Friday 23 October 2009

Dick Out And About: Home Smoking Ban On Its Way


Banning smoking in your own home was always on the agenda - but the assault begins this year. Official. (link)




13 comments:

banned said...

Their endgame is obvious, why else their tag-line on the bus shelter posters in kiddie crayon " You smoke, I smoke "

Smokefree England

Dick. you may have noticed some of us voting at

http://www.alcohol-focus-scotland.org.uk

on the related statement " Cheap alcohol is damaging health and society, I support minimum pricing. Yes/No "

The result has changed from 72% No to 95% No and it has been suggested that 'they' might delete the poll.
alcohol-focus-scotland.org.uk mention corporate and personal donations though they are probably mostly public funded. Is it possible to get an FOI request that they publish those results ? I have it saved as an MHTML document but have never got the hang of screenshots.

Man with Many Chins said...

Any attempt to enforce this in my home will be met with terminal force...period

Anonymous said...

"Alt-PrintScreen" will get you your screen shot, "Paste" will place into any standard imaging software as a .jpg or .bmp.

Save all evidence as history will be rewritten to suit the puppeteers hiding behind the curtain.

With smoking bans coming into living rooms next, I hope the donation button at Freedom2Choose starts getting hit a little more frequently than in the past and anyone still sleeping wakes up to smell the coffee cooking, before it's too late.

They'll use the private home smoking ban to clear the way for the in-home drinking ban, at-home fatty foods ban and if they keep at it long enough, venture deeper into the bathroom areas to designate the toilet paper next.

If people remain apathetic, don't want to speak up, or if lost for words, don't want to at least contribute a few dollars to Freedom2Choose, which is on the frontline not just against smoking bans but all these infringements of the state onto the personal state, then sadly enough, it will turn into the worst feared in time.

Junican said...

It is easy to see how a ban on smoking in the home where there are children can be engineered.
1. In Parliament, pass a law which is totally unenforceable but apply swinging fines on persons who are discovered to be disobeying the law.
2. Create a 'help-line' for children to telephone to report that a parent was smoking in their presence.
3. On receipt of a complaint from a child, send round to the house a team of policemen and social workers 12 strong. Arrest the parents and take the children into care.
4. Publicise the 'fact' that the house was a complete mess with 'faecies' (shit) all over the place.
5. Accuse the parents of appalling neglect, try them in a secret court and jail them.
6. Publicise these events and thereby terrify parents into submission.
7. Get tame professors to justify.
8. Etc, etc

At the end of the day, there is only one possible solution which can militate against the above scenario and that is that the people that we elect as our parliamentary representatives do what WE want them to do rather than what the party leaders want them to do.

Angry Exile said...

I'm not convinced that the endgame really is prohibition. I've always felt that is the paternalist bastards really gave a shit about everyone's health they'd simply ban tobacco, and I don't mean the not-really-a-ban ban they brought in but classify it alongside cannabis, E, etc. Unfortunately that really would make a lot of people give up and the rest would smoke tobacco quietly and illicitly. In either case the government gets not a penny of revenue from the trade - revenue to which they are far more addicted than any smoker is to nicotine - and all the profits go to the people who'd smuggle it in. I think the ideal scenario for these government pricks is that everyone who wishes to smoke is left with a small, isolated and exposed area of their own garden, perhaps marked out by a hula-hoop, in which they are 'free' to smoke, but with no actual reduction in net tax revenue from tobacco. At that point they'd wring their hands (after dropping the money bags and kicking them under the desk) and say that they've done all they possibly can but at the end of the day smoking is a personal choice and they can't infringe an individuual's 'freedom' (ha!) to smoke if that's what they want. Sure, there are some health nazis who want a total ban - Duncan Ballatyne, thinking of you here, you weak cunt - and there'll be some in the Department of Health too, but I suspect the collective wet dream of government is for smoking to be ridiculously difficult but for all the smokers to somehow keep feeding the Treasury's money habit.

Angry Exile said...

I should add that I think tobacco, cannabis, E, etc really should all be treated the same, but by downgrading the illegal stuff to where tobacco is now. Actually where tobacco was a few years ago.

Anonymous said...

I think that it's entirely enforceable by stealth. They need only change the message of the TV ads in which children speak to camera from "I'm worried you might die, Mummy" to "Mummy, when you smoke in the house I don't feel well", publish a few reports and wheel out Bannatyne to spout his rubbish and Bob's your uncle. It will be achieved voluntarily through guilt and the fear of society's opprobrium.

Jay

Dick Puddlecote said...

Schools will figure quite prominently in this IMO. The early smokefree homes schemes have all involved schoolkids being sent home with leaflets for their parents, armed with soundbites and scare stories carefully placed in their little heads by a kindly visiting tobacco controller.

If a law is brought in, it will be the schools who will be sniffing out for little signs that the parents have ben disobeying the law.

Banned: I've voted copiously ;-)

Anonymous said...

Banned,

They are apparently (surprise sur-fucking-prise) a "charity" so records of their income should be listed. However there is no sign of this "Alcohol Focus" on the Charity Commission website. They must either be shady and not actually a charity or, more likely, they are brand spanking new. Fortunate for the Government that some philanthropists happened to set it up just in time for their attacks on alcohol.

This really puts the lie to these things not being arms of the Government. I'm no fan of Quangoes believe me, but at least Quangoes have standards to guide them The fake charities ARE Quangoes but because they pretend to be independent they have no such guidelines to abaide by. I want the quangoes to go, but good God - the fake charities must go first!

Anonymous said...

Me again,

Ah,

they are on Fake Carities though and the Scottish Charities Register.

http://www.oscr.org.uk/CharityIndexDetails.aspx?id=SC009538

No exact figures here I still love the ASH Wales figure of 0.2% of money comes from donatons) but they are, apparenty, largely funded by Government. As if we didn't know.

banned said...

Anon 03:07 "Alt-PrintScreen will get you your screen shot"
Thank you, but where does it save to, where can I find it saved on my comp ?

Abo said...

@banned – This is what I usually do (I have a PC, not a Mac):

(1) Hit Ctrl + PrintScreen; this saves the screenshot to a clipboard.

(2) Open a blank Word document.

(3) Hit Ctrl + V to paste the contents of the clipboard into the document.

Then you can save the document anywhere you want.

banned said...

Thank you Abo, but I don't do Word.