The New Puritan Alliance

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. That, transparently, was the only way legislation could be bullied through without risking a charge of acting in contravention of personal responsibility and property rights*. The real reason was to make you, and everyone else, stop smoking. Simple as.

How do we know this? Because governments are stupid, of course. They regularly pass laws on the back of an opaque lie, then sometimes openly boast about their true intentions.

House of Lords Behaviour Change - Science and Technology Committee

Now, in case you didn't want to click and enlarge the image, it puts forward one - presumably perfect, else it wouldn't have been used - example of "restricting the options available to individuals" as "outlawing smoking in public places".

If you truly believed it was about bar workers, you're probably the type who arranges their entire day around 20 words in the morning's tabloid horoscope (that's a polite way of saying 'crashingly gullible').

Of course it wasn't. The whole point of smoking bans worldwide is to pressurise smokers into quitting, and in doing so, buying - or the government buying on their behalf with your taxes - pharmaceutical products.

Sadly, smoking bans worldwide have this irritating habit of having a negligible effect on smoking rates, if at all. The latest country to admit they are barking up the wrong tree is Ireland.

THE SMOKING ban has not had any appreciable effect on the number of smokers in Ireland, the chief medical officer at the Department of Health has said.

You don't say? Ireland in 'exactly the same as everywhere else in the world' shocker, d'you mean? Well, what a surprise that is! And there they were thinking that this particular throw of the dice was going to be different to the long string of losers preceding it.

At a forum on obesity yesterday, Dr Tony Holohan said smoking was still at the same level as it was before the introduction of the ban.

Well, naturally, because smoking bans always result in the same ... oh hold on, wind that back a bit!

At a forum on obesity yesterday, Dr Tony Holohan said ...

Obesity? Why are you talking about the smoking ban at an obesity forum then, Tony?

He also said there was a need to look at the inter-relationship between different lifestyle factors, including tobacco use, alcohol consumption and obesity, and their effects on health.

“People who smoke just don’t smoke, they are also people who are overweight and they are also people who are high consumers of alcohol and we need to understand the interaction of those,” Dr Holohan said.

So what are you saying here, Tony? Why are you lumping all these lifestyle choices in together?

“There is no way these complex, societal challenges which face all of us can be confronted unless we can find a way of working together,” he said.

And crash, bang, wallop if Tony hasn't just encapsulated the ethos of this blog in one sentence.

Because I've said it before many times ...

Without adopting a united front in objecting to assaults on all lifestyle choices - whether you approve of them yourself or not - there is no chance of ever stopping these arseholes in their tracks.

While normal, everyday people are bickering and scratching each others' eyes out about the hierarchy of vice acceptability (I'm looking at the likes of you, CAMRA), public health departments are increasingly uniting a dream team of bansturbatory fun police to clamp down on everything you enjoy which isn't 100% healthy.

They have long since worked out that the way to success is via collusion and a common goal. Whereby those ranged against them are insular and dismissive of anything but their core cause.

When are the barely sentient cattle in this country and the wider world going to realise this, and start uniting themselves against what is, by comparison, a tiny number of loud-mouthed, publicly-funded blowhards?

Kiwi Crampton, as I've also routinely pointed out, offers a brilliant metaphor which encapsulates this self-defeating behaviour perfectly.

It's like a bunch of folks on the scaffolds complaining that the other guy's noose isn't quite tight enough. Y'all might instead direct your attention to the hangman sometime and try helping each other cut those ropes.

If you've ever said "something should be done about this", or "there should be a law against that", you are the problem. Just zip it.

Now - more than ever - it is necessary to fight on all fronts, or expect an almighty illiberal kick in the balls from a righteous elite who use co-operation and note-sharing to their advantage, while their opponents stubbornly don't.

* One might even call it a 'confidence trick'. Oh look, someone already did ... Deborah Arnott of ASH, to be precise.