Monday 4 March 2013

Stir Crazy

The Mirror reports on an imminent ban on smoking in prisons.
Smoking is to be banned in jails, sparking fears last night that lags may riot if they are not allowed to light up, the Sunday People has revealed. 
It will be totally outlawed at all 123 prisons in England and Wales – even outside in the exercise yards. 
Inmates will be issued with nicotine patches or electronic cigarettes instead.
Ha! The thought that e-cigs are being handed out to prisoners will send the extremist wing of the tobacco control industry mental, I reckon. Oh, and this twat too, of course.


The story continues ...
The Prison Service accepts that cigarettes must be stubbed out for health and safety reasons and to avoid compensation claims from officers claiming to be victims of passive smoking.
Perhaps someone should point the Prison Service in the direction of the Labate Case to avoid the many problematic consequences this ban may cause them.

Faced with a court case brought by the wife of an employee who was exposed to "passive smoking" during 29 years of his employment, the EU - who have themselves been pumping the second-hand smoke myth for quite a while - vigorously fought the compensation claim. The judgement in 2009 was crystal clear.
"The Tribunal rejected as manifestly unfounded the claims for compensation submitted by the applicant."
Which suggests the Prison Service should feel pretty confident about dismissing any claims from compo-chasing prison officers. Claims for injuries due to violence inflicted by some scrote deprived of his fags are a different matter entirely, of course.


4 comments:

Carpe Zytha said...

What will become currency once snout is banned?

Frank J said...

"to avoid compensation claims from officers claiming to be victims of passive smoking"


Perhaps somebody should point out that this has NEVER occurred. The nearest to it was the McTear case - Judgement 2005 - and that lost, hands down, all round. They couldn't even prove, on balance of probabilities, that smoking was a cause of ANYTHING in the general population.


Arrant nonsense.

trashbunny said...

Complety bonkers - and banning it in the open air too? But then again it's just like railway companies banning it on open-air platforms. There is no doubt that the ban on public place smoking was one of the most socially divisive laws ever placed on the statute books. And yet again we have to thank our spineless politicians for buckling under the pressure put on them by the public heath sirens. Next no doubt we will have laws to ban smoking in cars full stop (never mind about just in cars with children in them, not that they should be exposed in such a way to tobacco smoke; it only makes sense not to), then, based on what is happening in California, the banning of smoking in apartment blocks (irrespective of whether you are an owner or not) and then even in semi-detached and detached houses on the premise that smoke might drift over the fence and of course there is 'no safe level' of exposure to secondhand smoke. This is entirely consistent with the programme of 'behavioral cleansing' that is at the forefront of the tobacco control industry plan to demonise smoking and of course demonise and disenfranchise smokers themselves. Wait for smoking being lumped in with 'self-harming' as a mental disorder - can't be long now. At the end of the day we are all prisoners to the edicts of the self-righteous public health elite who, in the UK at least, seem to have the Department of Health at their beck and call. And the question I would pose is who exactly elected these guys to set public policy??. I certainly didn't - did anyone else??

timbone said...

Although I myself am not a prison officer, I have, through association, bona fide information on the prison serevice. My first point is this. The POA (Prison Ofiicers Association) is a professional body, rather like the RCP (Royal College of Physicians). Just like the RCP, the POA may make many claims which one would assume are supported by the mnajority of their members. As a matter of fact, the majority of prison officers, many of whome are non smokers, couldn't care less whether prisoners smoke or not. They would certainly be horrified however if smoking was banned in prisons! I have been informed today that this media frenzy about banning smoking in prisons is smoke without fire (pardon the pun). It is highly unlikely.