CAUSING DIVISION BETWEEN NEIGHBOURS

ASH is at it again in ensuring huge social divisions, violence and trouble become mainstream in their desire to eradicate tobacco and criminalise its consumers.

They have come up with a plan to encourage hatred of law abiding residents who smoke. No doubt the idea is make smokers eventually homeless.

This is not about health nor is it about consideration. It is about creating a climate where law abiding smokers can be bullied by smokerphobic intolerant neighbours.

ASH can only achieve its dream of destroying the tobacco industry by attacking its customers and creating such social divisions - as if they haven't done enough damage to the social fabric of this country already.

Most smokers are so browbeaten, they will probably take the bullying and do as they are told in their own homes by neighbours who have no right to dictate how they live.

But others will no doubt give interferring neighbours a punch on the nose which is just what ASH wants and why it has decided to cause trouble in communitites that until now have happily lived side by side.

ASH is disgusting. The Govt might as well fund the BNP to make immigration policy. The outcome will be the same.

The Govt should hang it's head in shame at supporting a move aimed at dividing communities.

And if you think this won't affect you because you don't smoke, then just wait until your neighbour has the right to force their way into your home, to check your fridge, and ensure that you are eating properly and feeding your kids in line with Govt or fake charity diktat.

It's already started and at the rate these things move, give it less than five years after smoking is banned in people's own private homes and it will be a reality.

If you're sure you don't want that then do nothing to help smokers now and you will surely get it.

IT'S NOT ABOUT HEALTH

The video above is a demonstration of how 21st century technology can address the smoking issue. It is rather like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut because CS gas in that volume is not a wisp of tobacco smoke in a normal well ventilated room but you get the point.



We know that in truth not one person in reality has died of passive smoking and this public health scam is more about political ideology and hard cash than altruistic concern.



Academics and scientists paid to produce results in paid for studies, which the general public is not allowed to see until they have been cherry-picked peer reviewed, seem to have their own weird and wonderful way of making the evidence fit whatever new active or passive smoking scare story is touted on any given day.



And when legitimate industry exercises it's legal right and makes a reasonable request to ask what this so called evidence is based on, the academics begin to panic.



It's disgusting and totally unacceptable if Linda Bauld has personally received threatening calls but I'm sceptical about that too. The two standard deflections of criticism are always : "Big Tobacco money is behind it" or "Big tobacco has threatened me".



As Dick Puddlecote points out Bauld accuses blogs - which call for Govt to wake up to the real motives behind these studies and the damage and divisions over-regulation are doing to both the economy and society - of leading hate campaigns against her personally and she could also be referring to Tea and Cigarettes as I've written about her before and featured Imperial Tobacco's report.



However, this blog has never called for violence or threats to be made against anyone in the anti-smoker industry despite the fact that they don't bat an eyelid when such threats are made against smokers. Bauld might believe her own damaging propaganda but there is nothing in law yet to say that we must.



What this blog has called for is an independent review and health information which I still believe is desperately needed to redress the balance and put this issue back into a proper perspective.



Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you but some of the outrageous claims about smoking and smokers are simply ludicrous and appear to be designed to incite fear and loathing.



If it was really about care, about people not dying, why not accept that people will smoke and are able to make up their own minds about it. What they want is harm reduction. What is wrong with that? Why does it have to be death or quit and then serves you right?



I would have more respect for Bauld and her kind if they worked to make tobacco safer. The professionals should understand the warnings pumped out continually don't relate to smokers' real lives and some will not quit no matter what is said or done to them.



Instead of trying to rid the world of tobacco, why not invest in developing safe cigarettes for adults or children of the future who fall by their definition of the wayside. It could be done in the 21st century. In pushing that smoke free cause surely more lives have been lost than need be over the last 40 years.



Just imagine if Gio Batta Gori had been allowed to develop that safe cigarette in a programme that was sacrificed to push instead for the ideological smoke free future which has been enforced largely by coercion and has now evolved into downright bullying of a minority.



Govts must realise that in backing this ideology, without allowing consumers the right to smoke a legal product in peaceful association, they are slaughtering equality, civil liberties, freedom of association, private property rights, and a future based on a decent and tolerant society.



And other legitimate industries and their consumers are being targeted by the same professionals who wouldn't be out of place in the early Temperance Movement of last century.



It's time people woke up to what is happening and backed calls for decision making to be based on real science to the benefit and not detriment of people's lives.



UPDATE : It appears few are taking Bauld's whining seriously and there are moves from the tobacco industry to actually start fighting back on our behalf, and not before time. Read more over at Taking Liberties.

BIGOTRY TO RULE LINCOLN?

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.