Who’s The Daddy Now?
Excuse me while I light up. I smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of black coffee whilst writing; my teeth bear the scars, but it could be worse, I suppose. At least I’m not in the ‘Lost Weekend’ league – yet. But one thought struck me as I began to type: as my home is my workplace, am I breaking the law? It’s hard to know these days. Demonisation and discrimination began on foreign soil and have slowly crept towards home soil as the ceaseless march of the prohibition nannies progresses with nary a raised voice to bring their state-sponsored moral bullying to the grinding halt it deserves. An Englishman’s home may be clinging on as his castle, but now his car has been clamped by the health fascists and their ammunition of dubious statistics that the masses accept as Gospel.
But it’s all about protecting the children, of course. That’ll be the same children stuffed to their fat little gills with ‘Mac’ Meals as they spend their school holidays bent double over their iPads because it’s too dangerous for them to leave the house without an escort lest a showbiz celebrity from the 1970s be loitering in next-door’s garden, ready to pounce and whisk them off to a Satanic mass. The latest layer of cotton wool comes in the shape of a new addition to laws that are the kind of challenge to an adult’s human rights that no court in the UK or Europe dare to question – anti-smoking ones.
As of yesterday, any adult smoking a cig whilst driving a car with a passenger under-18 riding in it can be liable to a £50 fine. That’s right – the privately-owned vehicle of a private individual will no longer be exempt from laws that began in public interiors before spreading to public exteriors. If said passenger is either 16 or 17 and happens to be smoking, however, that’s okay. What if the driver is a non-smoker, though? Is the juvenile passenger puffing away not guilty of damaging the driver’s health? Apparently not. Should the driver be susceptible to nicotine, he won’t be charged if driving a convertible with the roof down; that sounds reasonable until you think about it and realise there are only ever two or three weeks in an entire British calendar year when the driver of a convertible can dispense with his roof without feeling as though he’s travelling through an Arctic wind tunnel. Also, e-cig smokers are safe, though considering how even those vanishing vapours are gradually being targeted by the serial censors, it’s only a matter of time.
The police have complained the new law is unenforceable, and they have a point. On paper, it’s as impossible to police as the 1913 Cat and Mouse Act, which was used to combat the activities of Suffragettes, whereby a hunger striker would be released from prison when she was on the point of death and would then be under observation until she started eating again, which was sufficient cause to carry her back to the nick. The Old Bill cites more serious crimes as having priority over adults smoking a tobacco that is perfectly legal throughout the British Isles. Steve White, Chairman of the National Police Federation said ‘Should we be focusing on people smoking in cars with children in the cars or should we focusing on burglaries?’ Quite. One could add to that statement ‘Should we focusing on burglaries or should we be focusing on tracking down people who were in the Accrington Girl Guides in 1975, following an allegation of sexual abuse against a dead MP made by a confused middle-aged woman fresh from therapy?’
Although the Commons and the Lords have both backed this new law, it is the supposedly-libertine left that has most vigorously embraced the anti-smoking lobby over the past twenty years and not the right, which has traditionally been associated with a censorious outlook. Even though New Labour could hardly be labelled Socialist, there has always been a strain of patronisingly puritanical ‘we know what’s best for you’ finger-wagging running through leftish principles, born of the concept of a common good and an equality that requires a narrow definition of equality to work. Caroline Flint as Labour Health Secretary was a prime mover behind the original smoking ban in public places that came into being in 2007, before flouncing out of the Cabinet, claiming she had been treated as ‘female window dressing’; this is the same woman who had posed for a glamorous photo shoot a few months earlier. Mind you, that shoot was probably ‘empowering’.
Watch any movie or TV drama from the last century set in a contemporary Britain and one can’t help but mourn the loss of a grown-up world that has now been utterly infantilised. It often resembles some surreal version of the UK in a parallel dimension, whereby democracy is represented by adults having the luxury to make their own lifestyle choices, to express an opinion that goes against the consensus without the prospect of instant denouncement, to smoke a cigarette without having to stand out in the cold like a naughty schoolboy, to speak to a child they didn’t sire without being condemned (and, in some cases, killed) as a Paedo by a vigilante, or to say out loud words that exist on the pages of a dictionary without having to navigate their way around the minefield of sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, Islamophobia (tick whichever box is applicable). The eyes, ears and lungs of children must be shielded from everything that doesn’t conform to the Teletubby Land we now all reside in.
Whether or not one is a smoker is immaterial; if anybody claims to profess concern about the erosion of civil liberties – even in areas that don’t constitute one’s own day-to-day existence – then this further insidious expansion of a law that set the wheels of state interference in the private affairs of the individual in motion less than a decade ago matters.
To slightly reference an earlier post this week, I recall a ‘Judge Dredd’ story in an issue of 2000AD circa 1979 when smokers had been reduced to wearing what resembled astronaut helmets, so all their smoke was prevented from damaging the health of anyone but themselves. Incidentally, another prophetic scene in the same comic displayed a family containing an irritating brat whose father was poised to slap before the mother intervened, reminding him that parents can’t chastise children in the twenty-first century. As a child who had more than one imprint of an adult hand on his backside, I thought this an idealistic notion less likely than dinosaurs being resurrected via DNA samples for the purposes of feeding an overpopulated planet; as for the treatment of smokers, this too seemed a far-fetched prediction that went way beyond any concept of realism. Yet, here we are, fifteen years past the deadline date of the comic, in a country where the rights of minors take precedence over the rights of adults. Who indeed is the daddy now?
Petunia Winegum
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October 2, 2015 at 9:09 am -
October 2, 2015 at 9:23 am -
I’ve been saying it for years – that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. It’s plain for all to see that the lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum. The sooner there is a severe backlash against the”nanny state” the better. I’m sick to death of being lectured about what I should and shouldn’t eat or drink. If you go to any NHS facility I guarantee that you will see many NHS employees who are grossly overweight. As far as I’m concerned it’s up to them to decide what, and how much, they want to consume, but don’t tell me what I should be eating and drinking.
I have never been a serious smoker, but I was very much against the ban on smoking in public places. For the life of me I couldn’t understand why it couldn’t have been left up to pub managers to decide if they wanted to be smoking or non smoking venues – especially when prisons and the HOC bars were exempted.
Off topic slightly, here’s my thought for the day – if homophobia exists then does hetrophobia also exist. Likewise if xenophobia why not xenophobia-phobia?
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October 2, 2015 at 10:34 am -
Pet, I hope your place of work has no more than two walls – I’ll be around later with a sledgehammer to legalise it!
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October 2, 2015 at 10:40 am -
The BBC ran strongly with this story, even having a vox-pop with some infant children opining how much better it would make their lives.
At the end of the Today piece they interviewed an “expert” and posed the leading question – something along these lines…
Of course this is a great step forward for public health, but it is in the home where children are most likely to be exposed to second-hand smoke – what can be done about that?Once again it is necessary to quote C.S Lewis…
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good
of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live
under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may
at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good
will torment us without end for they do so with the approval
of their own conscience.”-
October 2, 2015 at 5:45 pm -
Sometimes robber barons are moral busybodies too. It is a good way to keep the victims cowed.
The Iranian government is of this type.
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October 2, 2015 at 10:50 am -
For PC/Puritan Cowardice Fraud Market careers, ratings, and profit, all deviously masked by Mass Deception as so called ‘Child Protection’.
The Over-Protection Industry, is itself now a very serious form of child abuse!
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October 2, 2015 at 10:58 am -
“If said passenger is either 16 or 17 and happens to be smoking, however, that’s okay”
Actually it’s not. If the only person under 18 in the car is the one smoking, the driver is still liable for the fine, for allowing smoking in a car with an under-18 present. Idiotic I know, but when has that ever stopped the 650?
I’m just wondering when they’re going to make it illegal to smoke in a house with an under-18 present. Or at least 18 hours before said under-18 turns up.
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October 2, 2015 at 11:17 am -
Look on the bright side, folks. At least we’re still allowed to break wind (and that seems to be about all we’re allowed to do, these days). Well, until some pillock with a beard and a degree in Ecology hypothesises that it’s contributing to Global Warming, anyway….
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October 2, 2015 at 11:30 am -
“At least we’re still allowed to break wind…”
Er…
“Do you have a workplace odor and fragrance policy? Here’s sample language…”
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October 2, 2015 at 11:39 am -
“…fragrance sensitivity may easily rise to the level of a disability under the ADA.”
*stunned silence*
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October 2, 2015 at 11:42 am -
“*stunned silence*”
There’s rules for that as well:
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/effects-noise-workplace-45782.html
“Whether the noise is coming from office machines, chattering co-workers or construction,….”
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October 2, 2015 at 11:48 am -
There’s an ambulance-chasing lawyer trawling for ‘victims’ prior to bringing a class action against Chanel and Old Spice even as we speak….
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October 2, 2015 at 12:22 pm -
If that happens here, I look forward to suing my employers over Year 10’s perpetual miasma of ‘Lynx’ and ‘Impulse’.
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October 2, 2015 at 1:51 pm -
I seem to recall reading last year that there are humanity hating misguided souls what want to ban the aroma from Fish N Chip shops et al. Might have been FrankD who reported it. The ‘logic’ being that those ‘smell’ particles of lovingly crispy potato etc are actually hazardous to health.
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October 2, 2015 at 11:42 am -
It’s OK, PJH, I think we’re in the clear on this one! It seems to refer to perfumes and fragrant foods rather than the fallout of a good old rip-snorter:
•”All employees must observe good habits of grooming and personal hygiene. Body odor, from any cause, should not create distractions. To accommodate sensitive individuals, employees are discouraged from wearing or applying excessive amounts of perfume, cologne, scented lotions, or body washes in the workplace; using hairsprays, air freshener, or other scented products in the workplace; and eating or keeping fragrant foods or items at your desk.”
…..and, since ‘Odor’ is spelt in American, it’s only trans-atlantic BO that’s a problem, too. A bit of good old British sweat is perfectly legal. So far.
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October 2, 2015 at 11:47 am -
” It seems to refer to perfumes and fragrant foods…”
Er – no; from the bit you actually quoted:
> “… Body odor, from any cause ….”
seems to cover it
“…and, since ‘Odor’ is spelt in American…”
It was the first reasonable hit I got off google. I’m sure there’s a right-pondian version of it somewhere…
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October 2, 2015 at 11:52 am -
Bloody ‘HR professionals’. I hope they’re forced to work in an ‘odor’-free office, so they can’t fart and their arses swell up and jam them into their swivelling chairs, blast them.
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October 2, 2015 at 12:16 pm -
I’m quite happy with this concept and its further long term development.
That future pogroms might deal with veggies, and garlic eating Frogs, is quite appealing, and might well help keep the world from overpopulation too.
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October 2, 2015 at 11:43 am -
Stunned!!!
Petunia – would you start on the Raccoon Arms Odour and Fragrance Policy please, before that constipated midget comes in the bar again…..?-
October 2, 2015 at 12:34 pm -
I think some of our regulars could certainly do with a shower before they wander in from whatever skip they’ve been kipping in; but I didn’t like to say anything, being a sensitive soul and all that.
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October 2, 2015 at 1:35 pm -
think some of our regulars could certainly do with a shower before they wander in from whatever skip they’ve been kipping in; but I didn’t like to say anything, being a sensitive soul and all that.
I will have you know you bloody Typewriter fondling Geordie that I shower religiously-and by that I don’t just mean at Xmas. I shower so much that I now have to use baby bath as shower gel because my dwarfish hide ‘as got really sensitive after all these years above ground.
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October 2, 2015 at 5:54 pm -
I laughed way too out loud on that one, and the replies below. So much so that my boss is worried!
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October 2, 2015 at 11:50 am -
I see that the lawyer responsible for that one is a Mr Jacuzzi…
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October 2, 2015 at 12:20 pm -
“privately-owned vehicle of a private individual ” My log book says keeper,and i,m informed that once you register something you transfer ownership, ie houses , children cars, if you dont believe me dont pay your rates, car tax, and dont send your children to school and see what happens!
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October 2, 2015 at 7:06 pm -
Hi Walter,
It’s funny you should mention this business of registration, as I was just the other day trying to find out if it was
illegal not to register a child’s birth. Not that I have any newborns knocking around the house you understand, but I was actually
interested in finding out what my parents had done for me, by registering my birth, without my consent.
You raise an interesting point. Did they inadvertently transfer the ‘ownership’ of my ‘flesh and blood’ to someone else, ie the State?
It’s a woolly subject it seems – lots of – illegal to lie, illegal to not turn up when requested by the registrar, but nothing that actually says – you must by law register a child’s birth.-
October 2, 2015 at 8:52 pm -
Don’t worry about it.
Last year in a house fire, one young child, aged 9 weeks, was killed but it was reported that the child was as yet un-named by its (ethnic) parents – they were apparently awaiting family advice from ‘back home’. I pursued this, particularly as the law states that a birth must be registered within 6 weeks. My MP elicited the fact from the Justice Department that apparently around 20,000 births per year miss that deadline – to date no-one has ever been prosecuted.
(It is suggested that the deadline is missed more often with female births, as it then becomes administratively easier for that type of child to ‘go missing’ and thus not arouse questions about female infanticide in some communities. The Dept of Just do not seem too troubled by this).
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October 2, 2015 at 12:59 pm -
Obviously the intent of the law is to discourage adults from blowing cigarette smoke over children so they don’t arrive at school smelling like ashtrays. A few selective prosecutions will discourage the others. What next? No open bottles of rum in the car with the kiddies, perhaps.
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October 2, 2015 at 1:27 pm -
“What next? No open bottles of rum in the car with the kiddies, perhaps.”
They’ve already got that one covered. “Don’t drink and drive. You’ll spill it.”
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October 2, 2015 at 1:28 pm -
Whatever next? Seventy years ago the army used to issue me, a young soldier in Italy, with a tin of fifty cigarettes each week. One way and another (some admittedly good) this society has grown almost unrecognisable since then.
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October 2, 2015 at 1:43 pm -
I bought Granddaughter1 a ‘wees & poohs doooOOOllleeee’ last Xmas…’Baby Spawn ‘. As I am going to have to get a car seat to transport Granddaughter2 I think I might nick the wee & Pooh Dolly and connect up an E-cig with it’s Real Suckin Action mouth…. see if I can get any ‘takers’. Be worth fifty quid for the shit and giggles.
Always makes me laugh when I stand outside on the main street with Granddaughter 2 on my arm having a fag (me not her, she doesn’t like the Gauloises I smoke yet and I refuse to buy her own Lights cos her Mommy gets really sniffy). Every woman who drives past gives me ‘the evils’, the ‘OMG HE IS SMOKING WITH A BABE ON HIS ARM!’ bear stare….while the exhaust of her SUV’s diesel covers said cutey baby in enough carcinogens to wipe out a small Kindergarten.
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October 2, 2015 at 2:57 pm -
Looking back barely twenty years, I remember a pregnant friend of mine used to smoke like a chimney before the babe was born and the babe in question came out fine. A decade later, another pregnant friend told me the looks she received whilst lighting up couldn’t have been worse if her surname was Hindley.
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October 2, 2015 at 4:51 pm -
I smoked all the way through pregnancy and it didn’t seem to do any harm then or my smoking all through their childhood. Why don’t they just ban it altogether ? Wouldn’t be any more successful than stopping drugs but then the the fanatics would lose all their lovely tax payers money to tell us how to live our lives. I just ignore them all and I don’t consider over 16s to be children.
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October 2, 2015 at 2:25 pm -
My girlfriend had wrestled control of the remote-control away from me on Sunday, subjecting me to one of those TV clip-compilations from a bygone age.
(Apparently, Italian music had a lot of success & exposure in Spain, hence a whole thrilling hour of weirdness). One clip had both of us laughing & shaking our heads, as you just don’t see such public acts of cig-smoking these days, particularly whilst singing romantic waltz-duets.The rather lovely Claudia Mori firstly nicks the fag out of poor Adriano’s stained-fingers, has a puff or two & then chucks it on the floor! To be honest, they both look as though they took advantage of whatever was on offer in the green-room snug before mounting the stage. Say what you like about the fascist dictator Franco – you could still have a puff on network television in those days.
It’s at 25’15” in the following link… before the censors get around to purging the archives:
http://www.rtve.es/television/20150922/italia-pop-musica-dente-segundo-plato-cachitos/1224346.shtml
(And completely off-topic, but anyone bothering to watch the above might also want to ‘rebobinar’ to 20’20” to watch Rita Pavone – a Wee Jimmie Krankie channelling the spirit of Michael Jackson. Groovy!) -
October 2, 2015 at 6:48 pm -
The goofs have been allowed to much lead….they are the many..we are the few…democracy is technically unworkable…
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October 2, 2015 at 6:50 pm -
And Keiko petunia …you my hero
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October 2, 2015 at 8:22 pm -
I worked in a bar for several years in the late nineties. I never noticed the smell of cigarettes when I was at work but when I got up the next morning my entire bedroom was infused with it just from the clothes I had taken off the previous night. I have made a choice to to wreck my health by smoking (on my mothers side my grandfather and six uncles died in their early sixties from lung cancer while on my father’s my non-smoking relatives have live to their early nineties). It comes down to two incompatible rights: my right to choose to maintain my health and your right to do what you want with your body. There is no easy libertarian way to square this circle. I for one am glad there is a basic ban on smoking in public places. Of course, the ability of our legislators and the police to make a complete mess of how this is implemented can be relied on.
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October 2, 2015 at 8:57 pm -
The idiocy is compounded when you contemplate the fag-smoking 17-year-old driver of a convertible sports car with a similarly-aged passenger, open to the elements and enjoying a greater throughput of fresh air than any static person this side of a hurricane – and yet the driver would be committing an offence under this latest bit of PC nonsense. I despair.
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October 2, 2015 at 9:21 pm -
No one said I may not smoke in her convertible….
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b116/horta/DSCF0101_zpsudt8zync.jpg
(and yes that was taken this evening whilst taking her for a drive around the parish )
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October 2, 2015 at 10:17 pm -
October 2, 2015 at 11:44 pm -
Like the look on her face. You Norfolk folk educate them well. One can hear her thinking,
“Papa, I’ve smelled the Foulness and seen the light”
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October 2, 2015 at 10:05 pm -
‘…imprint of an adult hand…’
Damn right & I repeat, I touch a fire, it burns, I don’t do it again. Total connection between stupid action and immediate retribution. Talking about the naughty step or waiting three months for a social report & review doesn’t have quite the same immediacy or connection. The wonder is that our world isn’t a lot worse.And fragrance – no complaints whatever over recent exposures to Miss Dior. I thought I’d forgotten….
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October 5, 2015 at 1:08 am -
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October 5, 2015 at 10:43 am -
That’s the one! Well done in tracking it down. How long before the arrival of the smokatorium, I wonder?
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October 5, 2015 at 1:47 pm -
I actually recall reading it some years after it came out, my First Real Girlfriend’s younger brother collected them and I used to while away the hours not spent “in bed” , in bed reading them. I also recall thinking ‘it will never happen’. Infact , in some ways, the smokers in 2000AD had it better than us -at least they could buy their ‘disgusting’ drug of choice in a shop openly on display and could smoke it in a public building.
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October 5, 2015 at 3:15 pm -
Quite! We’ve outdone Mega City One!
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October 5, 2015 at 3:48 pm -
And not for the first time- personally I see the ‘belly wheels’ outdone by those electric cripple carts that infest our highways, byways and supermarkets. Infact 2000AD was scarily predictive more often than not (thinking particularly about http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b116/horta/soonerOrlaterz_zpsvhiufokv.png).
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