The Great Smoking Ban Swindle
Sovereign | 24.06.2007 00:55
On July 1st the UK wide smoking ban comes into force. Bearing what now must be all the hallmarks of the Labour government this new law is poorly planned, based on lies and will have a dramatic effect on the civil liberties of the nation.
The ban has been publicly justified by five main reasons, none of which are strictly speaking true;
The first reason given is that smoking kills. Broadly speaking this is of course true however the argument fails to mention that every single one of you is going to die and on average a smoker only dies seven years younger then a non-smoker. In effect this is the difference between dying at 79 rather and dying at 86. Contrary to popular belief you will not spend these extra years playing with your grandkids, travelling the world or writing that novel you always wanted too. You will instead spend them confined to your home, alone and in pain.
The second reason given is that the NHS cannot afford to treat smoking related diseases. This is utterly untrue. In 2005 the treatment of smoking related diseases cost the NHS £1.5bn which admittedly sounds like a lot until you realise that the total NHS budget for the same period was £90bn which means that treating smoking related diseases only accounted for around 1/90th of the NHS budget.
Over the same period the excise duty and VAT from the sale of Tobacco products contributed £10bn or 1/9th of the total NHS budget. To put it more simply every smoker has not only paid in full fro their treatment they have also paid for the treatment of eight non-smokers.
On top of that you have the fact that over their lifetime a non-smoker will cost the NHS $6000 more then a smoker and that figure doesn’t even include the increased social care cost associated with old age.
The third argument given is that the ban will empower people to rid themselves of an addiction that is controlling their lives. This is again untrue because smoking causes the brain to overproduce a chemical called dopamine (the so called pleasure hormone). This dopamine flood causes the receptor sites to shut down to avoid the person to become overwhelmed with pleasure. The closure and reduction of these pleasure receptors is permanent and irreversible meaning that when someone gives up smoking they do not free them themselves of the addiction they merely learn to modify their behaviour to cope without this pleasure. This is why Allan Carr lied to his readers by telling them that smoking is a totally negative pleasure which they don’t really enjoy and why ex-smokers such as John Reid and Gordon Brown seem to be always trying to convince us that they were right to give up smoking.
The fourth argument for the ban is that it will in someway act as a form of resistance against the “evil tobacco companies”. If the fact that these incredibly rich companies who enjoy the support of more voters then any political party in the UK have not lifted a finger to stop this ban has not convinced you that this argument is a nonsense allow me to explain further. Since the 1960’s the main and very effective tactic of the anti-smoking lobby has been something called “de-cooling” this basically means employing propaganda such as the lie that Steve McQueen died of lung cancer in order to make smoking appear less cool and less desirable. The first thing the ban will do is make smoking an act of rebellion again. It will also produce a clear physical and visual division between the smokers and the non-smokers and this division will not serve the anti-smoking cause well because the smoking sections of pubs have traditionally been a lot more fun then the non-smoking sections.
Also any restriction on a market place cuts competition in that market allowing the big four tobacco companies that already operate in that market to consolidate their costs and boosts their profits.
The fifth argument for the ban and the one which is used specifically to ban smoking in pubs is that it will protect bar staff who are being forced to work in a smoky environment by the nasty capitalist system. I have to say that this is again nonsense because in my extensive experience bar work is without doubt the most difficult area of the service sector to get into because earning your money getting chatted up by the regulars is definitely preferable to trying to sell harassed parents kids shoes. This means that bar work has a very competitive labour market so if someone cannot get a job in Tesco’s it is highly unlikely that they will find work in a pub. In short the government is trying to legislate against a problem which does not exist.
This “protecting the worker” argument also falls flat on it’s face when you consider that in Scotland there was a 20% drop in pub trade following a smoking ban meaning that staff were laid off so presumably Patricia Hewitt thinks that it is far better that people starve to death then breathe second hand smoke.
As none of the reasons given for the smoking ban are quite as they seem I think it important to ask why the government is still so keen to spend £1.7bn of taxpayer’s money introducing this ban?
To answer this question we need to look at the history of the anti-smoking movement. Again contrary to popular mythology this movement did not begin in 1950’s America it began much earlier in 1930’s Germany when Adolf Hitler, the father of the modern anti-smoking movement before anything was known about the effects of smoking declared that smoking was part of a communist conspiracy to slow and derail the growth of the master race.
Upon coming to power Hitler began to pass laws to prevent Germans from smoking. These measures included a ban on Tobacco advertising and advertising campaigns which attacked smoking as Un-Aryan. Over the next 8 years the German people actually began to smoke more while Hitler annexed Austria, invaded Czechoslovakia and began ghettoising the Jews amongst increasing internal opposition.
In 1939 Hitler had enough and introduced a ban on smoking in all public places declaring; “If I had not stopped smoking then the Third Reich would never have happened!” This date also coincided with the invasion of Poland which started the second world war and the point at which the Nazi’s solution to the “Jewish question” switched from the relatively humane Madagascar plan to the final solution of Auschwitz.
During the course of the Second World War the allied intelligence services became impressed by the resilience of the Reich which managed to suppress both the horrors of the holocaust and the failures of the German army right up to the point that allied troops marched on Hitler’s Berlin bunker. After the end of the war they identified the social control of the smoking ban as one of the cornerstones of the Nazi’s ability to control their populace. It was this interest which allowed the key research into the effects of smoking to be published in 1950 and 1951.
Aside from the health effects of smoking these and other studies found nicotine to be a psychoactive substance which has a mildly sedative effect and alter the way the user thinks. This discovery was reinforced by work done by the US military which discovered that non-smoking soldiers were better at blindly following orders then their smoking counterparts. Other studies also found that smokers were less likely to follow the rules of Nash’s infamous “fuck you buddy” games.
As a lot of this work was carried out by the private sector on behalf of the US Army this knowledge began to bleed into America’s corporate world where smoking was seen as a weakness which made those who indulged less able to participate in the kill or be killed culture. Thus in the 1950’s the American anti-smoking lobby was born.
Given the rather sinister history of the anti-smoking movement coupled with the failure to produce a coherent argument for its introduction I have to say that I am very worried by our ever more controlling government’s motivations for introducing this smoking ban.
These worries are not being alleviated by the way the ban is to be enforced. Since the middle ages Britain has been policed by the consent of the people. This means that if you choose to break a law passed by parliament you can expect to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However if you witness someone else breaking the law you have no obligation to stop them, report them to the authorities or participate in their prosecution.
The smoking ban changes all this because it brings with it criminal offences for any employee of a pub or other public place who fails to report to the relevant government authority anybody they witness breaching the ban. To quote a member of the civil service this law has been specifically designed to make private citizens the agents of the state.
I know that this sounds like a very subtle and technical point to most of you but this right of non-compliance makes the difference between the citizen of a democracy and the subject of a tyranny. It is a right which has underpinned every important social movement throughout Britain’s history from the anti-slavery movement, through the suffragette movement right up to the modern anti-war movement and even before the ban has been introduced the removal of this right is already been used to justify changes in the terrorism act.
The first reason given is that smoking kills. Broadly speaking this is of course true however the argument fails to mention that every single one of you is going to die and on average a smoker only dies seven years younger then a non-smoker. In effect this is the difference between dying at 79 rather and dying at 86. Contrary to popular belief you will not spend these extra years playing with your grandkids, travelling the world or writing that novel you always wanted too. You will instead spend them confined to your home, alone and in pain.
The second reason given is that the NHS cannot afford to treat smoking related diseases. This is utterly untrue. In 2005 the treatment of smoking related diseases cost the NHS £1.5bn which admittedly sounds like a lot until you realise that the total NHS budget for the same period was £90bn which means that treating smoking related diseases only accounted for around 1/90th of the NHS budget.
Over the same period the excise duty and VAT from the sale of Tobacco products contributed £10bn or 1/9th of the total NHS budget. To put it more simply every smoker has not only paid in full fro their treatment they have also paid for the treatment of eight non-smokers.
On top of that you have the fact that over their lifetime a non-smoker will cost the NHS $6000 more then a smoker and that figure doesn’t even include the increased social care cost associated with old age.
The third argument given is that the ban will empower people to rid themselves of an addiction that is controlling their lives. This is again untrue because smoking causes the brain to overproduce a chemical called dopamine (the so called pleasure hormone). This dopamine flood causes the receptor sites to shut down to avoid the person to become overwhelmed with pleasure. The closure and reduction of these pleasure receptors is permanent and irreversible meaning that when someone gives up smoking they do not free them themselves of the addiction they merely learn to modify their behaviour to cope without this pleasure. This is why Allan Carr lied to his readers by telling them that smoking is a totally negative pleasure which they don’t really enjoy and why ex-smokers such as John Reid and Gordon Brown seem to be always trying to convince us that they were right to give up smoking.
The fourth argument for the ban is that it will in someway act as a form of resistance against the “evil tobacco companies”. If the fact that these incredibly rich companies who enjoy the support of more voters then any political party in the UK have not lifted a finger to stop this ban has not convinced you that this argument is a nonsense allow me to explain further. Since the 1960’s the main and very effective tactic of the anti-smoking lobby has been something called “de-cooling” this basically means employing propaganda such as the lie that Steve McQueen died of lung cancer in order to make smoking appear less cool and less desirable. The first thing the ban will do is make smoking an act of rebellion again. It will also produce a clear physical and visual division between the smokers and the non-smokers and this division will not serve the anti-smoking cause well because the smoking sections of pubs have traditionally been a lot more fun then the non-smoking sections.
Also any restriction on a market place cuts competition in that market allowing the big four tobacco companies that already operate in that market to consolidate their costs and boosts their profits.
The fifth argument for the ban and the one which is used specifically to ban smoking in pubs is that it will protect bar staff who are being forced to work in a smoky environment by the nasty capitalist system. I have to say that this is again nonsense because in my extensive experience bar work is without doubt the most difficult area of the service sector to get into because earning your money getting chatted up by the regulars is definitely preferable to trying to sell harassed parents kids shoes. This means that bar work has a very competitive labour market so if someone cannot get a job in Tesco’s it is highly unlikely that they will find work in a pub. In short the government is trying to legislate against a problem which does not exist.
This “protecting the worker” argument also falls flat on it’s face when you consider that in Scotland there was a 20% drop in pub trade following a smoking ban meaning that staff were laid off so presumably Patricia Hewitt thinks that it is far better that people starve to death then breathe second hand smoke.
As none of the reasons given for the smoking ban are quite as they seem I think it important to ask why the government is still so keen to spend £1.7bn of taxpayer’s money introducing this ban?
To answer this question we need to look at the history of the anti-smoking movement. Again contrary to popular mythology this movement did not begin in 1950’s America it began much earlier in 1930’s Germany when Adolf Hitler, the father of the modern anti-smoking movement before anything was known about the effects of smoking declared that smoking was part of a communist conspiracy to slow and derail the growth of the master race.
Upon coming to power Hitler began to pass laws to prevent Germans from smoking. These measures included a ban on Tobacco advertising and advertising campaigns which attacked smoking as Un-Aryan. Over the next 8 years the German people actually began to smoke more while Hitler annexed Austria, invaded Czechoslovakia and began ghettoising the Jews amongst increasing internal opposition.
In 1939 Hitler had enough and introduced a ban on smoking in all public places declaring; “If I had not stopped smoking then the Third Reich would never have happened!” This date also coincided with the invasion of Poland which started the second world war and the point at which the Nazi’s solution to the “Jewish question” switched from the relatively humane Madagascar plan to the final solution of Auschwitz.
During the course of the Second World War the allied intelligence services became impressed by the resilience of the Reich which managed to suppress both the horrors of the holocaust and the failures of the German army right up to the point that allied troops marched on Hitler’s Berlin bunker. After the end of the war they identified the social control of the smoking ban as one of the cornerstones of the Nazi’s ability to control their populace. It was this interest which allowed the key research into the effects of smoking to be published in 1950 and 1951.
Aside from the health effects of smoking these and other studies found nicotine to be a psychoactive substance which has a mildly sedative effect and alter the way the user thinks. This discovery was reinforced by work done by the US military which discovered that non-smoking soldiers were better at blindly following orders then their smoking counterparts. Other studies also found that smokers were less likely to follow the rules of Nash’s infamous “fuck you buddy” games.
As a lot of this work was carried out by the private sector on behalf of the US Army this knowledge began to bleed into America’s corporate world where smoking was seen as a weakness which made those who indulged less able to participate in the kill or be killed culture. Thus in the 1950’s the American anti-smoking lobby was born.
Given the rather sinister history of the anti-smoking movement coupled with the failure to produce a coherent argument for its introduction I have to say that I am very worried by our ever more controlling government’s motivations for introducing this smoking ban.
These worries are not being alleviated by the way the ban is to be enforced. Since the middle ages Britain has been policed by the consent of the people. This means that if you choose to break a law passed by parliament you can expect to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However if you witness someone else breaking the law you have no obligation to stop them, report them to the authorities or participate in their prosecution.
The smoking ban changes all this because it brings with it criminal offences for any employee of a pub or other public place who fails to report to the relevant government authority anybody they witness breaching the ban. To quote a member of the civil service this law has been specifically designed to make private citizens the agents of the state.
I know that this sounds like a very subtle and technical point to most of you but this right of non-compliance makes the difference between the citizen of a democracy and the subject of a tyranny. It is a right which has underpinned every important social movement throughout Britain’s history from the anti-slavery movement, through the suffragette movement right up to the modern anti-war movement and even before the ban has been introduced the removal of this right is already been used to justify changes in the terrorism act.
Sovereign
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