Skip to main content

Stop Punishing Smokers - An Impassionate rant


Drinking good beer means to support the industry and every aspect of it. Continuous measures and limitations have seriously affected our pubs, especially over the last decade. The famous public houses of British society have gone through a de-normalisation phase fuelled by those in power. Anything that is enjoyable, anything that is deemed unhealthy, is being ousted. 

Whether it is the health and safety laws, increasing taxes on beer or the attempted destruction of the tobacco industry, it can no longer be argued that a proportion of the nation's population aren't a bunch of gratuitious, self-righteous killjoys whose aim and pleasure whilst they exist on this world is to control people's levels of fun and happiness. They will call it looking after the nation's health but all it is doing is limiting the people's levels of indulgences. So if a smoking ban inside pubs eight years ago wasn't enough, yesterday the proposed banning of smoking in outdoor beer gardens made the news. 

There was a recent survey/poll taken that was inexplicably read out on the radio that looked into the "Top activities people do on the beach." (I can't find a link for this and don't have time to google it to shit - trust me it happened.) I was shocked as the study found that people that go to the beach enjoy such unheard of activities as reading, sunbathing and dipping their feet into the sea. Either there's a bored, lonely soul with a dictaphone questioning people on the beaches of Cornwall or somebody actually got paid for performing this irrelevancy. 

I go slightly off topic with that story to make the point that some people have jobs they have a need to justify. Some people need to pass the time in their insular, joyless lives and so create pointless studies to justify their worth. Some then follow this up with public nonsense that somehow makes its way to the governing bodies who then actually consider this lunacy. But hey, if a study about reading on the beach can make it onto the radio... 

Shirley Cramer is the chief executive of the Royal Society for Public Health responsible for this latest smoking ban proposal, and someone whom we shall from this point on refer to as Pol Pot II. She is an idiot with as much understanding of human mentality as a pickled walnut. This lugubrious barbarian of monumental fuckwittery will not have anybody enjoying anything indulgent under her communist eyes, regardless of ANY (here) CONTINUOUS (here) FACTS (here) that prove again and again that her crusades against life's pleasures are unfounded and prejudice. 

Pol Pot II doesn't like fun and you can shove knitting needles up your asshole if you think she's going to let you have any, (note: if you do enjoy putting knitting tools in your orifices then Pol Pot II will almost certainly ban that.) You've been banned from smoking inside pubs, on railway platforms, in work, in cars but some of you still haven't listened. Some of you are still smoking outside but don't worry - Pol Pot II will soon see to that.  

They'll undoubtedly be a BBC news reporter interviewing a cab driver over the next few days about all this. He'll be leaning out the window saying something that sounds quite radical like, "They'll be trying to ban us from smoking in our own homes next. What I do in my house is my choice." And we'll smirk because it will seem like a fanatical reaction. 

Or at least it did the first time. And the second time. A little bit the third time. But if smokers are restricted again, as the price for them continuously increases, I'd start to to think that that cab driver might be right, that the Health body dictatorship won't be sated until tobacco no longer exists in this country. 

I drink beer. I drink too much of it really. I eat pizza. I over salt my food. I wouldn't turn a salted caramel brownie down if it was offered for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I do all those things despite the health warnings because they make me happy. I don't smoke (aside from the occasional social cigar) but I imagine if I did, despite the price increase, the lack of marketing and the restricted areas I could do it, then I must be smoking BECAUSE I GOD DAMN WANT TO. It is a perfectly legal activity that people choose to do or choose not to do - like badminton. But nobody is trying to end badminton. 

Some boring zombie will make the argument of the burden on the health industry and how we shouldn't be wasting money on people who are in hospital "through their own fault." Shirley Kra... I mean Pol Pot II feels like this. I wonder if a member of Pol's family were to end up being involved in a car crash that was entirely due to their reckless driving if she was would feel the same way. Would she rock up to the hospital and say, "Turn that fucking life support machine off. It's their own fault. Kill them. And ban everybody in the UK from driving whilst you're at it." 

Let us not forget that Pol described smokers as "abnormal." Seriously, she used the word abnormal. I'm not even going to go into how that doesn't only offends smokers but proves that Pol Pot II is in fact a vehement dictator with great apathy to anybody she deems different. She is actively trying to segregate people in society that are viewed as lesser humans to her. Abnormal - I'm not making this shit up.  

At the start of this impassionate rant I did aim to talk about the affect a potential ban on smoking in beer gardens would have on pubs, bars and our beer world. That shouldn't be forgotten and I hope anybody that supports this industry is against any such ridiculous notion. I want to avoid the Orwellian society cliché here, but we must still have the freedom for our own little indulgences. We can't live in a country that has people in power hell bent on changing the rules to benefit them. We can't have those in power belittling those who have none. Quite simply, we need to stop punishing smokers. They aren't bad people. People who punish others for their differences certainly are. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Children and Dogs in Pubs and Bars

  I once took my niece to the pub. She was either 1 or 2 years of age. I often looked after her on Saturdays and on one of our weekly walks, for the first time, I stopped by the local pub, mainly because my friend was there with his daughter of similar age. The two kids got on well together and it was a lovely couple of hours; a perfect showcase of adult friends and their children existing in public houses. But my sister was furious. She didn’t rant or rave but her lips were purser than a 90s children’s show teacher. It was here that I learned of the effect that our childhood had had upon her. She recalls many an afternoon being bored in the corner of pubs that our Dad had dragged us to, arms folded in the corner with nothing to do, and she doesn’t want the same for her children. The idea of her first born being taken to pubs infuriates her; fearful that they would be subjected to the same unhappy experiences that she was.  I don’t recall those times in the same way as my s

The Ten Pubs That Made Me - Part 3: Dr Okell's / My Foley's Tap House and Leeds

A pint in Mr Foley's Tap House from December 2022     This is Part 3 (the fourth post) of an ongoing project. Please see the beginning of Part 0 for details.    Come the end of this journey, there may be a lesson in procrastination that I am unlikely to heed. These posts stem from a list that I made three years ago and a series that I embarked on 18 months ago. We’ve only now reached a 30% completion rate and with this post we are back to fail for the second time.   This odyssey began with a trip to Mr Foley’s Tap House in February 2022 – named Dr Okell’s bar on my first visits in 2005 – only to discover that it was closed. It did reopen by the time that the post was coming out and I managed a brief visit in December 2022. However, my July 1 st 2023 trip to Leeds, on which this post is based, is met with this sign at the door of the bar:      A quick check of social media shows an Instagram post from the day before (June 30 th ) announcing the closure of the

"They Had Their Issues, So..."

      There’s a set of garages to rent as storage units near my workplace. One of them is taken by a local florist that uses it to store flower arrangements for various events, that are more often than not funerals.   As such, at least once a week at 8am I will pass a car being loaded up with flowers arranged into heart shaped patterns or the letters M U M. It is a grounding reminder that, as I mentally grumble my way through the upcoming arbitrary grievances of my ordinary working day, a group of family and friends locally is going through the hardest time. It provides much needed perspective on days when I could do with being reminded of all that I have to be thankful for.   These little moments explain to me why it is possible for us to share a communal loss when a celebrity passes away. Grief is often a personal and lonely experience, shared between a minority of people in your life. When a co-worker loses a relative or friend, it has little affect on me, bar signing of