THE anti-smoking health fascists are getting more and more excited that the day is soon coming when smoking will be banned in all workplaces – crucially including pubs, clubs and restaurants.
The spineless cretins who sit in Parliament voted the measure through earlier this year. It is due to come into effect in summer 2007.
It’s an outrage that such proscriptive action could be approved by legislators who dropped hook, line and sinker for the dubious medical evidence that smoking is bad for our health. Overall, I’m convinced it is not.
Let me explain. Consider this health factoid, which the anti-smoking zealots would rather you didn’t think about…smoking is a great reliever of stress.
And stress is a killer. Therefore, smoking saves thousands of lives each year.
Also, you know the British. If they are not allowed to smoke they will eat even more pies, cakes and chocolate bars, and they really are a danger to health and wellbeing.
We are already a nation of lard-arses, prone to high blood pressure and strokes.
This is on my mind because I’ve just come back from a weekend in Scotland where the stupid, vindictive ban on smoking has been in force since last New Year’s Day.
Scotland, of course, now has a little Mickey Mouse parliament all of its own, which hasn’t really got enough real work to, and so was so was first out of the traps to bring in the ban.
The logic behind the ban, as told by the daleks who support it, is: “Smoking has been banned in pubs in New York and in Ireland so – ‘nah nah, na nah nah!’ - we should do so here too.� Pathetic.
Has anyone paused to consider that such a ban is every bit as daft and illogical as it is sinister?
Once they’ve criminalised smoking in pubs, what will they try to outlaw next? Having a pint of beer? Well, it would be a logical extension.
Laughing? Telling mucky jokes? Chatting up someone you fancy? Eating crisps (obviously a serious health and safety issue!), darts (ditto)? All those things are as traditional in pubs as smoking.
Next I expect the lemon-sucking puritans of the health and culture industries will try to ban people wearing track suits in Liverpool pubs as part of the preposterous poshing-up process underway for 2008.
Blimey, that’ll be 90 per cent of Scousers barred at a stroke.
We are discovering that the hand of the nanny state – so long hidden within a synthetic velvet glove – is actually made of iron, all the better for smashing into people’s pleasures and customs.
So now we are left wondering what it will be like when the bifter ban comes into force in England next summer.
I can hardly imagine my local, Hell’s Waiting Room in New Brighton, as a smoke-free environment.
It’s like a tar factory in there. Almost all the punters smoke. Around my table last night, myself, Daddy Hardman, Della and Quiet John were all puffing merrily away.
Apparently, the landlord Mr Craggs is having some sort of covered shack built on a section of flat roof, so we’ll all have to huddle up there when the ban comes in.
First, let me say I am amazed that the smoking ban is so rigorously observed by the public. What has happened to the famed rebellious streak in the Irish and the Scots? They meekly submitted to the ban, so I assume that will happen in England too.
Actually, I can tell you what will happen here in England when ciggies are banned in pubs next summer. First, sales of crisps go up when nicotine-starved punters get the munchies. That’s hardly beneficial to health.
Another side effect is that the pubs start to stink of human sweat and urine. Previously, the tobacco smoke masked those odours.
When you ban things there are always unforeseen, unwanted results. For instance, Irish and Scottish smokers now go outside the pub and group together in the doorway in the wind and rain for their ‘fag breaks’. Wait for it …
These Celtic types love to gab, so quick as you like they are chatting each other up on the pub’s front steps. Huddling together for warmth. Next thing, they are snogging away like billy-ho.
So I’m betting there’s been a rise in the number of home-wrecking sexual affairs resulting from Ireland and Scotland’s smoking ban. How healthy is that?
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Ricky from Baynards wrote...
Doncha just luv New Labour! Two years ago they effectively decriminalised cannabis. If you wander through parts of London now you can smell weed being smoked everywhere. If you were to go up to a copper and complain about this they would point out that 'no offence was being committed' - yet there's legion cases of people having cannabis smoke blown into their faces by truculent teenagers who know they won't even get a slap on the wrist. Somehow I don't expect the police are going to be anywhere near as tolerant towards cigarette smokers who are caught red-handed when the ban comes in. Of course not, the poor old fag smokers will just be some nice 'easy nickings' to boost the 'crime' figures and make self-righteous Chief Constables feel good about themselves. I'll bet that the anti-smoking obsessive head of North Wales Police can't hardly wait for the new legislation to come in.
I wonder what will happen when police turn up at a pub to arrest a cigarette smoker and find that there are a number of dope smokers in there. What's the odds that it will be the old bloke tabbing on the B&H King Size who gets chucked in the cells for the night while the dope heads get left alone (apart from an apology for any inconvience that they might have experienced). I'd happily put a tenner on it myself!
* Well said the Rickster! - SR.
Posted by: Ricky from Baynards | October 24, 2006 2:35 PM