Anti-Smoking Fanatics Will Lose

Warning: this is a bit of a boast post.

A few days ago, the truly horrible Duncan Bannatyne published a truly horrible set of thoughts (it hardly qualifies as an article) on the Grauniad website about why he would "only be happy when smoking was banned" and calling for children to report parents who smoke in their presence to the police. Their own parents! I was so incensed by his fascistic attitude to what is certainly an unhealthy habit, but nowhere near at the apocalyptic, genocidal levels anti-smoking fanatics like him would have us believe, that I posted a few innocuous remarks of my own in response.


The piccy is hard to read unless you click on it. This is what I said:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another proselytising ex-smoker banging on about his Damascene conversion and the need to treat evil smokers like second class filth. It's not the anti-smoking thing that gets me, it's the sheer hatred masquerading as concern and justified by a dangerous sense of moral superiority.

Stick to making money by exploiting the hard work and creativity of others, mate. That's what you're "good" at.

Next!

Not quite an exocet, I know. Yet a few days later, when glancing at it again, I was pleasantly surprised by the response my gripe had stimulated, complete with 800-odd "recommends", which is pretty high for Cif.

But I was far more impressed by the deluge of other (far better) comments that together nailed Bannatyne comprehensively and deservedly. Old Labour, Brownite brown-nose that he is, too, the ubiquitous condemnation couldn't have happened to a nicer man.

Suffice to say, a far more libertarian, anti-authoritarian mood is definitely emerging in this country, and that is a cause for optimism. There is hope for Britain after all.

Revealed: Who Inspired Labour's Smoking Ban?

The smoking ban is killing the pub industry stone dead. And for what? So health fascists can feel good about themselves in the only way they know how: by interfering in people's private lives and dictating how they wish to use their bodies. As a lover of liberty, this (still) absolutely sticks in my craw. As a (former) smoker, I do/did not mind one little bit being exposed to the odd thick pub fug now and then. It was all part of the pub atmosphere, so to speak. It was the point.

It was liberty.

Landlords were promised they could choose whether they were a smoking pub or not. Red Aussie dominatrix, Patricia Hewitt, reneged on that and opted for a nationwide, total ban. Consequence? The one place where people from all walks of life and from every conceivable background still meet freely to set the world to rights over a glass or two of a variety of traditional liquids has been fatally wounded as an institution. It is dying and a peculiar limb of British freedom is (conveniently?) withering away with it.

But who inspired the ugly notion of the 'total ban'? Where does this fanaticism about general health come from? What has happened to the principle that our duty is to usher our young into the arms of Aristotelian moderation, instead of route-marching them straight into the pitbull jaws of totalitarian disregard for the desires of others?

Reading the DT's magazine over a bowl of muesli last weekend Careful research has unearthed the following, disturbing testimony:

Today's theme was that old chestnut, smoking. He would start out with special reference to narrowing of the arteries caused by smoking. How awful a smoker's stomach must look. Smokers lacked consideration for others, forcing them to breathe in polluted air. He had really toyed with the idea of outlawing smoking [everywhere]. The campaign would begin by having a death's head printed on every cigarette pack. 'If I should ever discover,' he often said, emphasising the depth of his antagonism to smoking, 'that [my squeeze] were secretly smoking, then that would be grounds for me to separate from her immediately and for ever.

The 'he' in these fond reminiscences? Why, king of the Nazis himself, Adolf Hitler. What a surprise.