Monday 2 February 2015

The voluntary ban

From The Guardian...

Bristol squares aim to stub out cigarettes with voluntary outdoor smoking ban

Two busy harbourside squares are to become the UK’s first major outdoor spaces to become smoking-free zones from Monday.

Millennium Square and Anchor Square in Bristol, which are popular family destinations and often host cultural events, are to be turned into voluntary cigarette-, cigar- and pipe-free areas.
No formal, enforceable ban will be imposed but 11 signs dotted around the squares will ask smokers not to light up and thank people for helping “keep Bristol smoke-free, healthy and clean”

Listen, you cretins, there's no such thing as a "voluntary ban". It's Orwellian gobbledegook. By their very nature, bans require submission, enforcement and punishment. Calling a ban voluntary makes about as much sense as calling an authoritarian a liberal.

Okay, that's a bad example, but you'd think tobacco control fanatics, of all people, would know what a ban is. Every policy they ever lobby for involves one.

It comes as no surprise to find that this little slice of health fascism is the brainchild of the 100 per cent taxpayer-funded front group Smokefree SouthWest.

Kate Knight, deputy director of the group, which is commissioned by 15 public health teams across the region, said the scheme would be “self-policing”.

Ha ha! Good luck with that. I hope the people of Bristol make a point of chain-smoking in these areas as soon as they find out that this pseudo-prohibition has been sprung on them.

Knight accepted that it would inconvenience some customers of the bars and restaurants in the squares. “But it only takes them about 20 seconds to walk out of the squares. We don’t want to make the lives of smokers hell.”

Really? In that case, Kate, you have about as much understanding of the consequences of your actions as you do of the meaning of words.

You go ahead and have your pretend ban, the people of Bristol can pretend to obey it, and we'll pretend you're not a parasitic, hateful, puritanical, freedom-hating arm of the government. 

5 comments:

Christopher Snowdon said...

Outdoor smoking bans are a travesty. They are direct affront to liberty. They are about social control not health since there is absolutely no health risk to bystanders outdoors (there actually is virtually none indoors either but that's another story). Outdoor bans are intended to denormalize smoking, actually the marginalize smokers and cause societal fragmentation and division. Outdoor smoking bans need to be soundly rejected; indoor bans need to be amended.

Christopher Snowdon said...

Knight accepted that it would inconvenience some customers of the bars
and restaurants in the squares. “But it only takes them about 20 seconds
to walk out of the squares. We don’t want to make the lives of smokers
hell.”


"Inconvenience"?

"Only take them about 20 seconds"?

"...don’t want to make the lives of smokers
hell."?

Does this woman live on the same planet as the rest of us? Ye Gods, words fail me...

Christopher Snowdon said...

This being Bristol, anywhere people are smoking cigarettes, there'll also be someone smoking weed, so this might be a stealthy way to cut down on that.

Christopher Snowdon said...

Before enacting this ban, it would be interesting for the council to first carry out air quality surveys around the proposed ban sites to establish a before and after equation so as to measure the success (or not) of this latest imposition on legal smokers.

Christopher Snowdon said...

It has become blindingly obvious to me that women should not be allowed to participate in public life. Given they're never the ones called upon to defend or retain our freedoms, it makes no sense in giving them carte blanch to take them away. Which they inevitably do, trying to run others' lives as they would their kindergartens and households. Which means of course, we're going to have to rescind their right to vote. In 1918, Britain ruled the world, had an empire on which the sun never set. After giving the girlies the vote in that year, it took less than 30 years to reduce the greatest empire the world had known to a European rubble. Thank you.