EVERY ten days or so I drive through the Wallasey Tunnel and out through the soulful north-eastern suburbs of Liverpool, bound for the M58 and Wigan, where I visit my mam, Teresa Philomena, and my sister, Princess Stephanie of Wigan.
I last made that journey, through gusting squalls, on the evening of Sunday, July 1.
It was the very evening that the weird modern liberalism of England passed its critical tipping point and turned into a form of civil fascism.
Yes, it was the first evening of the hated Smoking Ban.
I refuse to go along with the deceitful PR bulls**t about us living through the wonderful start of a “smokefree” country / workplace / healthy population etc.
The reality is that July 1 was start of a cruel ban – one that distresses and punishes innocent older people more than most.
To the more mature generations, having a cig with your tipple in the pub was the most natural and pleasant of experiences.
For men, in particular, the ritual was especially beautiful: a pint, the evening paper and a bifter – the holy trinity of relaxation after a hard day’s graft.
Over the years, smokers have moaned only gently as bit by bit the powerful health lobby and the anti-smoking Nazis made their audacious moves. Many of us foolishly swallowed all the bogus medical propoganda about it.
First smoking was banned in cinemas, then in the factories and the offices, then on the top floors of buses, then in restaurants (and in crap rural pubs which pretend to be restaurants), then on trains.
The only smoking zones left to the old, the tired, and all the people who've been loyal to this loveable old bitch of a country down through the decades, is their home, their car or their local pub.
And now they’ve taken away our right to smoke in the pub – a right English people have enjoyed for more than 300 years.
What kind of people are the Smoking Cessation Nazis and our politicians to do such a thing? Bast**ds!
On my drive up through Liverpool on first night of the smoking ban I saw the saddest scenes: mature men and women, their faces full of dismay, stood outside of working class pubs ... in the wind and the lashing rain.
There it was, this miserable scene, repeating itself up the Scotland Road, though Everton, Kirkdale, Walton and Aintree.
I hated seeing these wretched scenes in the kind of terraced communities that are close to my heart – because they are streetscapes so similar to the ones I grew up in Wigan, 20 miles away.
I hated seeing local people reduced to despair and discomfort for no good reason.
Just as back in New Brighton, I am saddened to see splendid, glamorous older women - from my local, Hell’s Waiting Room - shivering in the summer storms and getting their beautifully done hair blown to bits just because they’ve been forced outside for a bifter.
Stepping outside for a fag break is harder on women than men - beause they dress more daintily and elegantly and so feel the cold more.
This unnecessary smoking ban has caused unhappiness for very many older people – and all the misery has been forced on those who deserve it least by a bunch of hideous, twisted zealots.
Quite apart from the increased obesity and stress-related deaths, which the current persecution of smoking and smokers will bring (touched on in an earlier posting), there are other wretched consequences…
For instance, there is sure to be more arguments about glasses being snatched by bar staff before a drink is finished - simply because some drinkers temporarily leave their pints etc inside while they pop out to spark up.
Such rows can create a nasty atmosphere in a pub.
There is also increased bad feeling in restaurants now, because restaurant owners suspect diners of using "nipping out for a smoke" as a ruse for doing a runner.
And now that our Liberal-Fascist State has been allowed to get away with the ban on smoking in all enclosed public and work spaces, you just know that they won’t stop there.
Soon, people are to be persecuted and in some cases prosecuted merely for absent-mindedly dropping a cig but on the street.
A load of useless jobsworths have already been employed at taxpayers’ expense to enforce all this harassment and the gross denial of personal liberty.
Authorites such as Wirral Council, having failed over many years to maintain public services and landmarks, or to spark any genuine economic (i.e. privately funded) economic revival of the local area, are now being reborn as agents of repression for central government.
People are being employed in thousands of non-jobs by the Death Star that is Wirral Council – just to harass working class communities and to provide a “vote bank” (of people grateful to have been given a useless non-job in the pubic sector) for the New Labour Daleks who rule us.
The state (comprising local and national government, the NHS, the spy-camera obsessed cops and other blue lamp services, plus the health and safety Nazis and the publicly-funded equality industry) now feels it can get away with anything.
Next on their twisted agenda: banning you smoking in your car, banning the under 21s from buying alcohol, prescribing more yet more rules for your sex life, outlawing the telling of dirty and politically incorrect jokes in pubs (soon to be reclassified as “hate crime”).
What can we do about these lamentable trends? Well the answer is contained in the great paradox of personal behaviour.
Because when the State becomes a conservative and repressive force on society (which is happening now) then we should all strive to become as liberal and permissive in our personal life as it is possible to be.
Again, paradoxically, whenever the State is an overly liberal and permissive force in society (as it was for most of the post-Second World War period) that is the time to maintain a conservative and morally upright approach to our personal behaviour.
Sadly, during the years of permissive government, most British people chose NOT to be morally conservative with themselves, and during that period there was a terrible fall in educational standards and a collapse in school discipline (because the Government foolishly abolished corporal punishment).
The result of the way our country functioned in recent past decades is that now many of us Brits are staggeringly thick, ineloquent, amoral, sexual slags.
Repression and permissiveness – both can be forces for good or evil, you see.
Personal conservatism and personal liberality – ditto.
But it is all about getting the balance right, and good people now need to work doubly hard to spread truth, beauty, love and justice throughout our corrupted society.
Freedom comes with great responsibility. If we don’t take our freedom and our responsibilities seriously, then we damage ourselves and our civil structures.
That is happening right now. The smoking ban is just one small sign of how bad things have become.
The British state does not trust its people.
And the people no longer trust the British state.
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Justine wrote...
Hi Steve
I am an ex-smoker who occasionally lapses and has the odd fag because I get tempted when I see others smoking in the pub, so I'm actually quite glad of the ban to be honest.
I recently saw a heavily pregnant woman, outside the door of the maternity ward at Whiston, smoking.
Would you fight for her right to smoke?
It's a horrible thing, the compulsion to smoke. Personally, I'm glad to be rid of the temptation.
REGAN REPLIES: I just think everything looks and smells better through swirls of lovely tobacco smoke. IN the greatr smoking era, I am sure many pregnant women smoked with no harm to the chikld they were carrying. Are youi coming to the next Bards of New Brighton meting, Justine? It's on Mon 6 August at trhe Little Brighton pub.
Posted by: Justine | July 7, 2007 5:13 PM