Daily Express: The World’s Greatest Newspaper — This sounds like an odd way to do this. In the USA the process took place by peer pressure and owners telling people to stop. Why so heavy-handed?
Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money will be spent on policing new “no smoking in public” rules. Critics said there would be a town hall Taliban – an army of undercover officials with power to enter pubs, bars and offices.
They will be able to photograph, film and slap instant fines on offenders, part of “heavy-handed” plans by Labour to create a police state. Local authorities in England have been given a total of £29.5million for this year and next to help prepare for the ban.
The smoking ban will probably need to be heavily policed in England. I can believe that the general English chain smoking pub goer may obey the law with a little peer pressure, but a hard-line element will wish to totally defy the powers that be and light up regardless. At least with the army of enforcers (or at very least the threat of the army of enforcers) the proprietor may take some action and get the bad boy to either stop smoking or to leave the premises.
It won’t stop with just smoking. This is only a first, tentative step toward government control of aspects of life that used to be matters of personal choice and freedom.
But who ever said the champions of freedom intended for people to be free to do things that other people don’t think are good for them? Government knows best. The rise of the Western Taliban continues apace.
Thank you oh-so-much, my self-righteous PC brothers.
This isn’t a first step. We already have the government sensors checking whether you watch TV.(No that’s not a typo)
So what. I definitely do not want government intrusion into my life, and I have absolutely no problem if an individual wants to smoke, that is his business. But when it is in a public venue and is something I have to inhale that’s a different story. Sure I can choose not to work there, but why should I? I’m all for policing for smokers, get em out!!
This from the country that has CCTV cameras on every street corner. Why not just put CCTV cameras in every no smoking area?
U.K policy toward public smoking seems to me like the business of the U.K. people. It’s hard to be judgmental about whatever works for them, coming as I do from a hemisphere with a proud history of, let’s see…. Bushies… Hugo (“For the People”) chavez… CIA-sponsored military dictatorships… drug-war black markets… totally hacked electronic voting…
The U.K. is going anti-smoking with heavy-handed law enforcement instead of expensive an expensive media anti-smoking propaganda blitz that could have come right out of the drug war’s pro-black-market spin factories? Good lord, Brits, whatever are you thinking?
Er ah, John, What ever gave you the idea that it was peer pressure and not heavy handed tactics here in the USA?
I seem to recall several news stories of police fining owners and patrons of bars here in Califonria a few years back. Sure, the bartenders told people to stop…..because they didn’t want to get fined themselves!
As far as it goes it should be a private property issue. If I own the business, I decide whether smoking is premitted or not and you decide whether you wish to work here, patronize the business, or not, based solely on that basis, if you wish. There was a fair number of voluntary non-smoking restaurants here in LA before the ban. Two of my favorites, in fact had banned smoking a couple of years before the law, and their numbers were growing.
Now, if we could have a law about building buildings with windows that don’t open……
DAve
#7, I would try and reason with John, he’s as much a liberal as any of them.
I think this is the way they will start the American secret police. The so-called Right wing couldn’t get away with it, so the so-called little Leftist / progressive are in the best position to begin and maintain a secret police force. Today smoking, tomorrow twinkies and then firearms, hate speech, anti-progressive thought. Look back to Stalin or Hitler and you can see the pattern. Today there is no right or left, just globalist and nationalist. Do you really see any difference between their agendas, what one party can’t get through into law the next comes along and does.
The Republicans could bring themselves to surrender to Mexico totally so the Democrats will, by legalizing the Mexican invasion. That should bring in a flood of new trash. But, the more mundane will continue to see everything as Democrat versus Republican and nothing will change.
Imagine if some of the German people had seen what was happening in 1934 and tried to tell people, they would have been seen as alarmist and paranoid. People don’t learn from history they just can’t really see the changes when they happen, they seem to prefer to remain isolated and within their little secure domains.