TODAY I treated myself to 40 Silk Cut and a pack of big, juicy King Edward’s Invincible cigars. Marvellous.
For the past six years or so I have deliberately smoked extra-heavily on National No Smoking Day (that’s today, March 8, if by some miracle you failed to notice all the propaganda about it, financed by your taxes and mine).

Gleefully on this day each year I smoke more than I normally would. I really enjoy the experience. It’s my two-fingered response to the miserable crypto-fascist ban-it brigade in the NHS and Smoke Free Liverpool.
There is good recent medical evidence suggesting that the risk of suffering ill health from "passive" smoking is tiny - and that the risk has been consistently exaggerated by medics who have an axe to grind.
So why ban smoking in pubs? The ban becomes a reality, backed by the force of criminal law, some 18 months from now, thanks to gutless MPs who rolled over after being bombarded with thousands of letters from prissy non-smokers about the “evils” of smoking.
Now that the State has banned smoking in pubs, what will it want to ban next? Drinking? Well, that is also believed dangerous by the health fascists.
Swearing in pubs? Telling dirty jokes? Chatting up someone you fancy? These, like smoking, are all traditional pub pastimes.
What the smoking ban really demonstrates is that the modern tyranny of liberal values has triumphed over common sense and the traditional British zest for life.
A package of nasty and proscriptive liberalism, nanny state whining and the iron fist of the Government has been used to stamp out the centuries-old tradition of smoking tobacco in taverns and restaurants. It’s pathetic.
Last night I looked around the public bar of Hell’s Waiting Room in dear old New Brighton. Almost everybody was smoking in there and having a really good time. They looked cool and glamorous too – the very things the cheerless propagandists of the anti-smoking lobby claim smokers aren’t.
It was the same scene at The Lost Weekend late bar, and the other night at the Filthy Slags Disco in Birkenhead. Ditto at a charming venue in Seacombe that I call Sweaty Betty’s.
I am so tired of hearing the “smoking kills” mantra being trotted out by the medical profession, by anti-smoking organisations, and by the stupid, let’s- interfere-in-everything Liberal-Democrat council in Liverpool … without it ever being challenged.
Every dubious medical research report, every dodgy “fact” over smoking-related illness has been trotted out and slavishly reported by the mainstream media.
Children have been subject to such sinister brainwashing about smoking in schools that if they catch their parents having a crafty fag they start sobbing and ringing Childline.
Look, I don’t doubt there are health risks involved with smoking. There are health risks with almost anything you do if you choose to live without fear or favour as a free man or woman.
If you live life to the full as a smoker and a drinker – which is a fine and traditional approach to life – then, yes, pain and affliction and injury might well come your way.
Equally, if you live the life of a joyless, teetotal vegetarian non-smoker who does nothing more exciting that sitting at home reading caravanning magazines, you still might meet with misfortune and disease.
Tell you what. Here is a significant factoid the health nazis never publicise … smoking saves thousands more lives each year than it destroys because smoking is the best reliever of stress known to man.
And it is stress that is the real killer.

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