I am an inveterate smoker.
I’m still angry about the smoking ban 8 years after it entered the statute book for England. The letter of the law to be implemented was peevish beyond all adult reasoning.
Actually legislating that ‘smoking shelters’ must be engineered specifically to prevent smokers being sheltered from the elements. Resisting every call for business owners to be able to make their own decisions about smoking on their premises, or even to be allowed to provide a ventilated segregated indoor space for smokers.
That every public building must legally carry – even now – a very specific sign indicating that this particular activity is against the law. The way the railway companies were able to demarcate their entire premises – even the outdoors – non-smoking, such that you couldn’t have a fag at the far end of a platform at a remote station that is entirely in the open air.
It’s with glee that I read every year that the pub trade has been decimated again, thanks greatly to the brewers, owners and CAMRA who all acted like idiot lickspittles, bedevilled by denial of what was about to hit them like a steam train.
I think all those who endorsed the smoking ban then, and those who endorse it today, are massive despicable cunts. Which is mild and non-committal compared to how I felt – and still feel – about those who brought this into law.
But strangely, I don’t feel in the slightest bit upset about the latest ratcheting up of this law. Today, MPs voted themselves the right to make it illegal to smoke in a vehicle that contains children.
In fact, I’ve been chuckling about it for weeks. I’m not glad the MPs finally voted in the affirmative, but now they have I’m grinning like a Cheshire Cat.
Why?
Well for a start, I don’t have children. In the 20+ years of my driving career, I think I’ve had someone’s kids in my car about twice, and I hated every minute of it. Put your seatbelt on, sit down, and fucking shut up you little bastards. So it doesn’t affect me.
Secondly, it’s just absurd isn’t it? How can it possibly be enforced? Does it apply to convertible cars with the roof down? How about sunroofs? How about cars with blacked out rear windows and an absence of ‘princess on board’ pendants? A law that cannot be enforced is at best pointless, and at worst a lever for all kinds of arbitrary and random enforcement by our nation’s burgeoning army of shiny jacketed simian enforcement mongs, and the serried ranks of pucker-faced citizen informers with their welfare-funded iPhones. Again, however, it doesn’t affect me.
Thirdly, buses, vans, lorries, taxis and an increasing proportion of cars are diesel powered. Diesel engines produce massively carcinogenic soot particles in the 10-100 micron range, which get breathed in by children in cars that are behind said vehicles, where their parents aren’t smoking. Still, doesn’t affect me.
I think I’m just smiling because for once the government have done something cuntish – which they do frequently – that doesn’t affect me. I’m not laughing at you so much as I’m elated with relief that for once I don’t have to take the big rusty unlubed cock of government up my arse. It’s someone else’s turn.
So, forgive me but.. Hahahahahahaaa fuck YOU for a change.
The child benefit changes made me smile too. Perhaps the tide is turning against this mindless vomit-inducing vote-chasing veneration of hard-working families, most of whom should probably have been sterilised in the first place.
Anyway, off to Malta for a month, nice and cheap, before you plebs are allowed to take your children away on holiday and the prices all quadruple.
Chin chin.
AJ
Al Jahom's Final Word 
I agree whole heartedly my dear Sir! Im another Malcontent in the Colonies
This pretty well destroys the Myth of second hand smoke:
http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/28/16741714-lungs-from-pack-a-day-smokers-safe-for-transplant-study-finds?lite
Lungs from pack-a-day smokers safe for transplant, study finds.
By JoNel Aleccia, Staff Writer, NBC News.
Using lung transplants from heavy smokers may sound like a cruel joke, but a new study finds that organs taken from people who puffed a pack a day for more than 20 years are likely safe.
What’s more, the analysis of lung transplant data from the U.S. between 2005 and 2011 confirms what transplant experts say they already know: For some patients on a crowded organ waiting list, lungs from smokers are better than none.
“I think people are grateful just to have a shot at getting lungs,” said Dr. Sharven Taghavi, a cardiovascular surgical resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, who led the new study………………………
Ive done the math here and this is how it works out with second ahnd smoke and people inhaling it!
The 16 cities study conducted by the U.S. DEPT OF ENERGY and later by Oakridge National laboratories discovered:
Cigarette smoke, bartenders annual exposure to smoke rises, at most, to the equivalent of 6 cigarettes/year.
146,000 CIGARETTES SMOKED IN 20 YEARS AT 1 PACK A DAY.
A bartender would have to work in second hand smoke for 2433 years to get an equivalent dose.
Then the average non-smoker in a ventilated restaurant for an hour would have to go back and forth each day for 119,000 years to get an equivalent 20 years of smoking a pack a day! Pretty well impossible ehh!
It doesn’t affect me either but they are coming for us.
This idiotic law is deliberately unenforceable. There will be cries of ‘Police do not have the resources to stop every smoking driver and check for chidren hidden in the glove compartment’.
So, they will extend it to all cars and my bet is they will do this before the law comes into effect.
Next step will be council houses, then housing associations, then private homes. You will not be able to smoke in your own home even if it is fifty miles from the next house and surrounded by fifteen acres of brambles covering a minefield, an electrified barbed-wire fence and machine-gun towers operated by motion sensors.
(That’s my dream home, by the way. One day…)
However, if Little Nicky Clegg has his way, you can shoot up heroin anywhere you like. The police will even hold your syringe steady for you.
I wouldn’t shoot these idiot politicians. I’d shoot everyone who voted for them.
Otherwise they’ll just vote in another one.
The very reason, that it is unenforcable, is why in a month ot two, they will start the bleating for banning smoking in ALL cars.
Then it WILL effect YOU!
Do not think because you have been taught by the dictatorship to be paranoid, that they are NOT out to get you.
Quite right, this ban is more about the continuation of smoker bashing rather than children’s health. They even admitted that denormalisation was part of their agenda. And yes, the ban in it’s existing form will be unenforceable, which give them the perfect excuse to extend it to vehicles regardless of whether or not brats are on board. There’ll simply be another amendment made. Given the track record of the control freak, it’s a total no brainer. Then, of course, they’ll push for a home ban – those with children first etc etc ….
As for pubs, many smokers weren’t regular pub goers pre-ban so could have made the same argument as above – it didn’t really affect them. It will now, the car ban owes everything to blind acceptance of the 2007 lie.
“Well for a start, I don’t have children. ”
So? As above with FT’s comment, what makes you think you won’t be affected in future?
Looks like this needs rolling out again:
“It’s like a bunch of folks on the scaffolds complaining that the other guy’s noose isn’t quite tight enough. Y’all might instead direct your attention to the hangman sometime and try helping each other cut those ropes. “
I’m chuckling along with Mr Jahom here, but for a slighly different reason. I don’t smoke in either of my cars – the company one because it’s “streng verboten” and my own because it takes less cleaning that way. No, the reason that I’m chuckling is that those who are lauding this piece of bullshit legislation simply don’t realise that they have finally allowed the state to cross that great rubicon of “private property” and that their turn is coming – before long legislation will be passed that affects something that they consider their right to do and their shrieks of protest will be met with “but you already agreed to something very similar” and “sorry, but the precedent has been set”