Sunday 18 January 2009

An Object Lesson in Lying


Martin Dockrell is a lying bastard, employed, at your expense, by ASH. Here are the latest available figures on ASH funding (I'm sure newer ones won't be much different), courtesy of The Filthy Smoker at Devils Kitchen.

Year ended 31st March 2007

Department of Health: £210,400

Wales Assembly Government: £110,000

Supporting charities: £185,228

Donations & legacies received: £11,143


Dockrell's latest lie (he lies for a living) is in a response on the FT.com letters pages. Liar Dockrell was replying to a letter written by Michael J. McFadden about deaths caused by the UK smoking ban.

Have some workers possibly been spared an extra chance in a thousand of getting lung cancer 40 years down the road? I actually don't believe so from my own research, but even if it were true, what is the trade-off? A loss of 50 or so pubs per week in the UK and Ireland translates into a five-year loss of roughly 100,000 jobs if we assume the average pub employs 10 people. The general impact on the economy of these people being forced to go on the dole or work at menial jobs has severe health consequences in and of itself.

A British Medical Journal study several years ago examined income inequality and its effect on mortality. It estimated that a 1 per cent difference in income translated into 21 deaths per 100,000 per year. If we assume that the estimated 100,000 workers who lose their jobs over five years had their income cut by 50 per cent, that would be over 1,000 extra deaths per year caused by the smoking bans. That's 1,000 per year, right now, as opposed to 100 claimed/theorised to happen 40 years from now without a ban.


Anyone wishing to pursue a career in Government-funded fake charities might want to start taking notes here, as Martin Dockrell gives an object lesson in lying like a motherfucker in his reply.

He makes this calculation on two assumptions. First, that over the next five years 50 pubs will close each week solely as a result of the legislation, making 100,000 bar workers unemployed, and, second, that 1 per cent of them will die as a result.

His sums only make sense if all pub closures for the next five years are entirely the result of this legislation and that all those workers have their income halved in the first year. Camra, the UK “real ale” group, has reported that an average of 57 pubs a month closed in the year pubs were subject to the new legislation but it also noted that 56 pubs a month closed the previous year, a difference of just one pub per month or 12 in all.


Lie number one is that lying bastard Dockrell is not comparing like with like. McFadden's letter mentions UK & Ireland. Dockrell purely focusses on the UK ... badly.

He goes on to quote CAMRA as a resource. That is lie number two. CAMRA did say that 57 pubs a month closed ... in March 2008.

The Campaign for Real Ale is calling for a tax cut on beer in Wednesday's Budget to help prevent community pub closures following the results of a survey released today which reveals that the number of pubs closed permanently has increased to 57 a month.


This was based on a survey of their own members at the same time that the British Beer and Pub Association was doing a survey of all pubs. They had a different figure.

Pubs have been closing at the rate of 27 a week - nearly four every day - over the past year, according to the latest figures released by the British Beer & Pub Association. The current closure rate is seven times faster than in 2006 and 14 times faster than in 2005.

1,409 pubs closed during 2007. This is a sharp acceleration on previous years. Pub numbers were down 216 in 2006 - four a week - following a fall of 102 in 2005 – two a week.


A bit more than Liar Dockrell's 57 per month but why let the truth get in the way of a lying bastard, eh?

So, the lying bastard Martin Dockrell quoted stats from a survey nearly a year old, and had already cherry-picked it from those available at the time. Conveniently ingnoring the industry standard in favour of a lesser survey by CAMRA that fitted with his particular technique of lying.

There have, of course, been further surveys since but Dockrell, the compulsive liar, has seen fit to ignore them.

Pub closures across Britain have accelerated to five a day during the first half of this year, according to new figures released today.

Pubs are now closing at the rate of 36 a week, according to figures compiled by CGA Strategy for the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA). This is a sharp increase on the 27 closures a week during 2007, reported by the BBPA in March this year.

Pubs are now closing nine times faster than in 2006, and 18 times faster than in 2005.


CAMRA agreed on their web-site.

With the most recent Beer & Pub Association report highlighting that 5 pubs are closing every day, CAMRA has to do more than ever to support local pubs through these difficult times.


Dockrell, strangely enough, chose to skip over that one from CAMRA, despite it being a hell of a lot more relevant than the CAMRA study he quoted. It couldn't be that he was being a lying bastard, could it?

Lie number three I am sure you have spotted already. That of the previous year's pub closures. I don't know where CAMRA got their figures from, and I'm not even sure if the inveterate liar Dockrell knows himself, he could be plucking figures out of the air as far as we know. It is, after all, what he gets paid for. It wouldn't be anywhere near a 'first'. Here is a document boasting about how the lying bastard Dockrell and his chums got round democracy to force their agenda on every smoker and tolerant non-smoker in the country. It is headed by "... how a Government committed to a voluntary approach was forced by effective advocacy to introduce comprehensive smokefree legislation."

Or, to sub-title, "How an organisation that no-one voted for changed the minds of a Government who were planning on doing what their electorate had asked them to do". Or perhaps, "How an organisation that can only garner £11,000 per annum in donations can dictate to a Government on how to run the country".

What we do know is that the British Beer and Pub Association did NOT record closures anywhere near 56 per week as the mendacious Dockrell claims was occurring prior to the blanket smoking ban ... that no-one voted for.

Yet this Labour Government believed lying bastards like Martin Dockrell when treating around 9 million voters as lepers. And how have smoker prevalence rates gone since?

to be continued ...




10 comments:

Michael J. McFadden said...

Wow! LOL! Why don't you just come out and say what you feel about Dockwit or whatever his name is. :>

I thank you for your support good sir! Unfortunately newspapers tend to have a set-in-stone policy against allowing "dueling letters" on their pages so my response to them affirming my figures probably won't make it in, but maybe someone else will drop them a line in my defense...

Dick, a WONDERFUL job poking out his lies!


:)
Michael J. McFadden
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"

Anonymous said...

The smoking ban has improved pubs greatly. The reasons for pub closures are varied and complicated and have nothing to do with the smoking ban. I wouldn't get so worked up about pro-smoking people, they lost, end of story. Chill out. Go down the pub and enjoy a good ale!

Witterings from Witney said...

Paul Garrard,
You miss a basic point here sir, regardless of whether you disagree with Dick Puddlecote or not. The basic principle here is that we live in a democracy and this blanket rule has interfered with the right of someone to earn their living and decide how they wish to do that. It must be up to the licensee to decide whether he wishes to cater for smoking, non-smoking clientele or both. It is up to the 'customer' to decide which 'service' he wishes to use, not for the Government to dictate a 'blanket service'.

ASH is but one of a number of 'charities', mainly funded by Government, which is used as a mouthpiece for Government policy, consequently the process is 'Orwellian' in nature.

We have sufficient 'one stop shops' in this country, example the NHS, and we don't need any more.

To quote you - Chlll Out!

vincent1 said...

Paul, I do not go to pubs anymore, because of the smoking ban, nothing else, not the credit crunch or the fact that supermarkets are selling cheap booze. They have always been cheaper than pubs. I know the smoking ban is not the only reason, pubs are going under. But they started losing plenty when the ban came in.
They may be more pleasant for some, but no-one was banned from investing their own money, into smoke-free venues.
I am married to a lifelong "non-smoker" pubs are no longer the same for us, or many others in the same position. Ventilation/Air filtration, should have been one of the ways forward.
Pigs in a field have to have more shelter, than smokers are allowed. Some pubs do not even have an umbrella to stand under if it is raining.
http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/
Air quality testing by Johns Hopkins University, the American Cancer Society, a Minnesota Environmental Health Department, and various researchers whose testing and report was peer reviewed and published in the esteemed British Medical Journal......prove that secondhand smoke is 2.6 - 25,000 times SAFER than occupational (OSHA) workplace regulations:
8th August 2006 the HSE in the document OC 255/15 article9 state
for some strange reason hmm it has been changed to OC 255/16 Paragraph 14
” HSE cannot produce epidemiological evidence to link levels of exposure to second hand smoke to the raised risk of contacting specific diseases”.
The social lives of many has changed, what has been done, to the elderly and (the pipe smokers) also, is unforgivable.
mandyv

Xopher said...

This 'debate' started from a report about pub closures and Michael highlighted the effect on (ex)staff. This is serious enough BUT what about the (ex)customers of the many closed hospitality venues.
Simply on the basis of 85 Bingo clubs closing each with up to maybe 400 smoking and non-smoking (ex)players we can expect around 300,000 citizens will have suffered a serious blow to their social lives. Add to this the number of pub, club and cafe closures and we have the potential for a major epidemic of loneliness and social exclusion - all based on the orchestrated hatred of a single legal product.
This ban is government sponsored murder!!

Mark Wadsworth said...

Excellent stuff.

@ Michael J McF, the FT does allow 'duelling letters', there was one chain or letter with reply and reply to that and then reply to that.

DaveA said...

Dick, I trust you are well.

Leave it to me I an email from Dockwit saying the smoking ban is to blame.

Watch this space.

Michael J. McFadden said...

Mark, thank you for the advice. I *did* write them a followup, just privately to the editors, expressing my continued stance behind my statements. Several other folks have written them (cc'g me) supporting what I said and challenging the "facts" put forth any the ASHhead.

Oh, and Paul? Yep. The pubs just HAPPENED to all suddenly go south at the moment the smoking ban hit because "people have simply decided to drink at home instead." (old quote from an Anti trying to excuse the ban)

See the very simple and very clear graph at:

http://banthebanwisconsin.com/Documents/MNGraph.pdf

to see exactly what these "cost free" smoking bans do.

Michael J. McFadden
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"

neil craig said...

Disgraceful that a newspaper should aqllow a non-factual attack on a previous writer & refuse to publish a factual counter. TYhey are thereby deliberately lying to their readers. Disgraceful but not unexpected.

Michael McFadden said...

My Wisconsin link no longer works. The graph can be seen on p. 18 of "The Lies Behind The Smoking Bans" at http://tinyurl.com/SmokingBanLies


- MJM