A complete smoking ban?
So is an outright ban or, at the very least, a ban in homes likely?
Simon Clark, from the tobacco lobby group Forest, thinks so. Reacting to the vote by MPs, he warned a rubicon had been crossed as private spaces were now fair game.
Well, this was always the end game, wasn’t it? The temperance movement has never gone away and has never learned from the mistakes of the past. Prohibition doesn’t work. If they don’t want to take note of the USA during the twenties, then what about the war on drugs? How is that going? Oh, yeah, it still is going… Meanwhile the drug runners are growing ever more wealthy and people still take them.
But this has been dismissed by Deborah Arnott, chief executive of the campaign group Action on Smoking and Health, which has been at the forefront of the fight against smoking.
“A ban in homes is not feasible or right. But what this does, and indeed the ban in public places did, was send an important message and as a result the numbers smoking in homes has fallen.”
Yes, well, we have long since learned to take anything the dreadful Arnott might say with a big pinch of salt – despite CASH preferring us not to. After all, according to her, there isn’t a slippery slope – meanwhile the tobacco template is being used against other targets on the health fascists’ list – alcohol, salt, sugar, transfats, fruit juice and so on. Arnott is either deluded or disingenuous – either way, she is unreliable.
And when he was health secretary, Andrew Lansley talked about making it “socially unacceptable”.
In fact, if the tactics of the past few years could be captured in one phrase, that would probably be it.
Frankly, one of the more chilling phrases that comes out of the arseholes of the puritans. Once someone says it, I can – and do – dismiss them as such.
“And when he was health secretary, Andrew Lansley talked about making it “socially unacceptable”.
In fact, if the tactics of the past few years could be captured in one phrase, that would probably be it.”
Had to go back and read that part again, as my ancient brain misinterpreted the speedreading of ‘tactics’ as ‘lunatics’.
However, turns out that either word fits equally well in that sentence.
The usual failing, people believe they can have enough knowledge of what is going on everywhere.
Nobody can know if smoking in homes is decreasing or not. What they can know is what is happening to reported tobacco products sales which may be decreasing.
But we also know, from bleating from HMRC, that tobacco product smuggling is significant because right next door is France with lower ciggie and booze taxes, thus lower prices, and France is connected to the rest of a Continent with Countries with even lower prices.
And notwithstanding private individuals getting together and brining in their allowance, organisations can easily enough smuggle people and drugs across all these borders, so how difficult can smuggling fags and booze be?
The trouble is there is the real World, then the imaginary World these idiots inhabit.
“Well, this was always the end game, wasn’t it?”
Yep. They’ll go for row homes (infiltrating deadly smoke to neighbors) and homes with children under 21 in them first, along with forced registration and identification of smokers to protect the innocents from thirdhand smoke. Heh, looks like I titled “TobakkoNacht — The Antismoking Endgame” none too soon, eh Long?
Of course that’s just scaremongering, right? As Clive Bates, director of anti-smoking group ASH, said in 1998: “This is a scaremongering story by a tobacco industry front group. “No-one is seriously talking about a complete ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/167762.stm
{H/T to Dave Atherton at http://daveatherton.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/a-ban-in-homes-is-not-feasible-or-right-deborah-arnott-of-ash/ for the Clive quote/link}
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MJM