FORWARDS OR BACKWARDS?

Legalisation of gay marriage is a good thing and so I'm really pleased to see that the Govt is considering a change in the law and the idea has the support of top ministers.



Not only is it fair, equitable, and humane but it is morally the right thing to do. It's not for Govt to tell people who they should or shouldn't fall in love with or who they should or shouldn't spend their whole lives with and they shouldn't be discriminated against because some people find homosexuality offensive.



I know a gay couple in the US who got married - and later divorced just like any other couple. And why shouldn't they? We do live in the 21st Century and divorce is no longer illegal.



Perhaps I'm cynical in thinking that Govt isn't acting just out of the good of it's heart but because backing gay marriage is a popular policy.



Polls have shown that two-thirds of the public would support gay marriage.

according to the Daily Mail.



Funny that, really, because the Anthony Worral Thompson Petition to review the smoking ban has consistently been ahead of the e-petition to make gay marriage legal and yet not one whisper from Govt on their plans for smokers other than forcing us to go straight smokeless.



Cameron is right to ignore homophobic fears from those who don't like gay people because of who they are, or how they live their lives. I'm confused, however, because if all this is really about "equality" then why is Cameron pandering to smokerphobics who feel the same about smokers as homophobics do about gays?



Homophobics are scared of gay people. They think they will catch something if they just stand next to them, or they will somehow make "normal" people gay just by the very contact between them. My mother blamed my sister's first girlfriend for my sister being gay, for example, but my sister was just gay. (Quite a courageous thing to be in the macho engineering city of Lincoln back in the early 60s, incidentally. However, you need a certain amount of courage these days to come out as a smoker and defend you right to continue to smoke.)



Smokerphobics are scared of smokers. Anti-smoker propaganda has resulted in violence against smokers. Abuse against smokers is justified on the unproven grounds that they harm others in the same way that those who hated and feared in previous generations once promoted gay people, Jews and other "undesirables".



Smokerphobicsthink they will catch something from smokers, they fear that non-smokers, especially children, will become smokers just by the very contact or sight of a smoker. They feel sure that the very whiff of a smoker means they will die of something horrible too young.



The difference between Homophobics and Smokerphobics is that one group has been prevented from spreading its bile in favour of the admirable quest for an equal, tolerant, free, and compassionate society. The other is encouraged to be as abusive as possible against a purposefully demonised group officially deemed fair game for any bigot.



Govt and it's social engineers want to eradicate tobacco in the future as a recreational product even though they are happy to Frankenstein it as a pharmaceutical product to exploit its healing qualities and sterilise its stimulant factor.



They have even created enough social backing to destroy the centuries-old legal tobacco companies in favour of the relatively new Big Pharmas which evolved from the snake oil trade. To finish Big Tobacco off they must attack it's last remaining consumers.



It is with glee that they thieve a family-founded, historical company's trade mark in a bid to turn it's consumers towards their clients and funders. It reminds me of when they used to write "Juden" on the walls of Jewish businesses to stop customers going inside.



"They" are these sort of people who fill Govts full of Smokerphobic nonsense. They create panic and a false sense of alarm and popularity for policies they are happy to brag are in their own self interest rather than based on real public support or need.



If smokers wrote reports, carried out similar studies with vastly different conclusions, and had the same direct associations with Tobacco companies, or charities dependent directly or indirectly on Big Tobacco, as these so called independent "experts" have with Big Pharma, they would be brandished as evil monsters just out to get more people smoking. These people below want us to believe that they are altruistic to push us towards their products. No doubt they've convinced themselves that this is acceptable because they hate smoking and they've persuaded Govts to hate it too.



R.W. undertakes research and consultancy for, and has received travel funds and hospitality from, companies that develop and manufacture smoking cessation medications. He has a share in a patent for a novel nicotine delivery device. He is a trustee of the stop-smoking charity, QUIT. His salary and that of much of his research team is funded by Cancer Research UK. He is co-director of the NHS Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training funded by the UK Department of Health. M.R. has, in the last 5 years, had conference expenses reimbursed, been paid an honorarium for a talk and received freelance fees from Pfizer, but has not accepted support from the manufacturers of stop smoking medications in the last 3 years. L.B. is scientific adviser on tobacco control to the UK Department of Health and Vice-chair of Cancer Research UK's Tobacco Advisory Group. P.H. undertakes research and consultancy for companies that manufacture stop smoking medications. J.S. acted formerly as adviser to the manufacturers of smoking cessation medications, for which he received remunerations and hospitality. M.J. undertakes consultancy for Pfizer.



The Govt is blinkered in listening blindly to these people without giving due balance on a two sided issue. In backing the anti-smoker industry, and it's promotion of Smokerphobia encouraged by the stigmatisation, denormalisation, marginalisation and exclusion of smokers, it is crossing the line of established civil liberty rights on property ownership and the right of free association, into dangerously oppressive territory.



The gay community has come a long way in 50 years in its fight for equality, respect and tolerance. Legalising gay marriage is social progression in the right direction. Today smokers are the unpopular minority but the same persecutors who hate them, because of what they do and refuse to quit, share the same kind of mind of those who made laws against homosexuality.



The treatment of smokers is social regression based on intolerance, inequality, and dodgy manipulation of science and the law. It is taking society and the values it holds dear backwards in the wrong direction.



If we are equal, then we are equal, no ifs, buts, or propaganda. The Govt should wake up to the fact that equality is not selective.

TOBACCO CONTROL OUT OF CONTROL

I was trying to find the source of this image on the BMJ Tobacco Control site but I'd have to register to read the whole article. A tantalising piece of information about smokers as mushrooms caught my interest and brought to mind a previous newspaper editor who also thought it was Ok to call for attacks on minorities.

It makes me so said to see history repeating. In addition, I frankly despair at the suppression of the voice of our particular lifestyle group. The editor who allowed, and then defended, an appalling article calling for people to be shot in the streets, because her reporter didn't like what they did, should have apologised. Largely, she has ignored individual emails of complaint and commented instead in her newspaper why she felt the article was valid.

I also asked for the legal Right of Reply to allegations made against Freedom2Choose by an anti-smoker but have so far been ignored. "Name and Address Supplied" accused F2C of using propaganda "on web forums around the world denying smoking is harmful and denying links between passive smoking and illnesses in non-smokers and children."

Passive smoking has not been proved beyond doubt to cause harm but it has been seized upon by smokerphobics such as "Naas" to use as an emotional tool to blackmail people into believing it - particularly exploiting children as human shields in their argument.

If it was true that passive smoking killed children and smoking killed one in two smokers, then none of my generation would still be alive and in very good health. We are and we are as mad as hell at being coerced by fake charities because we won't quit.

The Science is not settled. Most SHS studies show what smokers' real life experiences have proved. It has no effect, it irritates some but also offers protection for some children No study shows a clear link between SHS and lung cancer

Naas also alleges that F2C's only reason to exist is "to persuade people to continue to smoke and to ignore advice about not smoking in pregnancy or in the presence of their children." This is absolutely untrue and defamatory of every member of F2C.

The organisation, which is not funded by Big Tobacco or organised by some Big T exec who sits in the shadows, is a collection of real, as opposed to astro-turf, individuals who simply want to be left alone. That's hardly immoral as implied by Naas' tone.

F2C supports those who chose to quit as much as it supports those who chose not to and it fights the corner of those currently being dehumanised, denormalised, abused and excluded. Unlike the anti-smoker activitist, F2C does not tell people what to do with their own children. That is their choice. If they choose to step outside, it's up to them. If they choose to smoke in their own homes, it's up to them. It is not the "right" of any anti-smoker activist like Naas to interfere in private family matters based on his or her own prejudices about where people smoke and what alleged "harm" they are causing.

One would hope that people like Naas would put their energies into fighting real child abuse if it concerns them so much rather than imaginary abuse based on their own phobic fears and loathing of one particular lifestyle group.

F2C also fights for the rights of hospitality owners to regain control of their properties and supports those pub landlords who have been stripped of everything they own, including their standing in their local communities, by a spiteful law that backed bigotry, intolerance and hatred when choice would have been the decent and honest way forward.

As we smokers slept and in consideration gave over many public spaces voluntarily without complaint to non smokers, believing there would always be a compromise in a fair country, the anti-smoker industry was already working on dismissing any future concern we would have.

Tobacco Control intervened to halt smokers being included in Human Rights legislation. TC has never represented smokers and yet managed to persuade governments that it spoke for us and said we don't consider ourselves a group. I think that used to be true but TC has since forced us into such a group defined by what we do - or fail to give up.

Tobacco control also dismisses us and grass roots smokers rights' groups as having been set up by Big Tobacco without giving any evidence except for the fact that such groups exist.

But when former Battle of Britian pilot Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris - of the same generation as many who now shiver in the cold outside of their social clubs - set up Forest in 1979, it was because he was an ordinary smoker who was assaulted by a smokerphobic woman on a railway platform when he lit up his pipe. It wasn't because he was approached by a Tobacco executive to do it in the way that the Royal College of Physicians was approached by Chief Medical Officer George Godber to set up ASH Uk using his position in Govt.

Tobaco control simply lies when it says : "... the tobacco industry created and supported smokers' rights groups (SRGs) in countries around the world to oppose clean indoor air laws and maintain the social acceptability of smoking."

Those groups have developed on their own and the reason they are far behind the anti-smoker industry in terms of "propaganda" is because these are real people - not paid professionals.

And if what Tobacco Control says about Big T "...developing ads to reassure smokers that they were not ‘social outcasts’ because of their smoking." then I say it's a necessity because of Tobacco Control's aim to encourage Govts across the world to treat smokers in exactly that way.

Instead of real health concerns, Tobacco Control only advocates the use of health as an excuse to push forward the real aim of a smoke free world at any cost. As one who has reported many inquests, I can confirm that the presence of asbestos is seen in the lung although the smoker's black lung isn't as obvious or they wouldn't have to use a pig's to scare the hell out of children.

Advocates should also continue to frame smoking as a health issue. Focusing on smoke as a pollutant avoids mentioning the smoker, and thus subverts the tobacco industry's metonymy of ‘smoker’ for ‘smoke.’ Eliminating cigarette smoke from indoor environments is equivalent to asbestos removal, and thus does not involve anyone's ‘rights.’

The very fact that ordinary smokers like myself are dismissed as "inventions" by the tobacco industry or "stooges" of Big T are some of the issues that anger me so much. I didn't even know the tobacco industry had the guts to fight our corner. Voices that appear on this blog and on other blogs I read are like mine. We don't get industry funding and we don't want it for fear of losing the moral high ground. We are ordinary largely lifelong consumers of a highly taxed legal product who are fed up at being treated worse than murderers.

Tobacco Control is out of control, inciting others to call for violence against us via the use of years of untruths and ideological propaganda. It is time this hate campaign against us ended and the anti-smoker industry's wild and outrageous health claims were put back into a proper and realistic perspective by the use of real independent scientists and experts and not those on the side of either Big Tobacco or Big Tobacco Control.

REMOVE THIS NHS BURDON

It seems to me that the only people draining the NHS of much needed cash are those healthists in the industry sucking the life out of it by furthering their own highly paid careers through scaremongering and getting public support by insulting selected lifestyle groups.



Despite telling us for ages that fat people are costing the NHS as much as the ficitional "smokers", so they need bullying into the perfect size 10, they now appear to be saying that no matter what fat people do they still won't lose weight.



"Once you are fat it is unlikely you will ever return to your former size, no matter how hard you diet.

Scientists have confirmed what most dieters already suspect; most people who lose weight end up putting it back on again, according to a long-term study of 25,000 men and women living in the UK.

The scientists, from the Medical Research Council's National Survey of Health and Development, tracked 5,362 adults who were born in 1946, and 20,000 born in 1958, assessing their weight, blood pressure and lifestyles.

While around 12 million Britons go on diets of one kind or another every year, only around 10 per cent lose a significant amount of weight, and most regain it within a year.

Dr Rebecca Hardy told the Sunday Times: "Both groups began increasing in weight in the 1980s and since then people have been increasing in mass all through life.

"For men it goes steadily through life. For women it starts slowly and accelerates in the mid-thirties. Once people become overweight they continue relentlessly upwards. They hardly ever go back down."



Note how the article is carefully manipulated to calm fears of the terrifying prospect of too many fat people running loose in the UK to show that help is at hand - Just Call the Professionals.



"A few lose weight but very few get back to normal. The best policy is to prevent people becoming overweight."

However, the study findings don't mean that all diets are a waste of time. Some, which promote eating healthier foods and increasing physical activity, can still make a positive impact on a person's health.

Around six out of 10 adults in the UK are now overweight, with one in four categorised as obese."



And they are stocking up on those professionals being paid to bully people into perfection but they don't say at what cost to the NHS or that it's more about jobs for them and career progression than it is to save fat people from dying or hurting others.



Passive Obesity seems to be the rage these days and it looks like public humiliation, hatred and disgust of this particular lifestyle group is about to become public policy.



Of course we smokers and now drinkers know that public health bodies lie to push forward self interest groups' own political ideological agendas but has there ever been a campaign so nasty as targeting someone who is overweight?



I doubt very much that drinkers, smokers, and the overweight cost the NHS anything like the fantastical figures plucked from the air, but for sure the healthists, scientists, academics, so-called "Charity" leaders, and NHS and related industry staff get whopping amounts of our taxes.



This is what needs to be addressed if the NHS is to remain in a healthy condition in future.

SMOKING AND HEALTH

Ages ago, when the story broke of an Indonesian whose fag exploded as he rode his motorcycle to work, I said it wouldn't be long before the health lobby terrified people into believing rocket fuel was in cigarettes.

As it happens, today I saw a new propaganda poster in the window of my smoke free shop. It had a diagram showing all the different chemicals in cigarettes including, yes, you guessed it, rocketfuel. Others were said to be poison used on death row, sewer gas, toilet cleaner, radioactive gas, and pesticide (which is how they now describe nicotine.) It was so wildly hysterical in it's claims that I wondered how they thought that it would persuade smokers of many years' experience to quit.

Perhaps it was meant instead to frighten the non-smokers more than us so they develop the same kind of paranoia and see us as diseased. My problem with this campaign poster of theirs is that they promote the smoker as the dirty, stupid, addict and not the victim of a dangerous black market that smoke free policies have created. Thanks to the anti-smoker political lobby groups tobacco with far more dangerous chemicals than anything Public health and it's front groups have tried to save us from before is now more available than ever. Adult smokers will avoid it. Kids will not.

Independent author Rich White explains the real chemical danger of regulated tobacco in his Smokescreens book and examines it in context with other atmospheric and environmental pollutants. He says, for example :

"...smoke from charcoal contains many of the same components of tobacco smoke, such as carbon monoxide and formaldehyde, as well as carcinogens and so on – a ten pound bag of charcoal produces as much smoke, and chemicals, as 160 packs (3200 cigarettes) of cigarettes."

British American Tobacco says : All tobacco products pose risks to health, but based on available scientific evidence, the ingredients our companies use, at the levels used, do not add to the health risks of smoking. Nor do they encourage people to start smoking or affect a person’s ability to quit. Ingredients are not added to make our tobacco products appealing to children, and there is no evidence that they have this effect. Although ingredients in some types of cigarettes include sugars, cocoa and fruit extracts, they do not create a sweet, chocolate-like or fruity taste in the smoke. In short, our cigarettes still taste like cigarettes and not sweets or candy. Nicotine is not added to tobacco products - it occurs naturally in tobacco. Smokers in countries such as Canada, Australia and the UK have historically preferred the taste of Virginia-style cigarettes which contain few or no ingredients.

That actually rings true with me from experience and taste. The smoke free wild allegations about chemicals in cigarettes seem false and certainly over-egged to exploding point.

Meanwhile, those groups like ASH that would encourage such untruths to achieve that ideological aim of a smoke free world are happy to push dangerous chemicals that have proved beyond doubt to kill. So on further examination, the anti-smoker industry's claim that "it's about health" does not stand up.

It seems, however, that when the Pharma industry wants to exploit tobacco, they claim it's good for a whole host of things including beauty and skin care (and I thought they said it made you ugly), circulatory health (and I thought they said it was bad for circulation), and oral health (and I thought it made your teeth look like a crack whore's.)

Reasonable anti-smokers even admit that there are some beneficial qualities in tobacco

But few would believe the benefits are as astounding as this clinic claims

JAKARTA (AFP) – An Indonesian woman exhales cigarette smoke into the mouth of a gaunt, naked patient at a Jakarta clinic, where tobacco is openly touted as a cancer cure.

The Western patient is suffering from emphysema, a condition she developed from decades of smoking. Along with cancer and autism, it's just one of the ailments the Griya Balur clinic claims it can cure with cigarettes.

"I missed this," says the woman, a regular customer, with an American accent, as Phil Collins's "I Can Feel It" blares in the background.

Griya Balur founder Dr. Gretha Zahar told AFP she had treated 60,000 people with tobacco smoke over the past decade.

You might think she's just a witch doctor but then she does have a PhD in nanochemistry from Padjadjaran University in Bandung, West Java, Zahar. Her jiggery pokery explanation is as astounding as the anti-smoker claims made in the opposite. And yet, she's a doctor. And we're supposed to believe doctors, aren't we?

She said :

"... manipulating the mercury in tobacco smoking can cure all diseases including cancer, and even reverse the ageing process.

"Mercury is the cause of all illnesses. In my cigarettes -- we call them Divine Cigarettes -- there are scavengers that extract the mercury from the body," she said.

Zahar says she does not need to subject her theories to clinical tests or publish them in peer-reviewed journals, nor does she have the money to "fight" with "Western medical scientists" and that I can believe.

Her claims were recently presented to the Constitutional Court where farmers and legislators from the tobacco-growing hub of Central Java are challenging a law that recognises tobacco as addictive.

Bearing in mind that the World Health Organisation, who we should be able to trust implicitly, played dirty in the smoking nd health game and buried the SHS results that showed protective effects on children preferring to use a less reliable method of study to achieve the aim they had already announced.

So in this myriad of conflicting studies, claims, fantasies, and politicking, who and what, exactly, are we humble consumers supposed to believe when trying to make an honest decision about the alleged harm or benefits of tobacco.

18th Century poet William Cowper had the best answer :

And diff'ring judgements serve but to declare/That truth lies somewhere if we knew but where

OUT OF CONTROL TOBACCO CONTROL

There's a great piece over at the Angry Exile on the efforts by tobacco control to make sure people keep smoking and one can only imagine it's because it gives them something to do to earn the billions in cash they steal from the tax payer.

It seems The swaztika No Smoking signs actually trigger a desire to smoke. And I thought it was just so that Nazi organisations in the Anti-Smoker industry could make a few quid from blotting urban and rural landscapes with their constant fly-posting.

According to Dr Carl Phillips Tobacco Control is so fed up with us pesky smokers spoiling their wet dream of a smoke free world with truth about smoking, and the futility of such nonsense as plain packaging, that they have to research how to lie well to further their ideology to ensure Govts continue to ignore us.

They've been trolling news forums to spy and pick up reasoned view from smokers and have then used our money on figuring out how best to discredit us.

Or as Carl succinctly puts it :

In tobacco control studying concerns with proposals is like entomologists studying the preferences of bugs in order to better kill them. ...

When everyone who disagrees with your worldly goal just needs to be hunted down and defeated, it sure must be easy to do "research".

Carl's piece also highlights how Tobacco Control is pushing the idea of a Tobacco Use Disorder - yep - that's right. The next generation is to grow up believing people who smoke are mentally ill.

Tobacco Control is taking us socially backwards. They remind me of those nutters who used to say being gay was a mental illness or a disease. It looks like zealotry is still around in central politics but they've changed their target for hate and the bigots who back them can't even see it.

The sign above is a good example of how the anti-smokers are trying to shift their own traits on to the smoker good guys. They employ fascism to enforce their particular ideology onto others and they make up words to describe anyone who opposes it like "denialism".

Smokers do not harm anyone else. If their choice to enjoy smoking tobacco is seen as genocide by the anti-smoker industry, and its followers and believers, then Tobacco Control is a willing accomplice in hastening the smoker's end. It has no right to take the moral high ground and Govts across the world are doing their people a very grave and dangerous disservice by giving it any authority.

AUS BACKS TYRANNY

I really feel for our Australian smoking cousins as the country proudly boasts about how tyrannical it has become.

When people are prevented from living peacefully and contentedly in their own homes then it matters not how it's dressed up or spun, it is oppression of the very worst kind and when lawyers become involved, then it is simply the weight of wealth and industry against the weakest members of society.

There is no scientific evidence at all to support this kind of Australian bigotry which has occurred because of a phobic fear encouraged by the billion pound anti-smoker industry which pushes hatred, prejudice and discrimination. If this home ban is "making history" then it indicates a future that we should all fear whether smoker or non-smoker.

If we are not free to live our lives how we wish in our own homes when IT DOES NOT HARM ANYONE ELSE, then I, for one, would have no wish to live at all. As a lifelong smoker, if I lived in Australia with no means of emigrating from that county, then I would kill myself. I will not live in the land of oppression. I will not. If it happens here, I would rather go to prison where people are far more free than those smokers who live law abiding lives.

At least, finally, smokers are getting some support and not before time. It's just a shame that tobacco companies who got them into this mess have taken so long to stand up for them.

Such is the bigotry of the Australian establishment that only fellow tyrants like Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini would think it an outrage that someone was standing up for the oppressed.

Australia should hang it's head in shame for advocating the slavery of a nation and backing tyranny of the worst kind. It used to be a country I admired. I have family there. Now it's about as welcoming to smokers as Nazi Germany was to Jews and others it deemed undesirable and a danger to others based on nothing more than prejudicial hatred.

BLIMEY!

A quick post due to the fact that I'll be working all week and likely not to have much time.

I was just absolutely astounded to find a common sense view from a Conservative Blimey!

Councillor Simon Cooke writes on quitting and the corporate grasp of the anti-smoker industry and its lies. Brilliant.

A brilliant strategy – medicalise the delivery of nicotine! Let me tell you something, these products don’t work. People stop smoking because they want to stop smoking – and whether they use patches, gum or specialist smoking cessation drugs makes not one jot of difference. But it does keep a pretty huge and very profitable industry going!

Well worth a read.

GOVT BACKED HATE

After writing THIS post, I thought I'd pop over to Dick Puddlecote's Anti-Smoker Psycho spot because I hadn't been for ages. I wish I hadn't ater I read this.

JFW,
03/02/2011 16:43:30
"I do hope never to be treated by an NHS worker who is stupid enough to be a smoker; it's worrying that some people that you might be forced to rely on in an emergency have such limited brain-power."
7 February 2011 14:58


As Dick says, anti-smokers now feel justified in terming smokers like a sub-human species. I'm not surprised. Govt backing of intolerance by it's blanket ban and refusal to listen to smokers could only result in giving the wrong message and encouraging such hatred and discrimination. I said it before the ban came out. It was why I was against it. I believe politicians either realise this and hate smokers enough to let the dogs loose - or they are completely naive and swallow without question the "confidence Trick" that Deborah Arnott from ASH UK admitted she had pulled on the Govt to enforce the ban in 2007.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they are naive given that they were also stupid enough to believe Tony Bliar's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and could kill us all within 45 minutes - and the Libyan Lockerbie Bomber really deserved to be freed.

Over at the Devils in the Detail blog is tobacco control's new policy as promoting smokers as violent types who call for violence and death to politicians. The article also links to a disgusting poll calling for the final solution for smokers.

The above kind of talk, backed up with state discrimination and enforcement, and the lack of legislative protection for smokers in employment really frightens me but I'm relieved to see that this sort of blatant prejudice based on Govt-backed ideology has not gone unnoticed

Writing about the NICE quango, Simon Hills from the Times Magazine acknowledges outrageous claims began When the government decided they were entitled to vilify smokers

I've also written before about the treatment of smokers, and outcasting them as sub human species of less intelligence, to the years before WW2 and the persecution of German citizens who were Jewish. I've been heavily criticised for that but I'm not the only one to find sinister comparisions.

The Angry Exile wrote an incisive piece about that HERE

He also blames state-backed legislation for allowing this to happen with public support.

It's not just legislative attacks specifically targeting them that they need to worry about, but also this foaming hatred whipped up by the constant process of denormalising, demonising and dehumanising smokers. What should give all of us pause for thought is that if you change just the last word of that sentence to Slavs or Jews or Poles it could have come from a history book on the 1930s, and if those times are any guide we haven't seen the end of this. Wikipedia notes that "The Holocaust was accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II.

Old people who fought in that war, people who have embraced fair restrictions over the years, mothers, fathers, grandparents, other people's adult children, business owners, pub landlords, nurses, doctors, journalists, office workers, land workers, the rich and the poor all smoke. They do not deserve to be to be cut off from their fellow citizens

If the Govt is serious about equality and cementing community relations, and it wants people to take it's Big Society ideology seriously, then it could begin by encouraging inclusion rather than exclusion of people who smoke.

It should also recognise that smokers are voters too and turn back this prejudicial and bigoted tide of hatred that it's anti-smoker laws encourage.

According to Forest Eireann spokesman, John Mallon, tobacco control policies should be amended so they “are fair for everyone, smokers and non-smokers alike”.

Who can fail to agree with that if they truly believe that prejudice, hate and discrimination, are bad for the health of cohesive and fair societies?

PASSION DISMISSED BY INTOLERANCE

Simon Clark reports today that the push for outdoor smoking bans in the UK has begun in earnest after Mayor Bloomsberg's announcement that all smokers are to be barred from everywhere - including the wide open air in New York.

Most people think this is a step too far to take from civil liberties, others are outraged at the sheer misrepresentation of YouGov's bigoted study by anti-smoker Peter Kellner. I'm a mixture of sad, suicidal and scared - but heartened by the calls for direct action at last.

I wait to hear when the march is and where. Those better at organising than I am might be able to sort this out. I hope so. I'm there with as many people as I can muster and I feel there will be many. This is a threat too far.

I've tried to explain here why I'm so passionate about choice and the current war on people who chose to smoke which is leading societies into dangerous places and, in my view, backwards socially.

This issue - which I have now been involved with politically for 10 years - six before the blanket ban - has made me question everything I've ever believed about this country, fairnesss, equality, discrimination, justice, tolerance and socialism.

It has taken everything that was instilled in me as a member of the post war generation, that was absolutely adamant that it did not want fascism to rear it's ugly head again, and shown me that socially moral right and wrong have got all mixed up in a whiplash of propaganda enforced trend and fashion.

I remember my old headteacher, a former RAF WW2 pilot, and the assemblies we used to have. He told us that Britain was great because we were a free country where no one could tell us what to eat or drink or when we should go to the toilet. He said ours was the greatest nation on earth because we had free choice. He pointed to bad examples of other countries like Russia, Poland, Hungary, and said they were ruled by Govts that told them what to do all the time. Govts have no place in people's lives, he said.

I know my children's generation was the first to have the anti-smoking message so firmly implanted in their psyche and I always supported education about the health risks associated with smoking. My children, at least, got balance in the home and saw and experienced that smoking was nothing to fear. Balanced information about the health risks and the reasons people choose to smoke didn't result in any of my children taking up the habit before they were legally old enough to do so. Only one is a smoker of four.

I doubt balance on this issue would occur to never smokers, or ex-smokers, or anyone 20 years ago when the one sided propaganda nature of this issue began to trouble me a lot. I think the generation of school children after mine was the first to be taught how "filthy, selfish and unhealthy" smokers are and how they are to be feared - like the plague.

That's when it began to turn from health education to nasty slander and abuse. Some people appear to have no interest in this debate other than to dive in and goad smokers for fun. They throw insults like daggers but then get all indignant and innocent when smokers answer back in kind.

They call passionate debate "foaming at the mouth" because they either don't have any passion or they are so inward looking they cannot believe people can be passionate about something they dislike. Equating passion for a cause with ranting is also a good way of undermining reasonable debate. Perhaps they go in there to have fun at our expense which is just plain mean and infantile - perhaps they work for anti-smoker lobby groups and aim to negate what we say just in case someone in Govt is listening.

It feels as if our lives are about as worthless to that sort of person as women campaiging for the vote was to those anti-suffragette's who thought women's right's activists had no reason to complain



As the anti-smoker of modern day life gains some sort of sadistic pleasure from insulting smokers, so did those anti-women voters of 1908. Just look at how they glorified and giggled at images of women being force fed in jail. I am sure the "majority" of people of that time scoffed at these women campaigning for the vote as "silly" too.



This issue in the 21st Century is as important to me as the issue of women's rights in the 20th Century, Civil Rights in the USA in the 1960s, and gay rights in the 1980s. Those who allege to "care" about injustice languish in this sort of history believing it can never happen again in enlightened society. They really should take a long hard look in the mirror to make sure they are not staring bigotry and intolerance in the face.

Govts are ignoring our modern social tragedy by encouraging discrimination, exclusion and isolation of a minority group which is passionate about its beliefs while holding it up for public contempt with the full backing of the law.

Smokers need not "harm" anyone else with choice and that is the bottom line if you believe the scam about SHS. Personally, I believe F2C because there is no money in it for them when they say that their survey showed only 7% of people believed SHS was a threat.

Whatever my beliefs or anti-smoker's beliefs, the fact is both sides of what has become a very acrimonious debate can be accommodated through choice, balance and fairness. In a modern tolerant society there is no place for hysterical propaganda designed to promote exclusion. That should have been left behind last century once and for all. We cannot call ourselves "progressive" otherwise.

More restrictions if they come will cause further isolation but they won't make one lifelong smoker quit. This blanket ban is not about health. It is about hate and profit and it depends for its income on some of the most vulnerable people in this country - the easy to get at - the poor and the old.

It may take the same kind of drastic action as throwing myself under the Queen's horse at Ascot to make this ignorant Govt finally sit up and just listen to the other side of this debate - and there are always two. If the outdoor ban and the rest follow, frankly, this is not a country I would want to live in nor a society I would want to live among.

DUTCH SALVO IN WAR ON SMOKERS

I like this from Frank Davis about how the Dutch won the war in Holland against the multi-billion pound Tobacco Control Industry.

TC still dosn't get it and shrieks like a toddler having a tantrum that Bogey Men from the Big Tobacco companies have pulled the strings in the background when the war on choice in Holland was won by the little man and woman who just want control of their own lives back.

Way to go Holland - where's next?

H/T Bill Gibson. Bold emphasis mine - because they are the bits I like best.

Tobacco Control simply don't understand why the Dutch Smoking Ban has been (partially) overturned, and are desperately trying to find out what went wrong. How could it happen? They're convinced that Big Tobacco must've been lobbying ministers and funding protest groups. But in fact in Holland it was the small bars who came together to fight the ban with their own money. Big Tobacco played no part in it at all, despite allegations that they did. But Tobacco Control is stuck in a mindset that can only recognise wealthy tobacco companies as their enemy. They don't seem to understand that smoking bans actually do a great deal of damage to a great many people, and some of those people are going to fight them, using their own resources. It seems that TC believe their own propaganda, that they're 'helping' people, when in fact they're trampling on millions of people. All over the world, ordinary people are becoming activists of one kind or other in the fight against TC. And, as with global warming, the principal forum is the blogosphere. But TC still has all its guns aimed at the tobacco companies, and they're all facing the wrong way to deal with this mounting global upsurge of grassroot resistance.

It seems that the problem in Holland was that Tobacco Control had a monopoly on the tobacco-related information supplied to the media and to the government. They could tell any lie they liked, and it would be swallowed whole. But in Holland the stranglehold of TC has been broken by the concerted resistance of the small bars and their private supporters, and the media and the government has begun to find out that there are people who contest many of TC's claims, and who can show that TC has been lying. The credibility of TC has been tarnished. They are no longer being believed quite as readily as they were before. And the news is gradually spreading from Holland to Belgium and England and Spain, where TC has a similar arm-lock on news.

Tobacco Control is beginning to face the same sort of problem as the IPCC and the high priesthood of the global warming movement. It's a wealthy institution (some $800 million of taxpayers' money from smokers helps fund TC's war on smokers), and it's used to fighting with other big, wealthy institutions - like tobacco companies. These ponderous, muscle-bound institutions have no idea what to do about the blogosphere on which thousands of little one-man (or one-woman) blogs and forums have started talking to each other, and increasingly ignore the established institutional authorities who used to have a monopoly on information.

Can Tobacco Control (and the global warming priesthood) adapt to the new situation, and mount a successful defence of their respective orthodoxies? Probably not. They're too big and unwieldy. And they're stuck in rigid, outdated mindsets. They're like conventional armies facing guerrilla armies in asymmetric warfare. They have big howitzers and tanks to fight other conventional armies, but these are no good against a dispersed guerrilla army that never engages in pitched battle, but instead constantly harasses the conventional army, and slowly wears it down.

I can think of one or two things that TC might do restore the situation. Because one obvious message is that... But, hey, wait a minute! Why the hell should I help these bastards out?

Tobacco Control is something to be destroyed.