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.

THERE IS NO SAFE LEVEL OF GOVT STUPIDITY

Alan Johnson, the creep who made smokerphobia compulsory during his time in Govt, was on BBC Question Time the other night and the very sight of him almost caused me to burst a blood vessel. He is so bad for health, they should ban him from all public places.

I could feel my fingernails gripping tighter into the arms of the settee as he opened his mouth and started talking. Those dodgy, used car salesman, slitty eyes narrowed further as he spewed forth his congratulations to the NuConservatives for implementing his policy on further denormalisation of tobacco consumers.

Yes, they'd have us stigmatised for the crime of buying a legal product we've enjoyed for decades by making it damn near impossible for us to buy it in the UK. First the tobacco display ban, next plain packaging after the charade of the fake consultation.

Meanwhile these monumental acts of stupidity, born from an ideologically obsessive healthist stance, have made smoking infinitely more dangerous, especially for the poor and the young, and deprived the UK treasury of some £4B in lost tax as this Panorama investigation shows.

Wittingly or unwittingly, these puritans are falling into the trap laid for them by smoker haters such as Action on Smoking and Health the charity founded to help smokers but has now become a greedy, far right wing lobby group that gobbles public money for its twisted cause to force smokers out of society by any means.

How much ASH costs the UK treasury from smokers who legally go abroad to avoid the fuss and tax must be equal to that of the cost of the black market.

What a great achievement but public opinion could not be twisted without the morality of Govt behind it - hence the smoking ban had to come first. Previous Govts have sensibly stayed out of the argument and let market forces decide.

It was only when Bigot Johnson's NuLabour weirdos swallowed hook, line and sinker every lie pushed down our throats during the first 10 years of their power. Arnott even took the piss out of her new paymasters. She explained how the con was pulled on a public that frankly didn't give a damn about smoking one way or the other :

It is essential that campaigners create the impression of inevitable success. Campaigning of this kind is literally a confidence trick: the appearance of confidence both creates confidence and demoralises the opposition. The week before the free vote we made sure the government got the message that we "knew" we were going to win and it would be better for them to be on the winning side.
(Deborah Arnott and Ian Willmore; July 2006)

No wonder both smoking and non smoking voters who fight against smokerphobia are flocking to the only party that speaks common sense on this issue. Even the NuGovt has to admit UKIP is best for the UK after swiping UKIP policy which it is claiming as its own.

Smokers who care about this cause have a duty to vote UKIP. The hate won't end unless Govt ends it and it seems that the NuTories are tainted with the same level of stupidity as NuLabour. You can expect years more pain under them.

And so it begins

A couple of years ago, I wrote “Might a future government seek to “persuade” brewers to reduce the strength of widely-available beers in the interest of public health?” And now it seems I’m being proven right. This week, Heineken are to announce that, as part of a “pact” with the government, they are “reducing the strength of “a leading brand” – thought to be the cider Strongbow – by 1pc alcohol by volume, from 5.3pc to 4.3pc as “just the start” of attempts to lower the alcoholic content of its drinks.”

Now, I can’t imagine the typical consumer of a 2 litre PET bottle of Strongbow being very happy with it being watered down to 4.3%, so there’s a market opportunity there for independent cidermakers, but would any of them have the guts to defy the anti-drink tide? It’s not hard to see the anti-drink lobby having a go at craft brewers and cidermakers for refusing to cut the strength of their products in line with the big boys.

And I will forecast now that, once the government see that introducing a higher level of beer duty at 7.5% ABV makes little difference to anything, they will steadily bring the threshold down so eventually it will be impossible to buy beer above 4.5% without paying punitive taxation on it, which will effectively lead to the disappearance of such beers from bars and off-licence shelves.