Okay, is it just me or is this seriously creepy?
Primary school children in Coventry are at the centre of a nationwide anti-smoking campaign.
Pupils from Earlsdon Primary School have drawn their own anti-smoking packaging ahead of the country’s plain packaging rollout in May 2017.
Public Health England (PHE) said it hopes the message “resonates” with the UK’s 7m smokers.
I’m not a smoker. Never have been and it certainly resonates with me and not for the reason PHE would think. It is an odious use of children for political purposes. It is deeply Orwellian. It is vile beyond measure. These people really are scum.
Campaign group Forest, which supports those who choose to smoke, said the use of children for an anti-smoking message was “emotional blackmail” and should not be “financed with taxpayers’ money”.
Director Simon Clark said: “Using children to make adults feel guilty about smoking is a new low for the public health industry.”
Classic British understatement there.
I’m more concerned about the only way kids are explicitly exposed to cigarettes these days is by the anti-smoker zealots doing this sort of thing…
I thought they wire all for *not* advertising their existence?
They are recruiting a new generation of smokers to keep their taxpayer funding alive after the present generation has gone.
Yes, creepy, but also pretty useless. “The kiddies” have been used so many times and by so many single-issue organisations to further their agendas – the anti-smokers started it, but they aren’t alone by far any more – that most of the people I talk to have become largely immune to any campaigns “using the children.” As one driver I spoke to in the wake of some anti-driving “think of the cheeeldren” campaign or another said: “Why do these people think that I’m going to take instructions about how to drive from someone else’s seven-year-old?”
Precisely. And when they have kangaroo courts made up of such seven year-olds to castigate and shame drivers who have exceeded an arbitrary speed limit, this is exactly the response that should be proffered.