Freedom Stubbed Out
For those of you who like a cigarette, enjoy your last day of freedom. At 6am tomorrow morning England becomes the last part of the United Kingdom to go 'smoke free' (an anodyne description for the abolition of a person's liberty to enjoy a perfectly legal product in an enclosed public place). Scotland abolished nicotine-related social liberty in 2006; Wales and Northern Ireland followed in April of this year. Most businesses already display the 'no smoking' signs in abundance, in readiness for the impending draconian diktat.
I started to think where this lunacy began. Did it start back in 1992 with the death of British entertainer Roy Castle? Castle, who had never smoked in his life, died from lung cancer. It was said that years of appearances in smoke-filled clubs had precipitated the condition. I don't suppose the media, increasingly reluctant to question anything outside of a narrow and narrowing PC remit, ever thought to list all the entertainers who have appeared in smoke-filled venues down the years and are still walking around very much alive. Oh well.....
I am not a smoker. However, I don't think there would have been anything wrong with having enclosed, separate smoking areas in pubs, etc. I think it is highly distasteful to see people who smoke condemned to standing outside. It might not be so bad in summer ('summer'? - now that's funny!!), but why should they huddle outside in freezing cold December nights for the enjoyment of a cigarette, like naughty schoolchildren? They don't have a compulsion for exposing themselves for goodness sake, they're puffing on a cigarette. Yes, a cigarette!!! Those tiny sticks whose purchase provides much of the funding for the NHS and swells government coffers year-in and year-out, you hypocritical b******s!!!
You can rest assured that an army of inspecting, pen-pushing jobsworths will have already been employed to police this nonsense. Will it get to the stage where having a fag indoors brings a harsher penalty than burglary? You may laugh, but who'd have thought ten years ago that the police would take a car driver doing 3mph over the speed limit more seriously than another car driver who'd had his pride and joy vandalised to the tune of £500? The smoking ban is a quintessential example of this government's approach to law and order: target the most law-abiding with stiff penalties and dictatorial edicts so that relatively minor transgressions can flood the crime-busting statistics. Meanwhile, spend less time dealing with serious offences, lest it offend some minority group, transgress someone's 'human rights', or entail the completion of 600 pages of pointless paperwork.
Andrew McCann
in Dictatorial Government
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