The UK government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has claimed that outlawing smoking in bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants and at work would dramatically reduce levels of lung cancer, and other lung diseases, caused by passive smoking. It seems the push is on, by the UK do-gooding society, to follow the example recently set by Michael Bloomberg, in New York.
Significantly, Sir Liam cited a recent government report, which claimed that 88% of people were in favour of smoking restrictions in restaurants. He obviously knows where to hit a government hard, especially one with no other principles than those dictated to it by opinion poll.
No doubt the UK government’s response will be to say, at first, that it has no plans to impose a public area smoking ban. Then it will say if private businesses fail to co-operate with a ‘voluntary’ ban, it will be ‘forced’ to take the necessary action to impose one, and then eventually, it will ‘regretfully’ impose the ban, if the appropriate opinion polls tell it to.
I am non-smoker myself, having taken seven New Year Eves to finally give the filthy weed up, but I am with South Oxfordshire’s very own TV celebrity chef on this one; Antony Worrall Thompson said on Channel 4 News last night:
I believe in smoking and non-smoking areas. If you don’t like a place because people are smoking don’t go in.
No doubt one day smoking will be banned completely in the UK, if these do-gooders keep up their do-gooding work, even in the privacy of your own home. The fact that people have to die of something, eventually, seems to have fully escaped them.
On the day they do successfully get smoking fully banned, thereby creating an enormous black market and making it even more sexually attractive to teenagers causing them to start up in the first place, is the day I will light up again. I am not looking forward to smoking Golden Virginia roll-ups again, but if it is in the cause of freedom, and helps the US economy to boot, so be it!
For such a measure is contemplated in an overprivatised State, I’m wondering which is more socialist: the Fr or the UK State…
Kodiak.
Kodiak: That rather depends. The absurd degree to which the French state regulates its the economy (hense the high level of unemployment in ‘caring’ France) is far worse than the UK… but in many social issues in which the state also has no legitimate role, the UK is sometimes worse.
But that he regards the exessively regulated UK as ‘overprivatised’ shows how authoritarian Kodiak is. I guess he wants the UK to have French levels of unemployment and to stop the ‘brain drain’ of French business people moving to London and Southern England. The area I live in (near Kennsington) is turning into ‘Little France’ as it fills up with French entrepreneurs and their families.
Smoking is gross.
Poisioning yourself for, well what? Fun? It doesn’t seem that fun to me. Cough, hack, eurcch. And then there are these losers…
Still it’s your body and as long you don’t make the town centre a mess with your detritus I don’t care what you do with it.
However what really get’s my goat is these bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants and work places are constantly referred to as public places. Aargh. Makes you want to scream. They are private property. And nobody is being forced to go into them against their will for goodness sake.
I quit smoking (60 a day) cold turkey some years ago. While I don’t like smoke filled rooms, and hate the smell of my hair and clothes if I’ve been around a lot of smoking, I don’t mind a vague smell of cigarettes – such as you get in the non-smoking sections of restaurants and bars or any other well-ventilated room that has a smoker or two in it. In other words, I’m not a rabid, or even a mild, anti-smoker.
I would rather be on the side of tolerance (I remember how much I used to love smoking myself), than on the side of the fascists. It’s reaching an intolerable point of intrusion. Who voted for Liam Donaldson? Who asked for his opinion which, as he works for this cack-handed “government”, is entirely predictable any way? He could go on TV talk shows and just hold up a paddle that said OPINION every time he was called on to say something, and we’d all know what it was. Actually, Jeremy Paxman could give one of his couture sneers and hold up a paddle that said QUESTION. We would be able to judge from the configuration and intensity of the sneer what that particular question would have been. This would save the viewer time and irritation.
Andy, I think the term “do-gooders” is no longer appropriate as there has been a profound escalation of the intrusiveness of these imposers of their will since Blair and gang got in. They are not do-gooders. They are not bleeding hearts. They are fascists.
And personally, I have filed ‘billions of deaths from passive smoking’ in the same file as ‘global warming’ – otherwise known as the bin.
Yesterday’s PM on BBC Radio 4 carried a head-head between the incoming chairman of the British Medical Association and a spokesman for FOREST (the smokers’ pressure group). It was a diverting example of the authoritarian mindset at work.
The BMA spokesman began his anti-smoking tirade by expressing horror at the ‘vast cost’ of smoking to the British economy. When his opposite number, quite correctly, objected that smokers contribute massively more than even the (most probably fiddled) figures produced to illustrate the ‘cost’ to the NHS of smoking, the medical demagogue swiftly changed the subject. It was as if he simply had not heard what had been said to him.
There are several issues here. The first (and I am indebted to a perspicacious friend for pointing out this tactic to me) is the way liberals, Leftists, statists and their fellow travellers argue. I think I’m going to call it the ‘shit and run’ technique. You make a statement: ‘millions will die because of Bush’s….’ ‘global warming will kill…’ ‘smoking costs 17 million pounds…’ and then rush on to the next slogan, having left a nasty smell in the air, which it is impossible to dispel.
If you keep on doing this, shitting and running, people eventually grow so used to the stink (sorry about this analogy, I seem to have, errr, waded in deeper than I’d intended) they believe the lies simply because they have heard them so many times that ‘they must be true’. After all, ‘everyone says it’… don’t they?
To put it bluntly, they won’t stand and argue their case. They speak in slogans.
The second point is that the good doctor plainly hadn’t been reading his own trade journals, where the ghastly truth has at last begun to emerge – ‘passive smoking’ is nothing like as dangerous as the anti-smoking industry would have us believe.
Smoking has become a standard for the medical business to rally round. No longer able to astonish us with miracle treatments every few years, faced with a public which increasingly understands that medicine is almost as much fashionable nonsense dressed-up in Greek as it was 150 years ago – and often with only a tenuous relationship to actual science – it is reduced to castigating us for our behaviour as a cloak against its own impotence.
When our doctors seek to become our masters, as they are increasingly trying to do, it is time for us to slap them, firmly, back into place.
Mark Holland – I agree with you about the noxious misappropriation of the term “public places”. Restaurants, bars, pubs, clubs are private property.
Perry,
That was a good one.
Do you want me to show you Little Englands & Little Scotlands in France?
Kodiak.
G Cooper – Shit and run is so apt it’s hysterical. And you’re right. This is exactly how they present their non-cases. As in Prez Bush was selected not elected. Global warming. Melting polar ice caps. Speed bumps save 90 million lives a year. The NHS is the envy of the world. Passive smoking … 15 million British children live in worse poverty than they did 100 years ago. Globalisation ruins third world countries. The harsh Afghan winter … Say it, then run away from the foetid air they’ve created.
“He obviously knows where to hit a government hard, especially one with no other principles than those dictated to it by opinion poll.”
I feel obliged to point out that’s not an appropriate accusation to level at Blair, given the fact that not so long ago his government was in crisis over his decision to go to war, in spite of public opinion. He’s most certainly not 100% populist, and came close to losing his position for not being so.
LB,
Although “Restaurants, bars, pubs, clubs are private property”, they’re public places at the same time.
It’s not a paradox, it’s a subtlety of the language that nonetheless conveys a very down-to-earth meaning: public place means opened to the general public (at random), not just opened to you or to me or to a finite list of happy few.
Your remark is totally irrelevant.
Kodiak.
I think that the Weatherspoons pub chain has already banned smoking in its pubs. This surely is a good example of the market giving consumers and bar staff a choice. If folk want to have a bevvy in a bar or work behind one in a smoke-free environment, then the market will provide.
I don’t like smoking and will seek out non-smoking bits of restaurants, as well as asking folk – politely – not to smoke in my flat. But surely that is the point. I make my choice. It is not always ideal but then freedom never is. What the safety nazis like Donaldson want is a one-size-fits-all approach to health.
When I wrote my piece the other day about U.S. lawsuits against fast-food joints, one commenter remarked on my “crocodile tears”. Bull. OUr hatred of such nannying interference and erosion of personal responsibility is felt from the heart. It ain’t some kind of pose.
Kodiak, yes, a bar is “opened to the general public”, but, unlike public buildings paid for out of tax, consumers are not forced to pay for, or use them. That is why privately-owned bars, clubs etc should not be forced to enforce certain regulations in the way that say, a publicly-funded building should be.
Kodiak’s remarks demonstrate the failure to grasp how a space in which “the public” gather is nevertheless, private, and hence free from government control.
Surely a fairly basic point.
G Cooper writes:
If you keep on doing this, shitting and running, people eventually grow so used to the stink (sorry about this analogy, I seem to have, errr, waded in deeper than I’d intended)…
I’m sorry G, surely that ‘waded’ pun is a yellow card offence! 🙂
To put it bluntly, they won’t stand and argue their case. They speak in slogans.
You might want to read something related wot i wrote, a few days ago, entitled Face to Face With the Enemy?
No longer able to astonish us with miracle treatments every few years, faced with a public which increasingly understands that medicine is almost as much fashionable nonsense dressed-up in Greek as it was 150 years ago
I was at Sheffield University Medical School, for four years. At the end of Year 2, I failed a biochemistry exam. The Professor of Biochemistry called me in to see him, and asked me, rather weirdly I thought at the time, if I wanted to carry on with Biochemistry rather than medicine?
As a socialist, at the time, wanting to save the world, I asked why on Earth I would want to give up something as wonderful as medicine?
He replied that medicine was a long way short of what it cracked itself up to be. Ninety-nine per cent of the health improvements that had occured in the UK, in the last 100 years, were due to simple Clean Air acts, and improvements in the water supply. All medicine had really done, was add some icing on top, and claim all the glory.
He went on to add, that even if the entire British medical establishment disappeared overnight, it would be almost entirely irrelevant to the economy, with 95% of health spending spent on people in the last five years of their life, often extending the last couple of years into two years of misery, rather than release.
I was astonished at the time (these were his words, remember), and stayed on doing medicine for another two disastrous years. But it was his words, combined with the dreadful state-servile authoratarian attitude of the medical profession, which eventually drove me into leaving the course, at a point after another examination failure, where I had to make a second “Medicine or Bust” choice. I chose “Bust”, and haven’t regretted it for a minute, since. Thank God I escaped a life of alcohol abuse, long hours, the fabulous choice of a single exploitative employer, and the endless hours of monotony talking about splenectomies.
When our doctors seek to become our masters, as they are increasingly trying to do, it is time for us to slap them, firmly, back into place.
Here’s a typical quote, from a consultant, as I remember it from my days within the medical establishment:
‘Andy, when you qualify, you’ll find the only other people you can speak to, who are on your intellectual level, are other doctors. There may be some lawyers up to our level, who you can invite to dinner parties, and so on, but there’ll be few and far between.’
I kid you not.
Liberty Belle writes:
Andy, I think the term “do-gooders” is no longer appropriate … They are not do-gooders. They are not bleeding hearts. They are fascists.
I couldn’t agree more, LB. Mentally, I equate the two terms, “do-gooder” and “fascist”. Now that I’m rapidly becoming a neo-Popperite, as I work through the master’s canon, I also think of his superb quote, inspired by the do-gooders who surrounded him:
‘Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell. ‘
Bulldog writes [on Tony Blair]:
He’s most certainly not 100% populist, and came close to losing his position for not being so.
On reflection, I think you’re right. For the first term, it was all Phillip Gouldian opinion poll populism, but this does seem to have been replaced recently by a different Blair, more prepared to cross a few swords.
So can I add one principle, to this government? That’s the principle of Tony Blair realising his time is up, and doing whatever he can (Iraq, the Euro, El Presidente Blair of the United States of Europe), to get into the history books, before he’s out on his ear, whether it destroys this country (he hates), or not.
You might want to read this superb Janet Daley article, on this phenomenon, which I think points the way?
Rgds,
AndyD
Jonathan,
” yes, a bar is “opened to the general public”, but, unlike public buildings paid for out of tax, consumers are not forced to pay for, or use them”
>>> Yes they’re not forced, & they aren’t selected to come in either (otherwise they would be restricted clubs) >>> there public places managed by private interests.
“That is why privately-owned bars, clubs etc should not be forced to enforce certain regulations in the way that say, a publicly-funded building should be.”
>>> They should be and they are, on the contrary. They are public places (see definition) run privately.
Kodiak.
I once heard The Wurzels on the radio describe their late band-mate Adge Cutler as the Bard of Somerset. Because he was barred from all the pubs. Boom, and if you will, boom.
Do you understand though? A. Pub. Is. Private. Property. And. Its. Owners. Are. Free. To. Decide. Who. They. Let. In. And. Who. They. Throw. Out.
Maybe you are the sort of person who thinks that access to a pub is a human right
Andy Dundan writes:
“‘Andy, when you qualify, you’ll find the only other people you can speak to, who are on your intellectual level, are other doctors. There may be some lawyers up to our level, who you can invite to dinner parties, and so on, but there’ll be few and far between.'”
That is a truly memorable quote and quite staggering in its implications.
I can only assume he is able to hold that opinion because when he is at a dinner party with a group of particle physicists, he thinks they’re talking Chinese.
Your Prof sounds like he knew a thing or two.
Mr.Kodiak
“there public places managed by private interests.”
Manifest gibberish. Restaurants and pubs are private property but since that is a concept which you clearly do not comprehend let’s just leave it at that.
I have no problem if you smoke in a public place if you have no problem if I spray clouds of Windex around your head in a public place.
Moreoever, I think cigarettes should cost $40 a pack — not as a tax, but because I think you should pick up the likely costs to the health care system of your habit, not expect the rest of us to do it. And yes, the same goes for obese people, and others who do stupid things, like riding without a motorcycle helmet. Go ahead, ride without a helmet — just buy special supplemental insurance for helmet-less morons so you won’t cost the rest of us when your head ends up huevos rancheros on the side of the road.
PS The three guys I know who won’t even ride a bicycle without a helmet — emergency room physicians, who see the results of riding without a helmet and know better.
Yes, David. Kodiak’s remarks are indeed gibberish. Private property is not public property. If a person comes into my house as a guest, that does not make my private property a public place. No one has to come onto my property, so please spare us your Marxist nonsense. Your remark is totally irrelevant.
Amy: nonsense! Which costs the system more – people who survive accidents to lie up in hospital, or people who don’t? And who’s more likely to survive one – the guy with, or without, the helmet?
Everybody’s going to die of something, eventually. Smokers, risk-takers, the obese die young and swiftly. The health-conscious hang around soaking up routine health care and pension moneys for years and years longer.
If you insist on framing the question in financial terms, dead people are really cheap to take care of.
Actually I agree with Ms.Alkon that everyone should bear the costs of their own lifestyle choices.
And, of course, that includes AIDS sufferers.
…and the obese…and anyone unwilling to take exercise…ANYONE who drinks…etc.
I very much approve of smoking bans. It puts my beloved tobacco in the same class with my beloved cannabis. It reduces my consumption and allows me to cock a snoot at the general public by waving my cigarette around while smoking in my car. The thrilling “unacceptability” of smoking adds great pleasure to the general experience.
So I smoke almost exactly 12.5 hand-rolled cigarettes per day (excellent McClintock tobacco blended and packaged in Denmark). This costs me about 35 pence per day and is well worth the price being cheaper than my coffee and MUCH cheaper than my cannabis.
The delight I get from smoking IS mildly affected by the generous health warnings provided by my government so I rigidly attend to exercise twice a week at an estabishment where I am 57th on their “fitness list”.
You are now free to admire and envy me.
Amy: the trouble is not people smoking and getting cancer etc… it is expecting other people to pick up the costs. Do not ban smoking, ban socialist healthcare.
Kodiak: Yes, lots of people from UK live in France… mostly retired folks or people with holiday homes, not entrepreneurs. Not hard to see why.
France is fine just so long as you don’t try and work there.
Perry & David,
1/ Fr as a workplace
OK Fr may not be quite sexy to your eyes to launch a business but quite a lot of foreigners don’t think so & really thrive & succeed in that hell of socialist, bureaucratic, frog-infested business incompetence…
2/ public place & private property
Your house is a private property & NOT a public place: not everybody is invited to come in & have a drink.
Your shop is a private property AND a public place since I or my grandmother might freely come in & buy or look at some interesting item.
It doesn’t mean that the awful State has the right to do what it wants in your shop. It merely means that your clientèle (eg: individual people at random the collectivity of which is commonly named THE PUBLIC) cannot be assimilated to your best friends attending a party you invited them for.
3/ socialist USA
So the Stalinian USA is now tellling you all what you should or shouldn’t do (smoking for instance) in public places…
The French are lagging far behind…
Kodiak.
“Moreoever, I think cigarettes should cost $40 a pack — not as a tax, but because I think you should pick up the likely costs to the health care system of your habit, not expect the rest of us to do it.”
Actually, some research done in the US indicates that smokers impose less of a burden on the medical system than non-smokers. Most of your medical care over your lifetime occurs in the last few years, managing your terminal illness or conditions. Smokers, once they start to go, often go fast. Non-smokers linger, running up the tab.
Perry wrote:
“The absurd degree to which the French state regulates its the economy (hense the high level of unemployment in ‘caring’ France) is far worse than the UK… ”
If the UK calculation system states (sorry for that word…) that a “job” demanding working 6 days out of 7 & 15 hours a day to get a 3-euro-per-hour gross salary is very valid employment, then no suprise that the UK unemployment rate is lower than the Fr one…
That’s just statistical acrobacy, not to mention mental elasticity…
Kodiak.