The Royal Society for Public Health's good cop/bad cop routine

The Royal Society for Public Health, one of the more ghastly nanny state outfits, is playing good cop/bad cop by calling for outdoor smoking bans while making friendly noises about e-cigarettes. The BBC has focused on the former, the Guardian on the latter.

Needless to say, there is not a shred of evidence to justify outdoor bans on health grounds. As the BBC says...

Unlike the original smoking ban the focus is no longer on the dangers of second-hand smoke.

As should now be clear to even the dullest minds, secondhand smoke was only ever an excuse. The real aim - the aim of all anti-smoking policies - was to harass and stigmatise smokers. It is now becoming difficult for the vermin of 'pubic health' to pretend that there is anything else to justify their vendetta against a fifth of the adult population. Hence, the official rationale of smoking 'exclusion zones' (as the RSPH are calling them) is to make smoking 'an abnormal activity'.

If you have a belief in anything approaching a free society, you will appreciate that it is not the job of government to decide what is normal, and it is certainly not the job of the police to enforce such opinions. One in five people smoke, so it is clearly common enough to be described as normal, but even if it was much less prevalent, it would not - or, at least, should not - be a matter for the police. A state that persecutes people because they are in a minority is on the road to fascism.

The 'public health' racket bandies prohibitions around so casually that it easy to forget the consequences. Bans lead to people being arrested, prosecuted, fined and sometimes imprisoned (people have gone to prison over the smoking ban in England). The RSPH are effectively saying that a person should be arrested and punished for portraying a common - but, in their view undesirable - activity as normal. This deserves no more than a two word response.

As for their eleventh hour conversion to vaping, who cares? First the 'public health' racket ignored e-cigarettes, then they tried to ban them and now they want to offer their support. Listen, lads, we don't need you, we don't trust you and we don't want you. You were asleep on the job when e-cigarettes emerged because you were too busy pushing illiberal and ineffective nanny state policies like plain packaging. Now that smoking rates have finally started to drop again thanks to vaping, you want to take the credit.

No dice. Vapers haven't forgotten how you treated them when they were smokers and you're not going to use e-cigarettes as an excuse to treat them even worse. We know you think inhaling nicotine through an electrical device is just as 'abnormal' as inhaling it through a cylinder of tobacco, and we know how you want to treat people who deviate from the norm. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!