OFFENSIVE ADS

A couple of people have notified me of offensive anti-smoker ads that are appearing on this blog.

I kind of expected the usual anti-smoking sort when i decided to pimp the blog but didn't expect them to be nasty.

I just spotted one myself that read : "Ex-smokers smell better" and another sponsored by the EU "Ex-smokers are unstoppable."

I have managed to get rid of the side bar of ads but working out how to get rid of the box that appears under the top post may take me longer.#

Bear with me, normal service will resume asap.

UPDATE - uh oh - I did block the url but it keeps coming back. Not good, not good at all. It might have to result in drastic action...

... and while I'm on technical problems, can anyone tell me if they can see my images on this blog? Those of my own including those that are downloaded have all disappeared and been replaced by a white exclamation mark inside a black triangle.

Perhaps it's time to move blog space.

TOO NICE TO BLOG

I had a few things on my mind that I intended to blog about here and then the sun came out and pushed politics to the back of my mind.

Unlike Leg Iron, I'm not too hot. I'm loving it. Heat makes me active. I've been walking in the Lincolnshire Wolds. I saw the sun rise for the first time in ages yesterday, and the long overdue garden tidying up, pruning and weeding, was done.

Temperatures must have been between 28 - 30 and this evening was clear and warm. I looked up at the stars and just appreciated the power of it all. I reckon the most arrogant thing about some humans is their belief that they can control nature and prevent it's worst.

I heard Caroline Flint on Question Time last night, for example, banging on about how the idea of an 80mph speed limit on British roads needs careful thought because of the damaging environmental factors like burning more fuel.

Thinking that by changing lives in small ways can somehow collectively save the earth seems to me to be like a sacrifice made to the God of Destruction hoping that he will be gentle with us if this climate change apocalypse is inevitable. If Nature decides that it is, then there nothing that we mere mortals - however "expert" we are - can do about it.

This beautiful autumnal last sigh of the summer we saw too little of this year feels like a blessing from the Gods and I'm determined to make the most of it before Sunday when, I'm told, the rain, cold and grey skies return. There will be plenty of those days to come until next year so for now I'll just make the most of this while it lasts.

Light begins to dawn?

The Morning Advertiser reports that CAMRA has called upon the government to revise the official advice on daily alcohol units.

In its submission to the Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry into alcohol guidelines, the consumer organisation argued that the current guidelines fail to take into account the latest medical evidence.

CAMRA also claims that the Government is failing to adequately communicate the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption.

Is this a belated recognition that more has to be done to resist the tide of pseudo-scientific anti-alcohol claptrap, especially when the underlying message put across by the anti-drink lobby is increasingly moving towards “there is no safe level of alcohol”?

It is significant that CAMRA also said:

The guidelines seem to portray the recommended allowance as an absolute upper limit, which is not the case. There is, in fact, a wide gap between the safe recommended limit and the point where drinking will have a severe health impact.

That is one of the key problems with the current advice. The guidelines themselves are not bad advice as such, except in terms of needless over-caution, but it often seems to be assumed that exceeding them leads to falling off a cliff of risk. This is on a par with suggesting that only eating four portions of fruit and veg a day will inevitably lead to contracting scurvy.

It also results in skewed priorities in public policy, with health campaigns often giving the impression of trying to make responsible people drinking 30 or 40 units a week feel guilty, while in effect washing their hands of those drinking at genuinely dangerous levels of 100 units a week or more.

GOOGLE+ and FACEBOOK

Grrrrrrr - Facebook has suspended my account.

They tell me it's because I haven't entered a date of birth. I might have put in a false one which seemed a sensible move to avoid ID theft given that just about everything about me to clone my identity is on FB except for my real DoB just to confuse any would be hacker.

This happened immediately after I joined a group that called for all Facebookers to move to over to Google+ which I did last week anyway after FB's new template. I'm not against it and find it quite useful now with so many friends but I thought it would be interesting to see what Google+ has to offer.

Readers of this blog who are also friends with my "Patsy Nurse" suspended profile, please find me as "Normal Mum" and I hope once again to share my posts and blog pieces with you in a networking manner.

Or join Google+, look for Pat Nurse and find the Pirate.

A TALE OF TWO CHIIIILDREN

I heard two very different stories this week about kids who harass their smoker parents. One is quite shocking, so be prepared, but both say something about the myth of a smoking "addiction" and even more about the dangerous misleading messages on the Tobacco Control trademark graphic images.

The first concerned a child of seven years old. His mum is a lifelong smoker given that she's now in her late 20s and has smoked for more than half of her life. Her son was harassing her continually to let him try her cigarette. So much did he go on and keep going on about it that she relented thinking that one taste - bearing in mind how foul the antis say everyone thinks smoking is - would be enough to shut him up, turn him off, and steer him away from wanting to smoke once and for all.

The kid liked it. She immediately took her cig from him and all he has done since is harass her for another smoke which she hasn't given to him. Her fear is that he has become immediately addicted from just one puff. What other explanation could it be? she asked until I pointed out that if you give a child a bar of chocolate for the first time, what is the child's response thereafter? They want more because they like it very much. I think the kid just liked the taste of the tobacco. Whether the antis like it or not, it does taste nice and it is a pleasurable thing to enjoy.

I think the boy would have tried it anyway whether his mum allowed him to or not but probably at a later stage, behind her back, when he is more of an independent child. He probably does get just about enough pocket money, as I did as a kid, to buy from man with a bag which the Govt has given licence to sell very cheap, dangerous and contaminated tobacco on his estate because of its paranoia and over restriction of the legal and regulated product only available from responsible shopkeepers who do ask for ID.

The second story relates to a 16 year old daughter of another friend who is an on and off smoker depending on when she feels like it and recently, because of some personal stress, she took it up again to get her through a hard time.

She said she really enjoyed it but her daughter was a complete arse about it and she ended up having to smoke in secret to avoid the abuse. Her daughter even told her that she was "dirty smelly skeffer because that's what smokers are." The teenager then told her mum that if she didn't quit smoking, the kid was going to take up heroin because "it's just the same".

Her mother, like all smokers and sensible non-smokers knows that heroin is addictive and is not something you can choose to quit easily. It takes clinical intervention, a change of life, often with a user having to move away from their neighbourhood and usual routine to ensure a modicum of success. And heroin does kill young people. I've seen first hand the destruction it causes to families, communities, and the addicts themselves.

There is not one parent who has had to suffer a child with a heroin addiction who would even think of putting smoking in the same category. However, thanks to TC's trade mark graphic of a heroin needle implying that smoking and taking heroin is the same, kids are being dangerously misled.

After a week of taking it up again, and following the minute by minute harassment of her daughter, my friend quit - again very easily.

Her daughter, taught to hate smokers at school I suspect, may chose to take up heroin if it crosses her path because state health education has failed her. She will think that she can quit after a week just like her mum did with smoking. She would be tragically wrong. A week is long enough for the physical addiction to heroin to take control over every single aspect of someone's life down to when they go to sleep to when they wake up.

Smokers without tobacco will go without it. Heroin addicts without heroin will steal, sell their bodies and their soul for another fix. It is a wretched addiction and should not be minimised by this misleading comparison to smoking. The Govt should remove that image for the safety of our children in future.

I wonder how long it will be before the Govt encourages kids to snitch on their smoking parents as they do in Honduras. There the children can call the cops on parents who refuse to quit.

And the dickhead in the above linked post thinks that's a good idea. The world and its morals are upside down.

THIS SHOULD BE CRIMINAL.

I recall that before NuLabour's discriminatory social exclusion of smokers in 2007 no one on the street or in a pub, a cafe or a restaurant, ever really moaned or talked about a blanket smoking ban except for TV, biased agenda driven newspapers, Quangos and Govt.

Most people were happy that there was choice for both sides and few complained when Taxi-For-Hire minister Pat Hewitt initially announced a partial ban would come in. We didn't know then that she was lying to ensure there was no dissent and to pull the wool over the public's eyes to push custom towards her corporate masters and secure a very nice personal wealth package for herself.

She said there would be exemptions for "wet" pubs when the ban came in which would only affect those places where families go to eat and get pissed in front of their kids. Then she shafted everyone at the last, forced all smoker pubs out of business, dragged the economy down with it, and legislated for hate and intolerance for the first time in Europe since the 1930s.

We didn't know then that she was a bought and paid for corporate minister, like the other two creeps skillfully caricatured above by Mark Wadsworth and that she would impose any economically, as well as socially, damaging policy upon the unsuspecting British people as long as she was paid enough to do it. I mean, what did she care about Britain as long as she got rich?

Boots was just one corporate company that paid her £3,000 per day to look after its interests as health minister. I always thought that was a bit perverse bearing in the mind the spiteful smoking ban was allegedly imposed to "help" people quit, "protect" (now unemployed) pub workers, and of course to get everyone running to Boots to get their ever so expensive NRT patches, gum et al to become one of the chosen and not the despised.

I think this is so scandalous that I'd like to see Pat Hewitt criminally investigated for corruption like the other troughing MPs who got caught after they stole cash from the public purse with their imaginary expenses claims to pay for mortgages and other stuff they didn't have.

And when Hewitt was health minister, she also ripped off the NHS and ensured the service quango paid over the odds for technology it didn't get

Am I surprised that Pat Hewitt is now a consultant at said firm? Not at all. It seems entirely in keeping with her Machiavellian self interest nature. Will she be prosecuted for criminal behaviour which I believe it was? Probably not but she should be if the current Govt wants us to believe that it is honest, well meaning, respectable and responsible and it is turning its back on corruption.

Govt must not turn a blind eye to any minister who touts UK policy for personal cash and it must carry out further investigations on those who did in the past. They, as much as the bankers, brought this country to its knees.

CAN'T WAIT

I'm really jealous of Leg Iron and others who are ahead in home grown tobacco stock. Those flowers sound lovely.

I can't wait until my indoor crop starts to grow but it could still be some time yet as the first two tiny leaves only came up a couple of days ago and haven't grown any more since.

Patience has never has been one of my virtues but I'm trying and I'll learn more than one lesson during this home grown experiment.

How exciting this all is. In five years tobacco has gone from being just the thing I bought in the shop with my paper and other bits and pieces to becoming a full time hobby of great interest, driven by a passionate cause.

GOVT DEMANDS CIGARETTES MUST KILL

Quangos call them RIP Cigarettes (Reduced Ignition Propensity) because they're taking the piss but we refuse to acknowledge that spiteful tag and call them LIP Cigarettes (Lower Ignition Propensity) instead.

Legal consumers are being forced to buy a contaminated product.

I've never been a conspiracy theorist but the sheer stupidity of our so-called leaders, in whatever idiotic ministerial department has ordered us to smoke these so called fire safe cigarettes without consulting us, makes me think there must be more to this than meets the eye.

As the graphic shows above, the alleged "fire safe cigarettes" are not fire safe at all. And the number of house fires caused by a burning cigarette doesn't justify making a risky product far more lethal by the addition of a host of new and unnecessary chemicals.

Could it be that they have other reasons? Perhaps they just want to make cigarettes taste foul to further reduce a legal industry's adult consumers in the social engineering quest to destroy that industry.

Could it also be that that they so fed up that most smokers don't die young proving their health scares wrong that they must make the product as dangerous as they have been saying for generations that it is?

Let's not forget that before even one single study on the fraudulent Second Hand Smoke issue was done in 1970, America decided to create a smoke free world by the year 2000 and other countries jumped aboard the vision. Our leaders pandered to the smokerphobics who, whether they realised it or not, had evolved from white supremists and Temperance zealots.

The only study or biological test done by that time was painting tar on mice to give them cancer. I used to believe that one - the tobacco companies made themselves targets when they denied it and funded cover ups. They've paid dearly for that monumental bad response and the general public has believed every anti-smoker lie directed at them and their consumers ever since.

Many are familiar with how George Godber - who founded ASH Uk behind the then DoH's front group of surgeons - reluctantly agreed there was no evidence on passive smoking to say it caused any harm to anyone else - but the general public must be made to believe it did becausee that the was the only way this ideological smoke free world could be achieved.

Revolting new tests have recently been done where known tobacco carcinogens have been directly applied to removed human fetal lung tissue to bolster the imaginary but dangerous phobia of Third Hand Smoke because the myth of passive smoking hasn't worked to make the smoke-free dream a reality yet.

Over at the F2C blog, someone was appalled that the tobacco companies had not informed their consumers about this lethal new chemical addition to their product that the Govt demands they inhale. I suspect that the reason tobacco firms can't highlight this new threat is because they are not allowed to communicate with their customers by law. The image below summarises the regulatory rules they must adhere to when trying to sell their product.

My guess is that if smokers contact the makers of their favourite brand, much information will be given to enable a decision on whether to quit or switch from Govt contaminated cigarettes to something less harmful.

You might also want to write to your MP pointing out that the easiest way to make current cigarettes fire safe is to take out the chemical that doesn't exist in cigarette rolling papers. I have a very long letter to write to mine about LIP cigarettes and other punishments planned for smokers who won't quit.

Rumour has it that cigarette rolling papers are not effected by this new state interference. If they are effected, then I'll find ways to find my own source of paper to go with the natural tobacco I'm growing in hope of my own future, safe, supply.

Psst, wanna buy a pub?

The Pollyannas of the beer blogosphere are always telling us that, despite the gloomy headline numbers, there are still great prospects in the pub trade if you get the formula right. So here’s a golden opportunity for you – the Nag’s Head in the large south Cheshire village of Wheelock.

It’s an attractive freestanding pub by a road junction at the south end of the village, which appeared in the 2010 Good Beer Guide. Currently closed, but not yet boarded up. Maybe a bit tatty at the moment, but nothing a lick of paint couldn’t sort out. There’s no shortage of houses nearby, so plenty of potential walk-in trade. It’s a fairly prosperous part of the country – certainly no run-down urban wasteland – and not too far from Crewe which is a major centre of population. Surely a great chance to mix a cask-led local with a bit of destination dining trade, or maybe a showpiece tied house for a local micro-brewery. And currently available, freehold and completely free of tie, at a knock-down £125,000.

The estate agents’ fact sheet can be seen here.

In practice, for any budding pub entrepreneur, there are plenty of pubs on the market in promising enough locations at very reasonable prices. But there’s little evidence of people being prepared to put their money where their mouths are.

Let a thousand flowers bloom

My local branch of Tesco has recently started selling two highly-regarded US beers – Goose Island IPA and Brooklyn Lager. Now, I can’t really say that American craft beers are my thing – those titchy 355ml bottles don’t help, and Germany tends to be my import source of choice. But I’ve read good things about both of them in the blogosphere, and the examples I had of each were very enjoyable.

However, it raises the question of where the demand has come from for Tesco, not some exotic specialist retailer, to stock these beers. They’re both filtered and brewery-conditioned, so not something CAMRA would directly champion, and indeed I struggle to recall any mention of either in a CAMRA publication. Neither is there any Campaign for US Craft Beer trumpeting their virtues, nor any newspaper columnist banging the drum for them. And how many of Tesco’s customers read beer blogs? It’s a kind of subtle percolation of word-of-mouth that has brought these beers to a mainstream supermarket in a Northern industrial town.

There has been a lot of debate recently as to whether CAMRA should widen its remit to support non-real “craft” beers such as these and their British counterparts. In response to this, two new organisations have been set up to promote a more wide-ranging and inclusive approach to quality beer - Craft Beer UK, and CAMRGB, the Campaign for Really Good Beer. There’s a long comment thread about this on Zak Avery’s blog.

However, do these beers really need any formally constituted body to lobby for them? This change is happening anyway, as more and more of the beer market slips away to the off-trade, where CAMRA wields minimal influence, and non-real “quality” beers slowly but surely make more inroads in pubs and bars. The growth in the appreciation of wine in the UK over the years hasn’t needed any Campaign for Good Wine.

Earlier this year, I wrote here:

"The result is that there is a large and growing territory in which CAMRA and “beer enthusiasm in Britain” no longer overlap. This in future may well become a problem if potential recruits with a wide-ranging interest in beer are put off by the fact that the organisation ignores and indeed sometimes denigrates many of the brews they appreciate and enjoy drinking. In the beer landscape of twenty years hence, CAMRA could have become an irrelevance."

Now, I see no reason why CAMRA needs in any formal way to embrace “craft beer”, and indeed have argued in the past that such a move would be fraught with pitfalls. But, as well as championing “real ale”, it needs to be much more accommodating in being prepared to accept merit in beers that fall outside that remit. In practice, many (probably most) members already take that view. In the coming years it is going to be a major strategic challenge to come to terms with the concept of a landscape where a passion for “real ale” is only one of a number of overlapping “beer enthusiasms”. To say that Goose Island IPA is “processed muck”, or “not worth drinking”, or even “nothing to do with us, mate” is not a credible stance.

STEALING FROM LEGITIMATE SHOPPERS

It seems the UK Govt hates us so much it plans to steal from us and will break EU law - you know, the one that "we can't pick and chose which bits we like and which we don't" - to punish us for not paying for our own stigmatisation and denormalisation.

And in the spirit of not abiding by EU regulations on cross border shopping, which the British Govt ignores only if it involves hate crime against smokers, the ConDems plan to harass us if we smoke more than they believe we should.

The EU Directive 2008/118/EC states that there is no limit on the personal amounts of tobacco that can be brought over a member state's border but the British Govt is taking no notice. It has issued guidelines which fraudulently lead the general public to believe that 1kg of tobacco or 800 cigarettes is the maximum "By Law" that can legitimately be brought home.

Their Nazi storm troopers UKBA enforcement officers have been ordered to pick out and bully selected cross border personal shoppers who legally bring home more than that amount for personal use. They haven't got a clue how to stop the Chinese dangerous imports so they really need to be seen to be "doing something" about the loss to the Treasury of £2bn in lost revenue - the amount we are purposefully with-holding until someone starts to act on our behalf.

The British Govt also needs the smoker's cash to continue backing those who design false studies, make false allegations and think they are above the law when anyone wants to see how or if their fraud was manipulated.

It seems smokers are too dirty and foul to be considered as part of NuBritish society but our money is better than anyone else's when it comes to raking in the excruciating high tax on our product to pay for the mortgages of those public workers employed to encourage Smokerphobia.

Perhaps we need to shout this out as loud as possible because these creeps obviously just don't get it or they are naively listening to the wrong people.

Look - CleggyCameroids, you might just notice a pirate image to the left of this blog. In case you're partially sighted and not stupid, I'll put it in big words for you :

SMOKERS HAVE JOINED THE RESISTANCE. EMPTYING YOUR CORRUPT ANTI-SMOKER POCKETS OF OUR CASH IS ALL WE CAN DO TO MAKE YOU LISTEN AND YOU CANNOT SCARE US OFF WITH THREATS OF HARASSMENT!

WE WILL SMOKE IN SPITE OF YOU AND IF YOU STOP US BUYING ABROAD WE WILL GROW OUR OWN.

Uh-hum - sorry - my throat is rather hoarse now and I'll try to continue in a calmer fashion.

We've been buying elsewhere than from the state for a very long time now - almost five years in fact, ever since you declared war on us, and some of us already grow our own personal supply. We will not fund your armoury of weapons against us. We want to fund everyone's healthcare on the NHS like we have done ever since its inception and until you stop funding Big Pharma supported political lobby groups, we will not fund you.

Looking at passengers coming off ferries is not where your focus should be. It should be on the criminal gangs who are targeting poor smokers with a dangerous, unregulated product. But then organised and probably violent criminals are not quite as easy to bully as ordinary law abiding people, I suppose.

If the Govt really wanted to stop cross border shopping and the supply of a dangerous black market product to those who can't afford to go abroad the answer is simple, which is why it won't be taken up.

CleggyCameroid should reduce the price of tobacco and cigarettes to the same kind of levels as our European neighbours. They will find that the revenue to the Treasury will massively increase but it won't encourage one more young person to smoke who doesn't want to. Those who do choose to smoke after Govt attempts to brainwash them into a blind state of panic about smoking are not breaking the law

We are already over-legislated to ensure that children and those under age won't want to smoke but it is time to recognise smokers are a group, we are here, we have something to say and much to add to this debate and policy.

You must get off our backs, get some common sense and independence back into this issue, and let us help the state get back on it's once sound economic two feet.

Taste the difference

On a couple of blogs, I’ve made the comment that, thirty years ago, food in pubs was often more varied and innovative than it is now. This has been met with incredulity and people saying “from what I remember it was absolute rubbish”.

So it’s worth trying to explain what I mean. I ought to start with an important caveat – I freely admit to being a somewhat picky eater, with a number of irrational dislikes, so I don’t remotely claim that what I say about food is in any way authoritative or applicable to the general population. In particular I can’t stand the bad side of “traditional English” – the gristly meat, lumpy gravy, tasteless spuds and soggy veg.

In the early 80s I was living in a bedsit in Surrey where the facilities for cooking for myself were somewhat restricted, so I had a strong incentive to get out round the pubs to find something decent to eat. However, I would say my experiences then were not dramatically different from what I found in other parts of the country when on holiday or visiting friends and relatives. While Surrey has a prosperous Home Counties image at least back then there was no shortage of surprisingly down-to-earth pubs.

Pub food was more in its infancy, and to a large extent licensees were left to their own devices. Even in managed pubs, food was usually the licensee’s perk. The chain dining pub was virtually unknown. There was a huge disparity amongst what was on offer – some was dreadful, some was superb, and so going in new pubs could be a voyage of discovery. It could well be described as a wide variety of simple, informal food, more food for drinkers than food for a destination meal out.

You were much more likely to see substantial snacks alongside main meals, for example Cumberland sausage with crusty bread or smoked mackerel with bread and butter. The White Hart at Chobham did “Mushrooms Bistingo” – breaded mushrooms with garlic mayonnaise and bread – which I still remember now.

Quite a few pubs offered extensive cold buffets, something you never see nowadays. The one at the Bull’s Head in King’s Norton, Birmingham, particularly sticks in my mind. And you were much more likely to get a proper Ploughman’s than the cheese salad with a roll that often passes for it nowadays.

Back in those days, many pubs served pizzas, which at the time were in the vanguard of the reaction against old-fashioned stodge. I remember having excellent pizzas, for example, at the Horse & Groom in Merrow near Guildford. While often derided nowadays, pizzas still form the core of the menu at fashionable restaurant chains like Pizza Express and Ask. But when did you last see a pizza on the menu in a pub?

And some pubs made a speciality of particular national cuisines from around the world. I remember one featuring Austrian and Balkan dishes, and several with a Mexican-themed menu, again something you don’t see now. The modern focus on locally-sourced ingredients, while laudable in some ways, tends to restrict the range of dishes that is offered.

Thirty years ago, there was certainly less pub food around. Fewer pubs did food overall, and it was harder to find food in the evenings and Sundays. Some pub food was dire, although that’s still the case today. But there was more variety in terms of approach and styles of presentation, and more of a sense of pubs trying new and different things to see if they worked rather than just settling into a comfort zone. And, across the spectrum of pubs, I undoubtedly found it easier then than now to find food that appealed to me on a personal level.

WORLD LAUGHS AT UK

It's a damn good job that none of this lot even thought about dropping a biodegradable fag end or they could have accumulated a levy to the state of fines worth a total of £320. If they ignored the demand for money with menaces, then they could have ended up with fines of more than £300 each.

Instead British towns and cities prefer to wallow in the sort of filth pictured above and not a single litter fixed penalty is issued as their jobsworths stalk vulnerable women on their way to work instead.

And they reckon it's just because our kids are getting drunk that Britain has become the laughing stock of the world.

*Snigger*

Actually, I can think of far more reasons than that including chucking buckets of cash in times of severe adversity at junk science studies that reach Monty Python conclusions.

The world has sussed that the country is run by mentally challenged individuals who have the business sense of an alcoholic in a brewery.

A tavern in every town

Not so long ago, a comment was made on the CAMRA web forum that the Good Beer Guide will “increasingly give you the local equivalent of the Kelham Island Tavern. It will not simply tell you where to find good real ale.” The Kelham Island Tavern being a two-time winner of CAMRA’s National Pub of the Year award and a classic example of the multi-handpump specialist beer pub.

I was recently browsing through the entries in the 2012 edition for the county of Cheshire, an area I know reasonably well. It was very striking that a large majority of the pubs listed seemed to be ones where a range of rotating guest beers and “Locale” accreditation were regarded as important criteria. The tied houses of the family brewers – Robinson’s, Hydes, Holts, Lees and Samuel Smith’s – were conspicuous by their absence. Indeed there are only four listed out of the 80-odd pubs for the entire county, while, across the border, there are four out of eight in Stockport.

Well-known classics such as the Harrington Arms at Gawsworth and the Hawk at Haslington are nowhere to be found. Now, I wasn’t privy to the selection process and there may well be very good reasons such as change of licensee why these pubs and others like them were not included. But it does seem to reflect a somewhat one-eyed approach to pub selection where those that keep a limited range of beers consistently well do not get a look-in. Is there now a single Sam Smith’s pub with its solitary cask beer in the Guide, even though many of them are highly characterful establishments that keep that one beer in excellent nick? There isn’t even one in their home town of Tadcaster.

If I was visting a part of the country where family brewers still had a strong representation, such as Palmers in West Dorset, I would want the Good Beer Guide to tell me where I could find their beers in the best condition (which, to be fair, it does). I’d also expect it to point me to other pubs that provided a contrast, but if it majored on establishments offering Pedigree, Bombardier and London Pride I might feel a little short-changed. It should also be pointed out that many free houses settle on two or three beers that suit their regular customers and are not always changing them around.

Yes, the pub scene is changing, but as well as the multi-beer pubs, a guidebook concentrating on beer quality surely also needs to give due recognition to the more traditional two or three beer establishments that for long were the backbone of what CAMRA stood for.

I think locally it does, but I do get the impression that more and more branches are putting choice ahead of consistent quality when making their pub selections. The risk is that this approach will alienate the non-member buyers of the Guide, many of whom will be primarily looking for a good pint, combined with decent food and/or congenial surroundings, rather than the widest absolute choice of beer.

TAKING OUT PARTY POLITICS

I know that those who don't support UKIP but are working to make their preferred party of the LibLabCon open their eyes to the social and economic damage of lifestyle health control and propaganda, don't like it when I post back-slapping UKIP stuff on this blog.

So I've decided to take the party politics out of Tea and Cigarettes and have instead created a new blog for that purpose.

Politics will obviously stay as part of Tea and Cigarettes, and I'll still fairly or unfairly be heavily criticising politicians - especially the stupid, greedy or naive - but this blog will now be politically neutral.

Those of you who do support UKIP will find posts of interest over at UKIP Lincoln and Gainsborough so please feel free to visit, follow or share.

ALL PARENTS ARE CHILD ABUSERS - LCH

Readers of this blog should have guessed by now that I am no fan of the NuNHS which literally throws away millions of our cash on unworthy causes like lifestyle control while turning it's back and refusing to treat those who do actually pay very high taxes to ensure their healthcare in future when they need it.

I particularly despise Lincoln County Hospital because it killed my mum and so I was really worried when my new eight week old baby grandson had to go recently after an accident. I was right to be concerned.

Daughter No 3 is an excellent mum and the healthly, happy, contented nature of my (almost) five year old grand daughter is testament to the very good care that my daughter and her partner give as loving, dedicated parents who make mistakes just like any other human being.

In a moment's oversight, my daughter put the baby on a hard backed dining chair as she stood behind him with two hands holding him. She took one away for a second to reach for his bottle as she was about to feed him. In that second he fell off the chair, she couldn't catch him in time, and he fell and smacked his little head on a hard laminated floor.

It swelled up immediately and my daughter and her partner of seven years were distraught and besides themselves at what had happened. They already felt responsible enough. Within 15 minutes he was at hospital and that is where the real nightmare began.

The doctors and nurses at LCH were more concerned that she was a child abuser who had battered her baby than they were about his health. She was traumatised because of his injury and wracked with fear that this powerful organisation, grilling both parents and trying to confuse them about what happened, would take her children from her as they inferred this was a case for Social Services to investigate.

They kept her in for three days not because of my grandson's injury but because they wanted to watch and monitor her every move.

Even worse was that someone, somewhere in that hospital, has obviously made a mistake - or the hospital is simply lying and trying to confuse my daughter - when they claim falsely that she gave "three different stories as to how he came by his accident."

No! She gave one story, as recounted above, and she has never faltered from that. Why would the hospital tell such lies?

We are all aware of cases like Baby P and Maria Coldwell years earlier and in fact do support methods of trying to ensure that abused babies are protected.

My daughter despite the trauma and finger pointing even said she was glad that the hospital takes this stance because she never wants to see another tragedy happen to another baby who falls through the Social Services' net.

But why in ensuring protection for babies does the hospital have to take the stance that all parents are child abusers and all babies need protection from them without at least offering some sort of support for those they unjustly accuse?

Why do they either not be more discreet about their suspicions, so they so not add to the distress of already grieving and worried parents after such a dramatic accident, or at least provide proper advocacy services for such parents they treat so appallingly.

My grandson had a full body scan (for old injuries) which upset my daughter a lot because "old injuries" on one so very young implies that she beats him regularly. He also had a head scan to check on his injury. So far my daughter has received the results that show he has never received any other injury in his short life but she still waits for the results of - and is still worried about - the head injury that took him to hospital in the first place.

Instead of getting these results that she has waited anxiously for, she got instead a visit from social services to her home today again repeating the lying allegation that she told three stories about how her son fell.

Even worse, is that she was told that we all now face investigation. If they believe my daughter to be a child abuser, then they believe it must be because me and my other half, and her partner's mum and dad, must have abused them.

And let's not forget that the "abuse" which never happened but simply lies in the imagination and paranoia of hospital staff will now appear on some sort of written record to be used against my daughter's family in future.

My grandson is a boy. He is bound to come to some of rough and tumble injury in future as he grows up and if he does have another accident in childhood, then Social Services and the hospital will use this non-event as "evidence" that there must abuse in the family because Social Services have had to visit before.

Indeed, my baby grandson's dad as a young boy had an playtime accident that damaged his head. Back in those days parents got what they deserved and needed - care, compassion, sympathy, and reassurance. Lincoln County Hospital should be providing this first and foremost and if they have any doubts they should do the decent thing and provide an independent advocacy service such as Parentline or their own health visitor, who knows the family better than any on-shift medic, so that those like my daughter can at least have someone professional to speak up on their behalf and get answers to questions they need such as :"Will my child be OK?".

The truth is that the hospital and the NHS generally is picking on good parents because they can't get the bad ones. To help them live with their conscience on failing to stop the deaths of the baby P's, they pick on those who are easy to bully to make themselves feel better.

Bad parents who smack a child so hard they break it's skull will not take the child to hospital for fear of being exposed. The hospital and our social services can't do the job right so they do it badly and offensively.

While hospitals protect our children from us, who is protecting our children from them and our elderly from being killed by NHS neglect and those murdering medics who slip through their ever so selective net?

I think the NHS should get it's own house in order and put in place systems of interrogation of its own staff to ensure that no more babies die while in NHS care.

Meanwhile, I have telephoned the hospital to register a formal complaint. After ages of waiting to be put through to "complaints" I ended up speaking to an answering machine.

My view is the NHS does not care. It can only bully. It has become a vile organisation.

More where that came from

Some more interesting snippets from the BBPA Statistical Handbook...

2010 average price of a pint of beer in the UK off-trade:

Supermarkets: £1.02 (= £3.16 for 4x440ml)
Off-licences and convenience stores: £1.29 (= £4.00)
Average: £1.08 (= £3.35)

2010 average price of a pint of beer in the UK on-trade: £2.69

Average number of alcohol units consumed per week by social class:

Managerial and professional: 14.6
Intermediate: 13.4
Routine and manual: 10.6
Average: 12.5

(thus giving the lie to the common notion that the poor drink more)

Average strength of beer produced in the UK:

1900: 1054.9 OG
1910: 1053.0 OG
1918: 1030.6 OG (low point during WW1)
1920: 1042.6 OG
1930: 1042.5 OG
1940: 1038.5 OG
1946: 1032.6 OG (1940s low point, actually after the end of the war)
1950: 1037.0 OG
1960: 1037.4 OG
1970: 1036.9 OG
1980: 1037.3 OG
1990: 1037.7 OG
2000: 4.17% ABV
2010: 4.22% ABV

In fact, from 1950 to the end of the original gravity system in 1992, the average OG was always within the range 1036.9-1038.2, although this masked the long-term decline of mild and an offsetting reduction in the strength of bitter.

In 1900, there were 34.3 million barrels of beer produced, as opposed to 28.0 in 2010, at a considerably higher strength, and for a much smaller population.

WHAT AN INSULT!

New research shows kids want to be just like Fashion icon Dot Cotton

It's official. Young people are thick, stupid, and they have no idea how to make their own decisions - according to new research by yet another Smokerphobic funded University.

Bristol Uni found that young people today are too stupid to watch TV without copying the actors and actresses - no wonder they moan about Shameless and all those young people who will now follow in the footsteps of alcoholic druggie Frank Galllagher. They can't be saved. They can't help it. They can only behave and copy whatever they see on TV. The dickheads at Bristol say so and their word is holy law to the righteous believers.

Which is why the Uni - without any evidence at all - is calling for smoking to be banned in films. Personally, I'd like to see an intelligent study following child smokers and how and why they fell into it - especially those from previous generations like ours - the ones who today are being wiped from culture, history, and society and thrown to the dogs as adults.

If such a life real study could be filmed in Communist Britain for sure the real idiots, who masquerade as somehow better than the rest of us, will find that kids don't smoke because they've seen some grown up smoking on TV or in the cinema - if only today's kids could afford to go.

Crikey - I'm guessing they'll be banning Dot Cotton from smoking in Eastenders soon - a tragedy as the 88 year old actress is a lifelong, generational and cultural smoker, but somehow I doubt that she represents either a sex or fashion icon to youth - even though she has that cultural siren in her mouth - a fag.

If young people really want to model themselves on a pensioner just because she smokes, then there is going to be trend of gaberdine-bedecked, curly haired, youngsters visiting beauticians that can implant wrinkles rather than take them away

Can these so called academics really be so naive and so - well - thick - but to hide this obvious lack of intellect, they manipulate research to make young people look stupid instead to fit their propaganda aims.

If I was a young person, I'd be fuming about this piece of trash that only bigots and the narrow minded allow to pass for "research".

UPDATE 9pm : I'm in shock and may need a medic. I actually agree with the Daily Mail:

But this is not just about whether or not public health could be improved or the quality of film making impeded.
This is about liberty and truth. When images of Churchill or Brunel smoking are airbrushed there is an instinctive revulsion that evidence should be falsified in our country...But thought control is the wrong way to pursue tobacco control.

Apart from this bit of pontificating :"I don't smoke and I prefer it if others don't" , I thought it was a fair piece.

HIDING FROM PUBLIC SCRUTINY

Image from HERE

It looks like the Aussie Tobacco Control's Globalink is losing some funding and has to stand to stand on it's own two networking feet, according to its Spiritual leaders head people in a memo to the faithful.

It says : "Over the past months we have all been alerted to the fact that Globalink will require new funding and administration in order to continue in 2012.

The dinosaur Puritans at Tobacco Control have realised that Facebook is a great, cheap, 21st Century tool for reaching mass audiences. However, it's open public nature is alien to the culture of secrecy employed by those at TC and its front groups like Globalink. They created a closed group to anyone but bigots and the intolerant.

They say : "Unlike Globalink, this group has no funding, no management committee, no constitution, no appeals mechanism for those we don’t allow to join and those we may have to exclude."

By "exclude", I assume they mean smokers but they don't mention us by name because they refuse to believe that we are a public grass roots, disorganised group and not paid, organised "moles" of Big Tobacco.

We welcome anyone working toward tobacco control goals. We don’t welcome anyone with tobacco industry ties and those who are regularly offensive

By "offensive" I assume they mean the angry consumers of a legal product who question their very questionable propaganda. Only by debate can we find out how such sanctimonious conclusions are reached and used as ammunition to impose further restrictions in society and divisions in our families and communities.

On the positive side, I guess they won't be spending much time in debate because of the hours they must have to waste in checking and re-checking applicants to their select Facebook club.

"We will do all we can to ensure only those with known track records or employment in tobacco control are admitted to the site. But we know from tobacco industry documents that Globalink has long been infiltrated and that people forward Globalink content to non‐members."

Excellent. At least the tobacco companies are doing something for their consumers when Tobacco Control's Globalink aims to plan further stigmatisation and denormalisation programmes for law abiding people whose only crime is that they won't do as Tobacco Control dictates.

The leaked memo ** shows ultimate hypocrisy within TC too. They slander smokers as people who are continually off ill, as people skiving for fag breaks, and yet they pour scorn on employers who don't let their tobacco control smokerphobic employees skive on FB.

Q "My employer won’t let me look at Facebook at work, so this group is a really terrible idea.

A Ok, we understand that some of you have employers who think you will waste the day playing online games and gazing at your friend’s baby photos unless your internet use is monitored or restricted."

I think that by hiding behind this veil of secrecy, and displaying its double standards, Tobacco Control is showing us how weak it really is.

** Disclaimer ** I picked up the Pdf leaked memo (without further comment) from Facebook where it was floating about. It was not given to me by anyone connected to the tobacco industry. I don't care where it came from. I'm glad I saw it.

We are all gastro now

It was reported recently that the Good Food Guide had banished the term “gastropub”. However, this is not because there has been a swing back to a wet-led model, but because the upmarket dining pub has become so commonplace that it no longer needs a special term to distinguish it. In the more prosperous parts of the country, like large swathes of Cheshire, it’s getting increasingly difficult to find any other kind of pub. In a sense “we are all gastropubs now”.

So, in view of this so-called pub food revolution, I thought I would ask blog readers how often they ate out in pubs in their daily lives when not on holiday. The results didn’t really bear out the received wisdom, with 65% replying either “very occasionally” or “never”, and only 13% saying they did it at least weekly. Even accepting that there is a proportion of smoking ban refuseniks, these results certainly don’t show a huge enthusiasm for eating in pubs from a population who typically probably visit pubs more than average.

Now, I have to admit that in some respects I am a rather picky eater, so I am reluctant to pontificate on the general subject of food, whether in pubs or elsewhere. But it has to be said that a lot of pub food is extremely dull and uninspiring, and if you want something interesting and imaginative you are far more likely to find it in a restaurant or a bistro/wine bar type establishment.

This perhaps merits a more detailed post, but it is certainly my recollection that, thirty years ago, there was much more variety and experimentation in pub food than there is now. So often today, pub food has settled down to a predictable, standardised menu, whether exemplified by the steak and kidney pie in the family dining outlet or the braised lamb shank in the would-be gastropub.

There’s also a posting on this subject on Martyn Cornell’s Zythophile blog.

THE B'STARDS

My tobacco seeds have arrived and I wasted no time in planting them.

I took Leg Iron's advice and put the first batch in a huge pot inside the house. The seeds are so tiny it is impossible to handle them individually but I reckon about four or five got scattered.

Checking them each day for any growth is a bit like watching paint dry but they've only been in for three days and so I should be more patient. I don't expect to see any sign of life for at least 10 days after planting. However, I put another few in pellets in a germinating tray today to see if I can make them grow any quicker.

I am a bit behind most people who are already thinking about harvesting and curing what they have grown. the Bolton Smoker's Club has more on that including a link to the video below.



I noted a comment over on the BSC about paying tax on home grown tobacco and so I thought I'd better check out the law. In the 1600s the King hated tobacco so much he put tax up by 4000 percent which resulted in the peasants growing their own. So much was lost to the Treasury that the King had to have a rethink. He lowered the tax and the cash poured in once more.

I thought he might have wanted to close the loophole and left us with an olde law that might be the basis of making home grown tobacco illegal today but it seems not.

Neither our Monarch nor our Govt make our laws today but rather the EU which decided in 1992 that all EU citizens should pay duty on what they produce because of the unelected B'stards from smokerphobic lobby groups.

Of course we only have to start coughing up and paying the smokerphobics indirectly through our tax if we produce a successful crop that can actually be processed and smoked. As I'm still waiting for my first growth, I'll reserve judgement on that for now.

Be careful what you wish for

I have made a few posts recently about the reduced rate of duty for beers of 2.8% ABV or below which is being introduced from October 1st. Several commenters have said this concession would be much more meaningful if extended to beers of 3.5%, and indeed CAMRA have argued for this.

That’s not going to happen because of the potential loss of revenue. However, such a move could prove to be a double-edged sword. I'm old enough to remember when there was very little draught beer available in the UK (or any kind of beer really) over about OG 1040, so I can imagine how a 3.5% cut-off point might be tolerable. In the days when it was brewed at Henley, the 3.4% Brakspear's Bitter was one of my favourite beers, and there were plenty of other flavoursome beers at that strength.

A pint at 3.5% would save 29p in duty and VAT over one at 4%, which would translate to at least 50p at the bar. That would make the 4% category completely unviable. Inevitably, the big hitters like Carling, John Smith’s and Guinness would be brought down to that level, along with all the well-known cask “ordinary bitters”.

It could easily end up imposing a ceiling on the strength of mainstream beers, with only a small number of speciality products available at higher strengths. It could even effectively kill off draught beer at a higher strength – the 5% pint would incur a surcharge of 41p over the 3.5% one, and to choose to buy one in the pub would brand you as a bit of a pisshead.

Of course the absolute level of duty is too high, but in principle the current British beer duty system that directly links the level of duty to the amount of alcohol is a sensible one. Introducing arbitrary cut-off points for higher tiers of duty will inevitably distort the market and may well end up having undesirable and unintended consequences.

On the other hand, as Cooking Lager argues, the wide range of beer strengths may serve to sow confusion in consumers’ minds. Spirits are effectively all either 40% or 37.5% (which is the difference between a 4% beer and a 3.75% beer, i.e. something you wouldn’t really notice), and the overall range in table wine strengths is no more than the difference between a 4% and a 5% beer. You don’t hear constant calls for the strength of spirits or wine to be reduced, and maybe if beer was all the same modest strength it would to some extent insulate the category from criticism. Not an argument I really agree with, but an interesting point nonetheless.

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.

Figuring it out

I was recently kindly sent a complimentary copy of the British Beer & Pub Association’s annual Statistical Handbook. This may come across as dry reading, but it contains a wealth of information about the brewing industry and the overall drinks market.

It shows that in 2010, the UK had the second highest beer and wine duties in the EU (only Finland being ahead) and the fourth highest spirits duties. UK per capita alcohol consumption was well below the EU median level, and less than France, Germany or Spain. But you’d never imagine that if you listened to Don Shenker and Sir Ian Gilmore.

No doubt my friend Cooking Lager will be pleased by the breakdown of the relative market share of ale and stout vs lager:

1970: Ale and stout: 98.0; Lager:   2.0
1980: Ale and stout: 69.3; Lager: 30.7
1990: Ale and stout: 48.6; Lager: 51.4
2000: Ale and stout: 36.4; Lager: 63.6
2010: Ale and stout: 24.6; Lager: 75.4

One of the most telling tables is the one breaking down on-trade draught beer sales by category, from which I have created the extract shown below.

From 1980 to 2010, cask ale lost over three-quarters of its volume, and keg ale and stout over four-fifths. Even lager, although greatly increasing its market share, lost volume in absolute terms over that period.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER OR FIRST STEP BACK?

The announcement by the Govt's bully unit that it will take the jackboot off E-cigs is news to be welcomed but also greeted with concern by those of us who enjoy a traditional smoke.

It's a sensible harm reduction move for those who don't want to quit the cultural act of smoking but do want to give up natural tobacco. However, my problem is a cynical fear that E-cigs will be used as a further "divide and conquer" weapon in the war on big Tobacco and its consumers who don't want to switch over to any form of NRT.

I'm also a little ill at ease that the Govt is backing one private industry supplier of nicotine over another. It feels dirty.

E-cigs made widely and cheaply available and pushed as "a responsible alternative" to smoking are bound to be effective in forcing tobacco smokers further down into a minority. And then what next?

I know there are vapers out there standing firmly in our defence but there are also some who do see themselves as superior to tobacco smokers because they have taken that "responsible" harm reduction option while "selfish" smokers still stick to the "dirty, filthy habit" that they have wriggled free of.

I agree with DP that there is little point in making E-cigs "acceptable" if there is no where they can be "acceptably" used in public. Used indoors could lead to smokers being welcomed back inside too and I'd hope that decisions taken on where E-cigs can be used will also include where tobacco products can be used.

The trouble is, of course, both products won't be treated equally and neither will the respective companies' consumers. Destruction of the tobacco industry is continuing, and loons are still trying to impose outdoor bans if others fail.

If the Govt encourages greater public respect and tolerance for vapers while continuing the denormalisation and exclusion of smokers, well, I'm sure I for one would feel even more marginalised. The news today from the Bully Unit has certainly made me feel a step more stigmatised.

WOO-HOO

I made the list again - or rather Tea and Cigarettes did - and so did some of my favouite bloggers including Obnoxio and the Angry Exile, and as I predicted Dick Puddlecote made the top five.

Leg Iron - who should make blogger of the year for the times he's appeared high up in every list - was also in there.

Well done you lot! (and me) and thanks for your votes.

GOOD DRUGS BAD DRUGS

Image from HERE

When are "bad" drugs "good"? When Big Pharma pushes them rather than illegal cartel drug barons or the legal tobacco industry.

We know that the Pharmaceutical industry is corrupt and doesn't give a flying fig about health. It's primary and only concern is profit and if children in the Third World are too poor to pay for life saving drugs then Big P simply won't provide them.

That's why every single anti-smoker organisation in the UK that is snuggled up in bed with Big P - including ASH - and several UK universities are not in it for health reasons but for cash and jobs.


Early medical "researchers"

Even the hallowed and saintly Stirling University admits it is dependent on Big P because most of its students now have careers in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and agricultural industries.

I don't see how they are much better than those who work in the tobacco industry myself and certainly their morals at taking this dirty money are questionable.

Of course tobacco is a natural medicinal herb but Big P and its academic lackeys malign it as a drug to slander tobacco consumers as addicts and push custom towards Big P. They cover the lie with Frankenstein science because they cannot openly admit after years of untruths that tobacco does indeed contain therapeutic qualities.

I know that I'd rather rely on nature than an unnatural manipulation of nature but each to his or her own - if only we were allowed to make our lifestyle choices without fear or favour.

It does suit Big P and its servants scientists to create a nation of hypochondriacs and phobics to keep the huge profits rolling in but I honestly and sincerely doubt that their motives are altruistic or based on any real concern about health - just as they were not in the days when snake oil salesmen pushed their useles wares.

I'd like to think that Govt is finally waking up to the con bearing in mind that Nanny Milton is trying hard to distance herself from ASH but I simply don't believe her.

ASH is not a grass roots organisation and never has been. It was set up by Govt and is a Govt quango in reality that masquerades as a "charity" so we are really not that easily fooled Ms Milton.

The only way that you can prove to us that you are not smokerphobic or biased in running the DoH is to stop all funding to the anti-smoker industry and lay off the Tobacco Industry, its law abiding consumers, and all the associated businesses with it - including the small vending machine salesmen, paid less than researchers at Stirling, now out of work and on the dole thanks to your Govt's stupidity in following the damaging economic policies of your predecessors in Labour.

Tobacco should be regulated and is. Over regulation in favour of its direct competitors at Big Pharma is obscene and would be unlawful if such methods of putting legal industry out of business was directed at any other lawful product.

UPDATE : I just saw this and wonder how on earth the author expects us to believe it and how he can state, with a straight face, that :

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.

Sorry, but here is direct evidence of an alleged "scientist" who depends on his own personal fortune by harassing smokers and propagating untruths.

If this man really "cared" about smokers damaging their health then he would be active in his cause for free like just about every single pro-choice warrior. He's obviously in it for the money. Don't believe a word.

The lite touch

The Morning Advertiser reports that, in response to the duty cut on beers of 2.8% and below from 1 October, local brewer J. W. Lees are launching two new 2.8% keg beers, a lager called Golden Lite and a smooth beer called Greengate Lite. This reflects what I have said before, that insofar as this measure has any effect, it will be in the keg and canned beer sectors. The weaker a cask beer is, the shorter its shelf life once the cask is broached, and I simply can’t see 2.8% real ales having sufficient turnover. So much for the “People’s Pint”.

And I expect the big boys are waiting in the wings with the likes of Carling Lite and John Smith’s Extra Lite which, if the category takes off at all, will come to dominate it.

STILL THE BLIND CAN'T SEE

Image from HERE

Interesting news today from the Telegraph which reports how the Labour Party's membership has fallen to the same levels it had in 1900 when it began.

It's interesting to note that the biggest exodus of former party members was in 2007 - I wonder what could have happened in that year to turn off so many core supporters?

Total Labour membership fell by nearly 6,000 during 2007, the year Gordon Brown replaced Mr Blair as leader. It is believed to have gone on falling during the first half of this year too.

I just wish that these so called political commentators would wake up to the impact of the smoking ban on their support. To be honest, I had high hopes when Brown came along because he wasn't Tony Bliar and I had hoped he would be what he said he would be - honest and without spin - but then that was just spin wasn't it.

The smoking ban was the single cause that turned me against my father and grandfather's party of choice and heaped upon that grievance was the fact that Labour would just not listen to the concerns of smokers.

And it looks like support is draining away from the Tories too who are blindly following Labour's anti-smoker policies.

I wonder where that lost support from both parties is going. Certainly not to the irrelevant Limp Dumps who have let just about everybody down.

There really are none so blind as those who can't see and they will suffer for it.

TYPICAL DAVE IN THE HOUSE OF LOONS

Via Anna Racoon's blog it seems that when a serious question is asked of David Cameron by one of his MPs, he just laughs it off and diverts the answer.

As much as I dislike Nadine Dorries, because of her smokerphobic views and support for the demise of the pub because she can't be arsed to wash her clothes anymore now that smokers are banned, I do think she asked a relevant question.

The LimpDumps are in the minority and shouldn't be dictating policy. No one voted for that. They should be there in an advisory capacity and that's all. Decisions should be Dave's but he's either too left wing or too disinterested to care how much influence the Dumps have on policy.

And I'm sorry but if the tax payers are funding the privileged lifestyles of these so called representatives of ours, then I would expect them to behave a little more dignified when sitting in Parlt.

Jeering cajoling, heckling, and making jokes at the expense of others just shows them all up as a bunch of yobs.

My guess is that Cameron doesn't care about policy because he doesn't make it and neither does the Limp Dumps. That is down to Herman Van Rompouy and his bought and paid for allies in the EU like Baroness Ashton who gets paid far too much to screw Britain over and by pass our elected Govt in favour of her mates in the exclusive EU select club.

BUTT OUT COMRADE STIRLING

It's comforting to see that political commentators in the main stream are beginning to see the wealthy self interest academics at Stirling University for what they are - smokerphobics who think they are above the law.

Donna Rachel Edmonds from the Commentator condemns the Uni's cynical use of Facebook to promote its own prejudices and gain support for its tobacco control dept's lies and I agree. This tactic, signed by many TC jobsworths rather than the general public, aims to give the appearance of support for the uni to hide its jiggery pokery manipulations which have been designed to give the desired result. Academics could simply be making it up for all we know because who or what can challenge their so called "evidence" if it is not there for all to see?

Edmunds says :

The University makes no bones about it's anti-smoking bias and credentials. On the 'About Us' web page of it's Centre for Tobacco Control Research, it states as its aims as:

To-Develop and evaluate interventions designed to prevent smoking uptake and encourage cessation.

Investigate the processes and effects of the tobacco industry's marketing activities, and on the basis of this undertaking, determine the most effective ways to counter them.

Evaluate specific tobacco control policies and identify those that successfully change smoking behaviour

In other words, it is declaring open hostility to a lawful, legitimate business with a client base of one quarter of this country's population. It has now broken the law in attempting to thwart that business from exercising it's legal right to examine any evidence that might affect it's trade; and it goes further still - in attempting to gain public support for that illegal act, furthering it's intention not to uphold the law.

If people do not like the product that Philip Morris manufactures, they are perfectly able to simply not buy the product. Indeed, various Government taxes and interventions have positively encouraged them in this course of action already. Therefore we must assume that the smoking population are happy with the product, know the risks (which are, of course, stated clearly on the packets), and have legitimate reasons for choosing to smoke. That some people do not agree with their choice is no reason to start treating the law as a pick'n'mix counter, applying it only to groups we as a society are deemed to 'like'.

Stirling University needs to stop messing around and release the data to PMI immediately.

Indeed. They should be forced to come clean now. They deserve no protection, special measures or backing in law that every other single public body must adhere to and why they think they should be exempt is beyond me.

I sincerely doubt their intellect and certainly their impartiality on this issue. Youths and cigarette packaging is something I have been looking at among young people myself and I've found that more often than not it is price and brand that determines what young people buy and not the way the packet looks.

At conference last week, I noted that one Young Independence member had a nifty sliding Silk Cut packet. Very sleek, I thought and said so.

"Cool," I said. "Is that why you bought them?"

"No, not at all and not so cool either," he replied. "If you have them the wrong way round when you open it, the cigs all fall on the floor and it's not cool when you're scrambling to pick them all up."

I think it is absolutely criminal that Tobacco Control is stealing a legal industry's trade mark and forcing them to package their goods in plain wrapping with the TC's trade mark graphic images. Others in private legal business should beware. If they can strip tobacco companies of their own brand then what next?

Anything at all because these self-interest phobics have set a precedent based on nothing more than "we say so and no one should be able to see how we came to the conclusioin that we did."

This is not about health or stopping young people from smoking. This is about Puritanism, The NuTemperance Movement and a hatred of an unpopular industry and its consumers.

If tax payers' cash is funding this jiggery pokery, then we have every right to see how it was done. Stirling University should stop complaining and abide by the law like they expect every single smoker to do in every single public place and every single tobacco company to do in respect of the many over regulations of the induistry.

My view is if they don't hand over that information as ordered then they should be prosecuted.