Wednesday 4 July 2012

Parkes's Perks

Sometimes the idea of an elected House of Lords makes some sense. At least under such a system some of the crustier loons might be dispensed with.

Anyone remember Baroness 'Trixie' Gardner of Parkes? I'll give you a clue, she has appeared here before.

Well, she's back on her authoritarian hobby horse.
Smoking in cars is an important issue, but I think that smoking is a real hazard in a lot more places than cars. I tabled an amendment to the Localism Bill to give local authorities the power to state that a certain area, even outside, should be smoke free. I raised that because a woman I know who lives above a group of garages said that she was unable to open her windows because all the local workmen came to sit outside the garages to smoke and the level of smoke going up to her window was such that she could not even open it.
Since when did responsible government involve old ladies demanding laws passed because their coffee morning friends have been inconvenienced? I'll leave aside the irony of moaning about tobacco smoke near, err, garages for now. You know, those used by carbon monoxide belching cars.
I have also heard from various local councillors that they have found the concentration of smoke outside some pubs and cafes, particularly in the summer when everyone is outside, can be so bad that it is hard to believe.
Hey, Trixie, there's a solution to that problem. Allow rooms inside in which people can smoke and, bingo!
When we first brought in outdoor-only smoking here, you could barely enter the ladies loo on the ground floor, because the smoking area designated for the House was the little area immediately outside its window? It was incredible.
Smoking room, dear, smoking room.
I noticed that in Australia, they have now banned smoking in some streets. It varies from place to place, but in some areas, they will not have smoking even in streets; it is only in private that you can smoke.
Baroness Gardner, for the record, is a freedom-loving Conservative.


2 comments:

theprog said...

I would suggest that bogs are precisely the places that need regular fumigating....

It's not as though she'd have any desperate need to enter a smoking room. Still, if she did it might be a case of 'I'd give it 15 mins love'.

Anyway, 'second hand shit' must contain methane or some other deadly toxin. (What actually causes the stink?)

But wait...aren't these easily removed by air extractors? Heck, they could put them in smoking rooms...

Naw, wouldn't work. Jimmy Repace has proven that tobacco smoke defies all the laws of physics. He's an expert you know.

nisakiman said...

Yes, I remember that story. She sounds like a barrel of laughs. Just the sort you'd want with you on a night out.

As far as the HoL goes, it worked really well until the NuLab monkeys decided they didn't like the fact that it was an hereditary institution and decided to "reform" (read 'pack with placemen') it. It has been a cock-up ever since.

What the NuLab goons couldn't understand was that generally speaking, the large landowners that made up the bulk of the Lords were in fact very close to the land, and those that worked on it, and had a far better understanding of what made this country tick than the champagne socialists in Islington. Not only that, but they sought no pecuniary advantage (no need), nor did they suffer from naked ambition (again, no need). They saw their role as a service to their country. It was an archaic, anachronistic system, but it worked well and was the envy of the world.

And then a bunch of jabbering, venal, grasping  intellectual pygmies decided to tear the whole thing down for ideological reasons.

Morons.