Tuesday
Jul012008
A touch of class
Tuesday, July 1, 2008 Libby Brooks, deputy comment editor of the Guardian, has THIS to say about Forest, smoking, and class in today's paper. Discuss.
Update on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by
Simon Clark
Simon Clark
See what ASH (and Forest) has to say: politics.co.uk has a feature on the smoking ban, one year on, HERE.
Reader Comments (16)
Disappointing. No real insights. Lots of clichés. Predictable Guardian stuff. This person needs to get out more too - although she's not as lousy a commentator as Polly Toynbee.
Everyone in the press seem to go on about this mythical 70% of smokers who want to give up, since the ban came in - where does this figure come from?
Just from my own area, smokers tend to smoke more now and go out less and even some ex smokers have started again! There are also those who have attempted to give up but not succeeded, which leads me to believe that all these figures bandied about by the NHS Stop Smoking scheme are mythical too! I am prepared to believe that it is possible that this number of people have contacted them about giving up, but I do not believe for one moment that the same number have succeeded!
It may too be a social thing, as Libby Brooks says, but from what I remember, hardened smoking from the late 50's (or maybe before) and through the 60's was the thing of the working class - social smoking was the thing of the better off, blue and white collar workers. Now that this sort of class distinction is being slowly eroded, there are no definite lines of segregation, that I can see.
Different people in different walks of life smoke for different reasons as we all have our own individual pressures to bear and as we are all different we all deal with them in a different way.
Just give us back the option of choice - that is all we ask - we do not want to pollute the air of the anti smokers - they can do that better themselves with the vitriol they usually spout! We just want our own space back to indulge in the legal product that we enjoy and that benefits us in the here and now.
Hello - but for an article in today's Guardian, I wouldn't have heard of Forest; it's great that there's some real lobbying in action. I want to add my voice to the chorus of disapproval at this egregious kick in the nuts.
I'm one of those irritating sods who can quite happily go all day without a fag, then have one or two at night. My real enjoyment, though, used to be in the pub - a pint and a fag: what could be more natural? I'd go all day, not even think about smoking, then easily smoke 10 or 15 in a night at the pub.
So what now? What complexion does my evening of civilised conversation, music, etc. take on now? Well, it's a fractured, disjointed, often freezing wet dog's dinner, punctuated by half-conversations with people I haven't chosen to be out with. I'm 42 years old and can make up my own mind about personal risk, and used to love nothing more than a night in my local. This is not the sum total of our social life, obviously, but when you've been about a bit, reared some
younglings, seen the world and experienced a wide range of cultural treasures, it comes as a slap in the chops to be told by a snivelling mandarin that I can't light up, unless I brave the Great British Weather.
They've taken all the joy out of a pint. It's not beyond the wit of man to designate some establishments smoke-free and some not. Is there mileage in the idea of a member-owned/co-op type of club or pub? In fact, some "pubs" could eventually become "privs".
The other side of this is, of course, the landlords who are going out of business and old folks in little labour clubs or rest-homes, who have to drag themselves out to the porch for a smoke(didn't some of their husbands die in the war for our freedom? I know my Grandad did). Also, there has been regrettable change on our streets; where once your average daytime drinker was hidden away, in a dank city-centre dump, with The Racing Channel on the box, he is now out on the pavement, making the place look bad. Ours is not to judge, but come on - the streets of Britain were already sliding into festering turpitude, without the added spike of withered malnourished pisspots, littering the place with phlegm and dimps. Get them back indoors!
Where was I? Oh, yes - so, after a pleasant hike around the hills of Lancashire, taking as much high velocity fresh air as possible, our cheeks pregnant with ruddy promise (this is one of our many healthy lifestyle choices, by the way) what better way to reward ourselves than with a country pint? The crucial part of this is: a fag is better savoured in a mellow, indoor atmosphere, not competing with fresh air, under a brolly - we've just done the Fresh Air Bit - and so we come to the payoff ... smoking is as natural as cultivating any other vegetable and doing something weird with it (stewed rhubarb anyone?) and to serve us from on high with a paternalistic ban like this is almost Orwellian.
So carry on the good work but failing armed insurrection, I don't know what could force a softening of this jackbooted nannying.
End bit: picture the scene ... United are in a European Cup tie, usually a night where you can barely find a seat in the pubs I go to on European nights... me & my mate roll up and we're the onnly ones in the pub, except two young-uns playing pool. No atmos, no camaraderie, no takings for the landlord, you get the idea. Walking back around 11.00, almost every window I pass has front rooms full
of beer cans, smokers and TVs tuned to Shameless. So is the long term plan to have the lumpen proles all tucked up at home, constantly absorbing media messages from global media giants?
Thanks for listening.
Yours, fuming, but not as I'd like.
'Choice is about class too'. The upper classes are the main owners of Chelsea tractors. Smokers may only kill themselves, but drivers of such cars may be killing the earth with global warming.
You might want to have a look at the debate that's going on at the Spectator.
See:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/808641/the-smoking-ban-one-year-on.thtml#comments
Mzz Brooks takes a typical Grauniadista stance, which is summed-up in newspeak as "helping people make better choices". Us poor disadvantaged people that is; those of us not posessing the illiberal elite's apparently superior grasp of statistics, epidemiology and the miraculous health-benefits of smoker-bans as exemplified by that never-published Jill Pell "study".
So "helping people make better choices" = "We know best, so do as you're jolly well told, peasant! That's your socialism.".
I see commenting on that article has been differently-abled. Perhaps Mzz Brooks fears being contradicted by people who actually know their subject.
I think ash should get their bloody nose out of my affairs the hypocritical morons. I like a fag and i will continue to smoke and will not be forced into giving up just because these load of overpaid morons want me to. And if i carnt smoke inside then i am dammed if i am going to put my fag out outside. They dont own the country or the world for that matter. They are a load of sad sad people that havent got anything worth while in their life so they try to control everyone well your not going to control me so put that in your pipe and smoke it you idiots.
Having read Ms Brooke's piece, I have to say, as someone from the lower classes, that I'm appalled she thinks we're too thick to make our own choices and our masters in the upper classes should morally make them for us. How dare she? I wonder when she last left the Guardian offices, and her middle and upperclass mates, to actually find out what real life on the streets and estates in Britain is really like and what people, poor maybe, but quite capable of making their own decisions, really think - especially about people like her who think they are so much better!.
I still laugh at the sketch from The Frost Report 'I know my place', with John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. The Government would love us all to accept our place.
Oops, commenting has been re-enabled...
Turns out it wuz the NoScript doofer in my browser, blocking all the Grauniad ad-bot nasties as well as the comment-box.
I was interested in what Libby Brooks said about 'taking in more Nicotine from each cigarette.'
Let's take Nicotine Patches, some of these are designed to be left on for 24hrs, the inhalor you can puff on 24 hrs a day, as for the gum I know people that smoke while chewing it, which doubles the nicotine intake. With cigarettes smokers refrain from smoking whilst asleep, with some NRT there's no such break. So I've come to see it that the antis, in their quest to keep the funding rolling, are encouraging 24hr nictotine, the very thing they say we should be forced to give up.
So I wonder if she can explain what health benefits there is to smokers then. What is better, nicotine for part of a 24hr period or round the clock nicotine. Nicotine is nicotine whatever way it passes into the system.
Therefore, in my opinion, all advocates of NRT, those high profile promoters ASH, Liam Donaldson, the NHS and the ones that reap the biggest rewards, pharmaceutical companies, are on a par with the tobacco companies they so readily denigrate for supplying, what the antis term addictive nicotine. So in effect they should be sued for knowlingly supplying harmful products, the same as the tobacco companies were sued.
What an appalling, patronising piece of dross is Libby Brooks.
Perhaps the very concept of the Smoking Ban experiment was to keep the lower classes in their place, to be educated by those who think they're better and know better.
When you look at it this ban has hit them the hardest. The middle/upper class don't frequent the places the lower classes do, high/back street pubs or bingo halls, the places that cater to these people are usually larger and more sophisticated than your down the road pub.
Wonder if Ms brooks uses a super length cigarette holder that stretches out the door while partaking of her lower class habit, so she doesn't have to venture outside where she can be seen by the very people she thinks need to be educated by her ilk.
Where will it end when those like Brooks think that people not of their social standing aren't intelligent to run their own lives
In my humble opinion you can't get a lower class than the likes of Libby Brooks, she's a disgrace.
What is better, nicotine for part of a 24hr period or round the clock nicotine. Nicotine is nicotine whatever way it passes into the system. - Joan
Look, it's quite simple. Nicotine delivered by cigarette is 'bad' nicotine which is addictive and kills people, but nicotine delivered by patch is 'good' nicotime. In fact it's a miracle wonder drug.
Joan, I believe that the the rationale behind NRT is that it isn't the nicotine in ciggies that's bad for you but the other nasties. NRT supposedly helps in tackling the 'addiction' by providing nicotine while the quitter gets used to breaking the habit of smoking.
The problem, of course, is that it's the nicotine that provides the pleasure so, in continuing to supply nicotine, NRT keeps the quitter hooked. Probably one reason why the success rate of quitting through NRT is so poor. Another reason, I think, is that NRT doesn't deal with the psychology of smoking/quitting. Every ex-smoker I've spoken to has said that when they quit it was because they really, really wanted to which is why HMG's bullying is not only odious but ineffectual. I'm sure that the stats generated from smoking-cessation clinics are completely untrustworthy, it certainly isn't in their interests to monitor rates of relapse.
I think that it was F2C that highlighted that an initiative to produce 'safe' cigarettes was blocked by the tobacco control lobby - says it all, really.
I understand that Premier Foods, Bury St Edmunds have banned the electric cigarette from it's grounds, because the cameras (more like the person viewing the camera) cannot tell the difference from real cigarettes. So much for helping people to quit.
Idlex, good, and true description.
Joyce, thanks for that, but I should have emphasised it with a great deal of sarcasm, it was supposed to be a tongue in cheek post.
Although I do find it ironic that they promote and make money out of an addictive product they're forever stating is bad for you.
Still double standards and hypocrisy is second nature to the antis