According to Big Brother Watch NuToryLimpDump junior health minister Ann Milton is giving local councils the power to further socially exclude smokers which is really bad news in my bigoted city.
pRick Metcalfe - former NuLabour council leader and now in the minority since his prejudicial party got booted into touch - is bound to push for this. He's a real nasty piece of work who hates smokers.
About five years before the blanket ban, there was much unhappiness here when a local hall was refurbished - because PRick's council had let it get to such a bad state following a lack of investment - and the council decided to ban smoking in it once it was done up.
One of the reasons they gave for this move was one of the most ridiculous I've ever heard. One councillor - a stupid woman whose name escapes me - said the council had done this to protect the chiiiildren. She said because the hall would be used at night for live acts, and for school workshop groups by day, then it was too much of a risk to their health when people had been smoking the night before.
Many people were furious about this including me. I wrote to PRick Metcalfe and he never even bothered to reply. I wrote again. Again nothing. I was so incensed by his lack of response that I wrote to my council chief executive and said as a local council tax payer I was entitled to a response.
I wanted to know why smoker tax payers' needs had been ignored. After all, our tax also helped to pay for this refurbishment and it seemed to me that the least they could do for us was to create a designated place somewhere inside. We'd paid for that right.
PRick's response was that if I was such an addict and couldn't do without a smoke for the length of a performance then I had no business complaining. Charming. I sent him loads of stuff from Forest about the fraud that is SHS plus the actual ONS survey which showed that the majority preferred choice to an outright blanket public smoking ban. You may recall that the thoroughly corrupt Nulabour party turned these figures around to suit it's own ideology to enforce the ban upon a public that didn't want it.
PRick dismissed this by saying only Forest was saying this and they were liars. Charming. A real fair and unbiased man of the people this one.
For me professionally this exclusion was disastrous. My political beliefs about choice meant I had to withdraw when a local "community" group wanted to use my book Devils Let Loose about the Lincoln riots of 1911. I had given them permission to use my copyright (thanks NB) on condition that I could be involved in the writing of the play they planned to base on it.
At this time there was nothing in the pipeline for the hall and it was decided the play would be staged at the local University. It was non-smoking but I had no problem with a private building setting its own policy. When it was announced that the hall would be finished in time for the play, the group decided to hold it there and I had a problem. It was a public hall that I had helped to pay for and I asked the group if they would hold a ballot of members to see how they felt about it.
I was told not to be "so silly". They said : "Everyone knows the hall is non-smoking and if they had a problem they'd say." I still asked for a vote to be held and if they all agreed the place was suitable even as a non-smoking public venue, then I'd accept it and carry on. At least they had been given the choice.
The idiots in the group said no. I had no choice but to back off and disassociate myself. They stole my work, changed the title to Devils Let Loose? and decided the question mark after the title made it their own work and they did not have to credit me or my work as the basis of the play thereafter.
They proved that "community" includes everyone - except smokers and those to whom choice is important. I had grounds to sue them for copyright theft, and I could have gained an injunction to stop the production in its tracks, but in England you can only use the law if you are rich and I am not so I lost out while they claimed all the credit for my work.
Of course I accept that they used my book as the basis and did a lot of their own work, but without it and without my title they would have had no starting point.
Of course we in Lincoln kicked out our former bigoted MP St Gillian of Merron because of Nulabour's stance on smoker exclusion and we hoped we might just get a fairer Govt instead. People were conned into thinking that the Tories were not nannies nor did they think it their business to tell people how to live their lives.
What we got was NuLabour in a different colour and a health department in bed with the fake charity ASH. Milton and her boss Andrew Lansley are so tucked up with Deborah Arnott one must ask if they are running a prostitution racket
Uuurrgghh - sorry - this pic makes my stomach churn too but it's necessary to show how corrupt this current health department is. Milton and Arnott couldn't be any closer unless they were snogging.
This despicable and fraudulent group's lies and propaganda - based on junk science paid for by Big Pharma corporations who compete with the tobacco industry to supply smokers with nicotine - has not only excluded people who don't want to quit, it is working furiously to criminalise them as well.
So I was completely uplifted today when I went to my doctors for a routine check up. I hadn't been in years because last time I got a bigoted nurse who told me I was a serial killer as well as a suicidal maniac because I smoked. The new nurse I saw was great. She told me the last one no longer worked in the practice after being asked to leave.
When the new nurse asked if I was still smoking I told her I smoked moderately for my health because as a lifelong smoker from the age of 8, I was scared to quit because the prognosis for lifelong smokers is worse if they quit than if they conitnue to smoke moderately. She agreed and completely understood how I feel as one who started smoking in childhood - when there was no protection for children - and who now resents being treated as an outcast as an adult when I could never have envisaged more than 40 years ago when I started what would happen when I was grown up.
Bigots like PRick, Lansley and Milton could never understand or empathise. They have no intellect and therefore have no business in positions of authority.
The only hope we have of getting these people out is in elections. Local council elections are coming up in May and we can show the LibLabCon that we have had enough by voting alternatively. For me it's UKIP - for many others in Lincoln too as I explained previously how many new members we have. That indicates to me that many more votes will also come our way and to help with that, I will be standing for anyone who supports choice, fairness and equality and is against corrupt and fraudulent institutions and quangos.
The day PRick loses his privileged position the better and the sooner fairness will return locally. The sooner we have a general election and the NuToryLimpDumps lose their seats because of their corrupt association with a fake charity, the better this country will be. Ours is the land of tolerance and fair play. It's such a shame that these bigots are working to erode our once decent society.