from Columbia University are not stepping on your right to free speech, they are trying to get you removed from the faculty of Columbia University. They are not saying that you cannot speak freely, in fact, they are speaking freely. They are not trying to pass a law, which is what the first amendment prohibits. So quit trying to hide behind the first amendment and back up your claims with good science, like a good doctor would!
Just in NEWSFLASH
SMOKING CURES LC WHILE SHS CAUSES IT! Its the low dose that kills people!
Our research has verified low dose response curves prove disease causation.
After discovering former smokers/quitters were developing LC at a rate 10 times the normal level and LC in non smokers has tripled since smoking rates went down. We are assured our collected results show this trend beyond any doubt!
Where’s this from?
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/725138
FRANCE FLATLINES AS QE FAILS AGAIN….& NOW THE INTEREST-RATE BACKLASH IS READY TO GO
Submitted by IWB, on May 5th, 2015
This piece at Forbes yesterday sums up my fears very well:
‘As the world’s most important benchmark interest rate, approximately $10 trillion worth of loans and $350 trillion worth of derivatives use the Libor as a reference rate. Libor-based corporate loans are very prevalent in emerging economies, which is helping to inflate the emerging markets bubble…. Libor is used as the reference rate for nearly two-thirds of all large-scale corporate borrowings. Considering this fact, it is no surprise that credit and asset bubbles are ballooning throughout Asia.
Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/france-flatlines-as-qe-fails-again-now-the-interest-rate-backlash-is-ready-to-go/#oxH6eM7kBpwu6Ki2.99
More Doctors Confessing To Intentionally Diagnosing Healthy People With Cancer To Make Money
By Archimede on May 5, 2015 11:07 AM
http://www.laleva.org/eng/2015/05/more_doctors_confessing_to_intentionally_diagnosing_healthy_people_with_cancer_to_make_money.html
Good find Harley.
It certainly helps explain why they only track cancer survival rates for 5 years.
H/T Rose for this editorial in the Sunday Express backing UKIP:
It invites change with its far-reaching, fully costed and independently verified manifesto based on old-fashioned common sense:
Establishing grammar schools in every town, where academically bright children can benefit from a demanding education.
Reforming our smoking laws, which are so draconian that they have led to pubs, the social hub of most communities, shutting at a rate of 31 a week.
Using the £11.7 billion we pay in foreign aid every year to help fund important projects at home.
Recognising the importance of Armed Forces veterans and rewarding them with affordable housing – 500 to be built every year because one in every 10 homeless people served Queen and country.
Common sense, INDEED!!!! Very refreshing!!!!!
And soooo nice to read after a rather interesting weekend evening where I for the FIRST time encountered a now vaping friend (and now former friend) having become a Deborah Arnott et al drone. She even put me off vaping for now. I did have to remind my former friend that it is MY house with a polite smile, ending the sentence in my mind with ‘which you will not visit again’.
I will, of course, invite my non-smoking (never-smoking) friend again. She will always be welcome as she does not care whether I smoke or not.
I really do keep my fingers crossed that UKIP will make a difference in the next 4 years!!!! My worst nightmare? A LABOUR majority…..