It's great to see THIS fund has been set up to help alleviate the suffering and stress of pub landlords who have been denied the opportunity to use their own premises as they wish but my own view is is that it doesn't go far enough.
That's why I have toyed with the idea of setting up a PayPal Smoker's fund to bail out all of those smokers who fall foul of bad laws including litter dropping, smoking in a work van, which is used solely by a smoker, for example, or a jobsworth swooping down on an unsuspecting smoker who may have found the goal posts have been moved several yards in the last three years since war was declared on 25% of us.
There are also those landlords who hold late night lock-ins by way of trying to keep our custom and if they fall foul of the law and get horrendous fines and penalties, who will help them if we don't?
Now, obviously, it is a very valid point that we should not encourage law breaking but surely we don't want to encourage compliance either or what is the point of a movement and what sort of teeth will it have? My view is that we need to send a message to Govt and to the Jobsworths that we support the people they are targeting and not them.
This may result in fine after fine after fine going into the treasury's coffers, but isn't that in itself a form of protest? It's like saying we don't agree with you and we don't see why this person you are punishing should have anything to fear or anything to feel guilty about.
I know opinion is divided on this issue so it seemed a good idea to find out what people think generally before setting up the PayPal account.
Further down on this blog, I wrote about how a woman who dropped a cig end out of her car window twice was fined almost £300 after being followed to work by a Jobsworth. I, personally, don't care that she did it twice. Dropping a cig end is like dropping a leaf - plant matter - and nature turfs millions of those everywhere every year in Autumn. By the time spring comes, they are biodegraded and by then any cig end is long gone. The true aim here in setting the weight of law on a person like this is really to further the denormalisation and humiliation process.
The other issue here is how, without funding, any person could fight such cases in a court of law. After all, if a jobsworth approached me, I'd want to see the cig end and have it tested for my DNA before I'd accept it as mine.
Thanks to the last bigoted Govt, legal aid has been cut back so far, you'd have to pretty much be charged with something like murder before you could take advantage of it. What hope has any smoker who chooses to plead not guilty got when faced with the expertise of a legally trained prosecutor in a place that the law-abiding feel intimidated in?
The fund, I should add, and I think we'd all agree, should not be used to bail out anyone charged with those offences such as assault which were in place before July 2007 even if it is because of a smoking related incident. Neither should any fund help anyone stupid enough to sell fags to the under age.
Anyway, thoughts on such matters above, and whether there should be a fund like this to help normally law-abiding smokers who have fallen foul of bad laws that we all want challenged, is a matter for discussion. So let me know your views and then we can - or won't - take this fund further.
After all, the success of this type of fund depends solely on those who would support it and pay into it on a regular basis.