If you're a normal, healthy-minded individual, you will be well aware - because it's really not too difficult to spot - that the point of the smoking ban in your particular jurisdiction had nothing to do with saving bar workers from imminent death. [...] The real reason was to make you, and everyone else, stop smoking. Simple as.I did so with reference to a House of Lords Committee's publication which stated categorically that the measure was part of a policy to "restrict choice".
Just to show that theirs is far from being an isolated opinion, here's European Commissioner for Health John Dalli emphasising it again at the weekend.
Such bans were effective, Mr Dalli said, arguing that at the very basic level they helped undermine the idea of the cigarette as being a social lubricant.Have a good look if you like, but I saw no mention of bar workers there, nor in the Lords' piece.
“The fact that you have to interrupt whatever you are doing at an entertainment site and go outside, sometimes in the cold, to smoke a quick cigarette is not very appealing,” Mr Dalli said.
It was never about bar workers' health. It was, however, about irritating you until you stop making free personal choices which governments don't approve of.
How dare we object to such policies? We should, instead, of course be bowing down and accepting the decisions politicians have made for us.
By accepting the bullshit that bans are solely imposed to protect bar workers, those who would suspend their belief for selfish ends - I'm being generous in assuming they're not actually stupid enough to think it's true - are tacitly endorsing deceit and mendacity as legitimate means by which to deprive us of our liberties.
And that's why anti-smokers are so very, very obscene.
H/T F2C
18 comments:
They just keep twisting and turning, don't they?
Unfortunately not in the way that we might like.
Dave Atherton in a comment in Taking Liberties (originally from Michael McFadden, I believe)
Here it is Baroness Dr. Elaine Murphy on smoking.
"You and many others have completely missed the point about smoking and health. The aim is reduce the public acceptability of smoking and the culture which surrounds it. We know that legislation which discourages all public smoking will have the better impact on public understanding and perception of smoking as an unacceptable habit.
Hence fewer people will smoke, hence health overall will improve."
Yours, Elaine Murphy
May be more believable if you did not have to wait half an hour for a pint because all the bloody bar workers were outside having a smoke.
What is very interesting is that it's clear anti-smoking politicians themselves don't believe the science regarding smoking bans protecting the health of bar workers. If so, they'd be using that as justification instead of the rather weaker ones as detailed above.
It's been a con job from start to finish. And they are well aware of it.
The myth about "protecting" staff
and other customers was blown completely apart by the fact a landlord cant even let his customers smoke in a 3 sided bike shed at the bottom of his backyard.
Not even a derelict caravan some 15 metres from the nearest door.
The smoking ban was nothing but another sinister sophisticated
attack on a way of life , a withering demolition of an established fundamental pillar
of traditional social cohesion
Waving shrouds to acheive long term objectives a common ploy in
Neo Marxist control ideology
No churches ,no meeting places,no taverns,no dissent no opposition.
A creeping tumour rotting on the bed
of an apathetic easily fooled mass.
Isolate the individual control the many.
A Long Shadow
Why do they want to stop smoking anyway? we (used) to pay large amounts of a very inelastic tax. We supposedly die sooner, having well over paid for any treatment required, so don't collect pensions. Now many buy abroad or illegally so no tax, can someone make sense of this to me?
Anon @ 22:23: "can someone make sense of this to me?"
As above, it's simply to stop you making your own choice. Everything else you read and hear is just sleight of hand and waffle.
Dear Mr Puddlecote
The real reason was to make you, and everyone else, stop smoking.
Actually it has made me start smoking. I am now on three cigarettes this year up from nil last - the first on national no smoking day - a red rag if ever there was one - the second on 1 July, National Smoking Day, which I inaugurated just for the hell of it and the third last Saturday at the People's Pledge Congress, because it was my birthday.
I didn't pay for any of the cigarettes, having cadged them from friends and acquaintances (thanks anon, Maarit and Rob).
I shall do the same next year (cadge them, I mean).
Suck that Arnott et al. And **** you.
Gosh that makes me feel better.
I shall buy tobacco seeds and plant them next year. Because I can. I shall experiment with drying and curing and offer the results to smoking friends, relatives and neighbours. I might even burn some myself and inhale the smoke. It is great to be a renegade. Even if I have to become a smoker to do so.
DP
I have a good memory. I also had a bad 'save the data' system a few computers ago!
When John Reid was the Labour Health Sec in 2005, he was honest and hated ASH, two componments which got him replaced by Hewitt.
Here are three facts, which are somewhere on the net (if they have not been removed)!
1. In an interview, Reid said that the proposed smoking ban was not about passive smoking, but to reduce the amount of smokers to 20.1 by 2010.
2. Reid said that ASH were a bunch of educated individuals who were fanatics.
3. I have seen emails exchanged between Arnott and other fake charities trumpeting the fact that Reid had been removed as Health Sec, so now they could get a total ban.
If you want to smoke in a bar then become a PM!
Smoking is still allowed
in all parliament bars that do not serve food,with the exception of Strangers Bar,I assume mebers of the public are permitted in there!
So yeah, hypocracy at its finest.
nfc
I assume its because members of the public are allowed there*
Beer and feckin computers....
Timbone: I don't suppose you kept 3) did you?
"to reduce the amount of smokers to 20.1 by 2010."
Well, that one's worked, then!
In my historic market town, most of the centre of which forms a conservation area, a pub which dates back to 1832, although the building is older, has just closed down and there is boarding over its windows.If you keep the shell of a building or a district while destroying the spirit of the place, then its architecture remains as a sad mockery of what is lost.
lleweton, quite. See what they did to the Reichstag and what they want to do as a "replacement" for the Berliner Schloß.
Exchange Station in Liverpool is another prime example.
@ Anon 23.17 (Signed DP)
If you are really interested in growing your own, you might like to take a look at:
www. boltonsmokersclub.com
(I trust that Dick P does not mind)
For the last three or four weeks, I have been analysing the subject carefully. Let's put it this way - there are easy, cheap ways and there are difficult,expensive ways.
OK with this Dick? Delete if you so wish.
“We should, instead, of course be bowing down and accepting the decisions politicians have made for us.”
Yes, this is called “democracy”. Although I've never been able to figure out why.
No havn't got it Dick. I am 99% sure that it was in some Forest archives
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