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 ...