Anti-smoking protestor hijacks plinth
Monday, July 6, 2009 Desperate stuff. Full story HERE.
It won't surprise you to know that anti-smoking campaigner Stuart Holmes is a familar face to Forest and a fixture at the main party conferences where he turns up, year after year, with his soapbox and anti-tobacco banners. (Credit where credit's due, he's persistent.)
Needless to say this is not the first time Holmes has gate-crashed someone else's event. Four years ago, at the Labour conference in Brighton, he tried to hijack a Forest photo call featuring David Hockney by entering the hotel where it was taking place, standing next to the great man, and refusing to move.
Hockney found the whole thing hilarious. His air of benign tolerance spoke volumes. (Full story HERE.)
Last year, at the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth, I found myself on the same stretch of promenade as Holmes. He was on his soapbox (as usual) and I was handing out flyers to promote a meeting we were organising.
When he realised who I was (or who I represented) he spent much of the next hour demanding that I stand on his box and justify myself. It was an uncomfortable morning, to say the least.
Fortunately he was making so much noise that my old friend Glen Oglaza of Sky News, who was trying to work on the balcony behind us, eventually called down and told him to shut up!!
Now, if I'd done that ...
Reader Comments (11)
The anti-smoking campaigner Stuart Holmes, looked like a complete nut on that plinth, especially when he wouldn't let go of his pathetic placard, like some naughty child refusing to put the hammer down when daddy has told him to.
To be honest, I think the whole thing of letting idiots of one kind or another climb onto the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square is ridiculous. Trafalgar Square was designed to commemorate the great and the good, not as a showing off place for pathetic idiots.
Isn't he unemployed?
If so, he's got a cheak bleating about how much smokers cost society, etc (when we don't). He should be putting his efforts into finding a job instead of leaching off us tax-payers, just like everyone else.
Shouldn't he be doing his job-search and sending his CVs off instead of gallivanting all over the country spreading his extreme views?
Will Gormley be so tolerant of other protesters taking over his... erm... plinth, I wonder, or is the tolerance just for self-righteous extremist doinks?
And, yes, he's a claimant. He's where our income-tax ends up.
My blood boiled when I read the protect children line on the muppetts banner.
I am sick fed up of being compared to some sort of child abuser by cretins like this.
Don't we have anti hate laws in this country.
If he was protesting against another minority it would have been a different story.
ps
Get a bloody job you sponger.
Tongue-in-Cheek here at mine.
And Mark Wadsworth points out the flaw in his figures.
It'll be interesting to see if ASH put this story on their web-site as I'd presume it's not the sort of nutter they would like to be associated with.
I believe that there are going to be people standing on top of that plinth for 100 days an hour at a time. That's 2,400 people in total. Since smokers make up at least 25% of the population, that suggests that something like 600 smokers will be standing on top of it. And what do smokers like doing when they're outside on their own these days?... The one antismoker may well be about to be outnumbered 600 to 1.
I quite liked Boris Johnson's groan-inducing words as he began it all: "I can't bring you the People's Princess., but I can give you the People's Plinth."
So if Gormley thinks that is an admirable expression of free speech, I take it he will be quite approachable about the idea of someone standing on his plinth with an Amend The Smoking Ban sign.
Perhaps we could ask him? ;-)
Let us hope that none of our pro-smoking friends do anything so stupid! From our point of view, it is EXCELLENT that this nutter did what he did. The Chief Medical Officer and Co. must have absolutely cringed.
From now on, we can say to all the nutty professors, "Get on your plinth!" and show them for what they are - nutters.
I am going the write to the Daily Telegraph NOW, and ask for more similar displays by Patricia Hewitt and Caroline Flint.
Male menapause I would say.
I was amazed the crane man didnt have a white coat and an injection in his hand.
It just goes to show the bigotry us smokers have to deal with every day of the week.
On the other hand the anti smoking brigade must be getting very worried with our recent campaigns when they have to resort to employing nutters clandestinely.
Nothing like a recession to bring the head bangers out of the woodwork, in my opinion a good dose of a water cannon would sort out all those con 'artists'.
A real health freak. On one site he even said that alcohol should only be sold in pubs.