Terms and Conditions
Yearning for their lockdown glory days, the British public craves yet another ban on things they don't like.
Is there a more perilous question than, ‘What does the Great British public think?’
According to opinion polls, those barometers of human rationality, two-thirds of my fellow citizens support a two-drink limit in airports. A further 58 percent would ban smoking from outside pubs, stadiums and even small parks.
During the COVID pandemic, my fellow Brits conducted the most comprehensive conformity study in history. With consummate relish, around one-third—many of them my neighbours, friends, and acquaintances—dutifully played the role of ‘guard’ in that nationwide Stanford Prison Experiment.
Facebook groups ironized their ‘community’ monikers.
“Hi, my neighbour has gone outside for a SECOND run today. We all know the rules! Who should I get in touch with?” went a wearily familiar post.
Ignore the faulty logic of that public denunciation. In a disease-transmission context, one would think a person literally running away is an ideal specimen. Your risk of catching a disease from someone running away from you decreases markedly with each step they take. Never mind that. Concentrate instead on that therapeutic ‘we’.
That therapeutic ‘we’ causes us wearied Brits all manner of trouble. Reader, whenever a member of the progressive community says, ‘We need to have a conversation about…’ Stop right there. That ‘we’ doesn’t include you and that ‘conversation’ means ‘an unimpeachable decree in which you have no say.’
This week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a constipated husk who wouldn’t crack a smile if he saw a cat tango, proposed to ban smoking outside of pubs, stadiums, and the like. Well, he proposed nothing. The plans leaked out of government and on to the front page of The Sun.
When asked if this was true, Sir Starmer the Humourless adopted the therapeutic we so beloved of repressive minds. “We are going to take decisions in this space,” he said. “More details will be revealed…”
What he means is the narrow clique to which he is hostage—the technocratic Sensibles tribe—have decided they don’t like those errant wisps of cigarette smoke which glance their nostrils on their rare safaris to where the masses gather.
True to form, Starmer claimed what his ilk always claims: It’ll save lives. Oh, and it’ll save ‘our’ NHS (Peace be upon her) billions of pounds.
Okay. First, smokers pay three times in taxes than what they take out. Second, smoking kills 80,000 a year. True. But banning smoking outside a pub won’t tickle that figure downwards. Smokers harm nobody but themselves.
Another linguistic cudgel favoured by the Sensible tribe is ‘second-hand smoke.’ For decades, the vegan-leather jackboots at Action on Smoking and Health have insisted on the watery science of passive smoking.
Campaigners rely on studies which show many have suffered from the perils of passive smoking. I don’t dispute that. But in those studies, the concerned were exposed to decades of their partner’s passive smoke whilst cocooned in their homes. From these extreme examples, anti-smoking zealots claim a wisp of highly diluted smoke floating around The French House smoking area presents the same risk to one’s health.
In 2013, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found ‘no clear link between passive smoking and lung cancer.’ Compromised? In the filthy pockets of Big Tobacco? Hardly. It’s the National Cancer Institute.
Scientists from Stanford and elsewhere studied the cases of 76,000 women. This was hardly a straw poll in the French House smoking area. Researchers found that the incidence of lung cancer was thirteen times higher in current smokers, and four times higher in former smokers, than amongst those who’d never smoked.
“However, among women who had never smoked, exposure to passive smoking overall, and to most categories of passive smoking, did not significantly increase lung cancer risk,” it read.
Interestingly, researchers discovered: “The only category of exposure that showed a trend toward increased risk was living in the same house with a smoker for 30 years or more.”
Jyoti Patel, MD, of the Northwestern University School of Medicine, said that a lifetime non-smoker who lived for thirty years with a smoker had a two-fold higher risk than normal.
The research “mimics the numbers we’ve known,” she said back then.
“In the existing literature, an active smoker who smokes two packs a day for 30 years has a 60-fold-higher risk of lung cancer than a never-smoker, and a never-smoking woman living with a smoking husband for 30 years has a twofold-higher risk.
“Passive smoking has many downstream health effects—asthma, upper respiratory infections, other pulmonary diseases, cardiovascular disease—but only borderline increased risk of lung cancer,” said Patel.
Reader, I’m not a medical doctor. I’m not a scientist. I’m not saying passive smoking is totally harmless. Nor am I saying we must roll back to 2006 when your underaged narrator was last happy and content. But I am saying there’s a difference between sucking up passive smoke for thirty years and catching an errant wisp of cigarette smoke outside a pub.
Of course, I could ask the pathologically nosey anti-smoking fanatics to clarify what I feel to be contradictory messaging. But I’d might as well ask Emily Ratajkowski if she fancies a Whiskey Sour in Soho this fine evening.
Doctors ceaselessly insist that quitting smoking confers heavenly health benefits. No doubt. But when held up side-by-side, two common claims don’t hold water.
The first, as highlighted in this study, claims that if one quits smoking by 45, you’ll cut your risk of lung cancer by 87 percent. Quit by 35 or 40, they say, and it’s as if you’ve never smoked.
And yet, the same people often claim that catching a momentary wisp of smoke in a beer garden may forever ruin your health. Therefore, they clamour for a total ban.
Reader, not to be a prig, but if one is true, then it renders the other highly implausible. According to anti-smoking campaigners, most smokers can puff away for decades before causing any permanent damage. That said, does it follow that an errant ribbon of smoke causes untold harm?
What is this puritanical proposal really about? We live in tribal times in which one tribe—The Sensibles—a cadre of right-on politicians, journalists, and other shapeshifting self-seekers—enjoy nothing more than to push others about whilst feeling good about themselves.
We are governed by a coterie of virtue-drunk busybodies who demand to feel vastly more important than God or Darwin had ever intended them to be.
The Sensibles (a term I did not coin, but the author evades me…) can rely on the support of a great swathe of Brits eager to ban whatever they don’t like this week.
As Britain threatened normality back in 2021, much of the Great British public itched for harder, deeper, longer, and more punitive punishments and restrictions.
Have a butcher’s at this poll in The Economist. Forty percent wanted masks full-time. A quarter yearned to shut casinos and nightclubs. One-third craved socially distanced pubs and clubs. A sizeable rump—one in five—pined for a national curfew. Reader, they wanted this lunacy permanently.
Forgive me, then, for rolling my eyes whenever the Great British public waves its collective hard-on for punishing people whom they don’t know for doing things with which they don’t agree.
After all, opinion polls are revealing. One third believe in astrology. Another third believes the Illuminati controls humanity.
Live and let live works both ways. If the British public are free to indulge in these mostly harmless, eccentric habits of the mind, then I should be free to indulge in mostly harmless, eccentric habits of my own.
And yet, fifteen percent of the British public believes there’s a monster living in Loch Ness. Allow me to ponder such unearthly wisdom over a cigarette and a mutant-strength Whiskey Sour outside my local pub.
Instead of a mutant strength Whiskey Sour, I would recommend a triple Scotch, neat. Reputedly, that was the source of the first Nessie sighting after all.
Don’t diss Nessie, she’s my neighbour. And she smokes Gauloises.