Nick Hogan jailed for 6 months

Nick Hogan has become the first person in Britain—and one of the first in the world—to be imprisoned for taking a stand against the smoking ban. He has been given a six month prison sentence for non-payment of a £10,000 fine. His crime was allowing people to smoke on his own property.

Both the fine and the prison sentence are completely disproportionate to the offence but it has been clear from the outset that the authorities intended to make an example of Hogan. The offence itself—"allowing people to smoke"—is absurd and has no place in a civilised society; the state has no right to force individuals to act as policemen.

The excessive fine of £3,000 was bolstered by ludicrously high court costs and further penalties. In my view, Hogan was right to refuse to pay it. In taking a stand he may have expected some sort of custodial sentence. Nobody could have expected a sentence of six months. A quick Google search shows us what company Nick Hogan has been placed amongst...

Two months

Brighton woman jailed after campaign of violence

A woman who carried out a campaign of violence and intimidation against council tenants has been jailed. Shirley Miles, 45, has been given a two-month prison sentence for anti-social behaviour.

During her terror campaign at a number of council properties in Kemp Town, Brighton, Miles abused two vulnerable tenants, using a razor blade toattack and cut a tenant's face and body.

She also caused criminal damage to council property and stole property and money.

Three months

Dungiven man jailed for three months

A Dungiven man convicted of sexual offences has been sent to jail for three months and ordered to sign the Sex Offenders' Register for seven years.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was convicted of gross indecency with a child and indecent assault on a female.

Four months

Merseyside teenager jailed for four months for 'despicable and horrendous' animal cruelty

A MERSEYSIDE teenager was sent to jail for four months for setting dogs on defenceless animals and filming them being ripped to pieces.

Six months

Baby beater jailed for six months

A man who was caught on camera repeatedly punching a friend's sleeping baby has been jailed for six months.

Hogan's 'crime' was, above all, a political protest so perhaps it would be better to compare his sentence against other political protesters. Like Greenpeace, for example, who cause criminal damage and yet are still acquitted:

Not guilty: the Greenpeace activists who used climate change as a legal defence

Six Greenpeace climate change activists have been cleared of causing £30,000 of criminal damage at a coal-fired power station in a verdict that is expected to embarrass the government and lead to more direct action protests against energy companies.

Note that these people admitted to causing £30,000 worth of damage. Despite being manifestly guilty, they were acquitted because their defence was, effectively, that global warming was sufficient provocation.

This is not a unique case. Take this one from 2001...

Trident protesters found not guilty

Two anti-nuclear protesters who entered a dockyard planning to disarm one of Britain's Trident submarines with an axe were yesterday cleared of conspiracy to cause criminal damage.

Sylvia Boyes, 57, from Keighley, West Yorkshire, and River - formerly Keith Wright - 45, from Manchester, admitted that they plotted to damage HMS Vengeance while it was docked at Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, in November 1999.

But they denied criminal damage, claiming their actions were justifed because nuclear weapons were immoral and illegal under international law. They argued politicians could not be trusted with Britain's nuclear arsenal, so civilians had to act to stop disaster.

Or this from 1996...

£1.5m Hawk attack women freed

Four women walked free from Liverpool Crown Court yesterday after a jury found them not guilty of criminal charges despite their admission that they did more than pounds 1.5m worth of damage to a Hawk warplane.

They broke into hangar 358 and used hammers to damage the plane in 25 places. All four claimed their actions were justified because the Hawk was destined for Indonesia, where it would be used against the civilians of East Timor.

The three cases above involved a jury trial, something that Hogan was not afforded. The disgraceful treatment dished out to a decent man who has caused no harm to anybody is further proof that the idea of equality before the law is a dead concept in Britain. If you have a politically correct excuse for your crimes, you are set free. If not, you are thrown to the dogs.

Leg-Iron has more on this.

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A little light reading (2)

A lot of good stuff around the web this week...

Tobacco Harm Reduction finds an explanation for social engineering from Terry Pratchett:

Paraphrasing, the observation was that the problem faced by self-declared revolutionaries of the people is not that we have the wrong government — that goes without saying — but that we have the wrong people. In other words, the self-styled revolutionary has talked himself into believing that he is devoting his life to save the people from their oppressors. But he usually discovers, much to his frustration, the people do not really mind how things are — at least not enough to join him on the barricades.

So eventually, after breaking the power of the old guard, the Peoples’ Revolutionaries (c.f. Stalin, Mao, Castro, et al.) they have to start devoting their energies to controlling the behavior of the people who they were supposedly try to help because those damn people just do not understand what is good for them.

At the Sunday Times, Minette Marrin is bang on the money, echoing the idea set out by Peter Obourne in The Triumph of the Political Class:

What’s really going on, I think, is that the nature of class war has changed. The old virus has mutated. The old social and political divisions have given way to two new classes — rather as on the trains. Those in economy are most of us, paying for the comforts of those in first class. And those in first class are the new political class — all those who owe their advancement and their security and their pensions and their privileges not to their backgrounds or their talents, or even necessarily their political parties, but to the state and our taxes.

At Spiked, Patrick Hayes has a great article about the British government's massive expenditure on public service advertising:

Nothing better reveals the contempt in which the New Labour government holds the British public than its advertising campaigns. Millions of pounds are being spent to ensure that wherever there is a potential captive audience there will be a government advert telling you how disgusting you are.

I would only add that one effect of having the government as the country's biggest advertiser is that it acts as a disincentive for commercial organisations to criticise its schemes. When the news comes from an independent source like ITN this isn't too much of problem, but I know from working in the local press that if one of your major sources of revenue is the council or health authority, this cannot help but influence editorial decisions.

As reported by Pub Curmudgeon, the UK's public health minister is mad, stupid or a liar. Whichever it is, she's not fit to hold office.

“The pub trade does have challenges and I am aware of that but it isn’t the case that the ban had led to pub closures.”

Taking Liberties has more on this jaw-dropping comment.

Tobacco Truth has more on thirdhand smoke hysteria:

The anti-tobacco extremists’ motto: if you can measure it, it must be deadly.

And finally, Stanton "trust me, I'm a doctor of mechanical engineering" Glantz gives a lesson in how to lose friends and alienate people from his San Francisco bunker. Still banging on about smoking in the movies, he takes pride in Julia Roberts' assistant sending his junk mail back unread and threatening to sue him. After calling actors 'self-absorbed jerks', the great scientist recalls how one of the major studios also threatened to sue him. 

This is followed up in the New York Times, with Glantz admitting that the Smokefree Movies ruse is designed to lose studios money:

Dr. Glantz led the way to hold tobacco companies accountable for profiting from smoking, and did the same with Hollywood, helping expose and end product-placement deals that promoted cigarette brands in movies. His current Smoke Free Movies campaign wants films that include smoking to receive R ratings, which might substantially hurt their box office receipts.

“That’s the whole idea,” Dr. Glantz said.

Way to wins hearts and minds, Stan!

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That French anti-smoking advert

Whenever you think anti-smoking activists have scraped the bottom of every barrel, they plumb new depths. Taking Liberties reports an almost unbelievable new anti-smoking advert in France that makes a bizarre connection between smoking and sexual abuse. You can see the ad here. Taking Liberties comments:

"As far as I know, practising fellatio doesn't cause cancer," said a spokeswoman for the Movement for Women's Liberation. I think this misses the point of the advertisement which, as I see it, implies that under-age smoking is on a par with a teenager being forced to have (oral) sex with a middle-aged man (ie child abuse or sexual assault if not rape).

Or am I reading too much into this?

I don't think he is reading too much into it and nor does The Strait Times:

Child sex anti-smoking ad

Deliberately shocking anti-smoking adverts that compare nicotine addiction to sexual abuse, and which the French government has vowed to ban, sparked a lively debate on Wednesday.

The ads show a man pushing a kneeling child's face towards his crotch. Two feature boys and one a girl. The children look fearfully up at him, holding in their mouth a cigarette that appears to protrude from his fly. Under the image runs the slogan: 'Smoking makes you a slave to tobacco.'

There is so much wrong with this campaign that it is hard to know where to begin. It should be emphasised that this is not an official government campaign. It comes from France's Non-Smokers' Rights Association (who funds them, I wonder, and what does this ad have to do with nonsmokers' rights?) The health minister and the minister for families have both spoken out against the ad.

But that fact that anyone could (a) come up with such an idea, and (b) go through with it, gives you some idea of how warped these people's minds are. This is, to use activist parlance, 'the next logical step' in a campaign that knows no limits of taste and whose values have become hopelessly twisted. It is the product of an ideology that says that smoking is bad therefore anything that is anti-smoking must be acceptable. As I have long said, this fallacious reasoning leads us down a very dangerous road.

Whether it's the quack science of second- and third-hand smoke, or ads like this, the failure of normal people to speak out and bring some measure of sense and proportion has allowed the lunatics to run free. Obsessive and mentally unbalanced individuals have found a crusade which allows them to act without restraint or reason.

Ads like this are the inevitable outcome of denormalisation. Ironically, they serve only to expose the people behind them as being far from normal. Their mask of sanity is slipping.

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Smoking bans on the ropes

It's been a bad few weeks for smoking ban lovers. After events in Croatia last year, Macedonia's exceptionally draconian smoking ban — which includes some outdoor places — is coming under severe pressure. The law came into force last month, with a predictably devastating effect on trade. Now, even the Public Health Committee is having second thoughts:

The Macedonian parliament's Public Health Committee Wednesday endorsed the ruling party's motion to amend the strict anti-smoking law that has angered the country's many smokers since its introduction in January.

No wonder. Businesses are so angry that they closed down en masse for a day last month in protest.

The amendments come after the Macedonian Tourism Chamber revealed a survey showing an astonishing 90 per cent drop in profits among café and restaurant owners since the new law entered into force.

90 per cent? Ouch! Don't they know smoking bans are good for business?

In Poland, a proposal to 'protect' bar-workers from secondhand smoke has been opposed by... er, bar-workers. With a nice line in irony, the Polish Bar Tenders Association are asking the government to protect them from the smoking ban...

Polish bar tenders have addressed a dramatic appeal to Parliament warning that the planned ban on smoking in restaurants and pubs will cause many to go bankrupt.

The Polish Bar Tenders Association, which wrote the letter to the lawmakers, says their profession needs to be protected against the impact of the anti-smoking legislation.

In Cyprus, a group of MPs are organising to get the smoking ban overturned. The reason, of course, is that the Cypriots have seen the usual fall in bar trade:

Themistocleous told the Cyprus Mail yesterday, “This law does not just attack the tourist trade and bar and restaurant owners: it attacks all Cypriots. We hope to change the law by April and in any case before July.”

In a survey of bar owners last month, some estimated that their revenue had dropped by up to 40 per cent. Yesterday, however, one owner of a popular Nicosia bar said that the worst affected have reported 60 per cent losses.

And in Bulgaria, the smoking ban has been liberalised before it's even been introduced...

Bulgaria's ruling party ready to qualify ban on public smoking

Amendments aimed at qualifying the full ban on smoking in all public places in Bulgaria, due to come into force on June 1 2010, will be introduced by ruling party GERB, Bulgarian media said on February 18 2010.

The full ban, it was believed, would undermine Bulgaria's tourism and restaurant industry. The amendments will be more flexible to enable restaurant and bar owners to comply with the ban.

This now looks like a done deal, but the leader of the right-wing Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria is nonplussed, saying that it is...

"not a European thing to do"

Which should remind us what this is really about. It is significant that these countries are recent EU member states or are hoping to become members (see also: Turkey). Smoking bans are the easiest way to win gold stars from the EU mandarins, but, as time goes on, the claim that business will be unaffected becomes more and more difficult to sustain. Which is why a growing number of countries including Croatia, Portugal, Liectenstein, the Czech Republic, Greece, much of Germany and now Macedonia and Bulgaria have either voted against a ban or have amended it. As I reported recently, the ban in the Netherlands is being widely flouted, while the Spanish are going cold on bringing in "comprehensive" legislation.

But in Britain, despite a looming election, none of the big three parties are giving the public any reason to believe they will amend the law, despite overwhelming evidence that it has decimated the pub trade. The Tories don't see it as a vote winner and are terrified of announcing any policy that might be in the least bit controversial. 

Seems to me that announcing a modest amendment that would allow smoking in some rooms or venues would win them votes from people who wouldn't normally vote Conservative, whereas it's hard to believe that many people are so intolerant as to vote against them just because they propose a little accommodation.

Whatever the case may be, it will be interesting to see if Gordon Brown cites the smoking ban as one of Labour's achievements when the campaign begins proper. He might do, but then he's not the politician Tony Blair was. A shrewd operator to the end, Blair quit four days before the ban came into force.

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Fat chance

They mean 2020, of course. Is the sub-editor of The Times on holiday, or is this headline a subtle satire on the soothsayers of public health, who were making drastic predictions about 2010 a few short years ago?

Predictions like this:

England to have 13m obese by 2010

More than 12m adults and one million children will be obese by 2010 if no action is taken, a report by the Department of Health is predicting.

Did that happen? Of course not. Back then (2006) the big headlines were about childhood obesity, which was supposed to rocket up. In fact, this happened:


It went down. This epic fail has been implicitly recognised by the new forecasters, who say:

“Unlike the recent report on child obesity, which showed some indications of a plateauing or at least a significant reduction in the rate of obesity..."

That sentence is the wrong way round, surely? Whatever. The point is that childhood obesity has fallen and was already falling when the public health doomsayers were warning of the sky falling on our heads. But hey, everyone makes mistakes. Let's change the subject...

"...the future projections for adults are less optimistic.”

Well, naturally. Show me an optimistic projection for anything to do with obesity and I'll show you a public health professional heading for demotion. Having cocked up the childhood obesity predictions, they are now focusing on adult obesity which has risen, albeit by a lot less than was predicted. It means they lose the think-of-the-children aspect, which is politically inconvenient, but nevermind.

The study, led by Professor Klim McPherson, of the University of Oxford, uses figures from 1993 to 2007 to predict future levels of obesity in England. It says that about 41 per cent of men aged 20 to 65 will be obese by 2020 and 40 per cent will be overweight; 36 per cent of women will be obese and 32 per cent will be overweight.

As the Department of Health recently - though quietly - announced, male obesity is 24% and female obesity is 25% (see here, p. 14). This is significantly less than the 33% and 28% predicted in 2006, but it is significantly more than the 16% and 13% recorded in 1998.

Leaving aside issues of data collection, that is a pretty big rise in obesity. In ten years, an extra 8% of men and 12% of women have become obese.

The new projection says that a further 17% of men and 12% of women will become obese in the next ten years. Altogether, they say, a total of 81% of men will be overweight or obese by 2020. Any projection that suggests that fewer than 1 in 5 men will be normal (or under) weight in ten years time should raise eyebrows.

And how do they get to these figures? By using "figures from 1993 to 2007". But the past is no guide to the future. How do we know that the biggest rise hasn't already come and gone? Buried away in the Health England Survey is an indication that this is exactly what has happened (emphasis mine).

Between 1993 and 2008, there has been a marked increase in the proportion who were obese. This proportion increased from 13% of men in 1993 to 24% in 2008 and from 16% of women in 1993 to 25% in 2008. However, the rate of increase in obesity prevalence has been slower in the second half of the period than the first half, and there are indications that the trend may be flattening out, at least temporarily.

You can't just extrapolate from previous figures. The childhood obesity figures show us that. Contrary to received wisdom, obesity is not a disease. It is not contagious and it won't spread inexorably. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that obesity in America has not increased at all since 1999. 

The JAMA study is important because it shows that obesity flat-lined at 32.2% (men) and 35.5% (women). The new British projections give figures of 41% (men) and 36% (women). Is it really likely that the UK is going to overtake the fattest country in the world - by quite some way in the case of men? Isn't it much more likely that, as with children and as with the US, the 'epidemic' will peak long before it gets to that point?

Public health projections are, quite simply, worthless. Whether the issue is swine flu, smoking or obesity, they are never anything but guesses (how could it be otherwise?). They are intended purely for the purposes of lobbying. Nothing else.

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Blistering barnacles!

Turkish TV fined for showing Captain Haddock smoking

Turkey's media watchdog has fined a private television channel over scenes in the Tintin cartoon that show Captain Haddock and other villains smoking.

Now, I'm more of an Asterix man myself, but surely Haddock wasn't one of the villains? Let's check up on Wikipedia...

Haddock was first introduced as the whiskey loving captain of the Karaboudjan, a merchant vessel used by his first mate Allan Thompson without his knowledge for drug smuggling. Due to his alcoholism and temperamental nature, he is characterized as weak and unstable, at times posing as great a hazard to Tintin as the villains of the piece. He is also short-tempered, given to emotional and expletive-ridden outbursts, and capable of infuriating behavior; at one point in the album he even attacks Tintin

This guy sounds like a great role model for children. If only he didn't smoke, he'd be perfect.

Turkish broadcasters normally blur the images of cigarettes, pipes and smoke to evade fines, but critics say the method is counter-productive as it disrupts the viewer's attention and draws it to the smoking scene.

D' ya think? Come to think of it, doesn't Tintin carry a gun in these stories? And don't people get shot and killed?

One board member objected to the fine, arguing that children can distinguish between the fiction and non-fiction...

You mean to say that Explorers on the Moon and The Crab with the Golden Claws is fiction? Billions of bilious blistering blue barnacles!

...and that smoking fitted with the features of villains.

Of course. And what better way to show that a character is evil than having him smoke?

In Turkey, the world's 10th largest tobacco consummer, almost one in three adults smoke, with the rate reaching 48 percent among men.

So no chance of children seeing anyone smoking in real life then? Good work guys. Now if we can just ban Avatar, we should be well on our way.

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Smoking bans in Europe

In Britain, one of the lemons we get sold by the media is that our smoking ban is really no different to those elsewhere. And if the rest of the world is doing it, why grumble?

As I've said before, this really isn't true. The total smoking ban is a phenomenon largely confined to the English-speaking world. I was in the Netherlands last week - and will be again next month for TICAP - of which the BBC reported in 2004:

Dutch clamp down on public smoking

Dutch smokers have begun the New Year with severe restrictions placed on where and when they can light up.

Laws which came into effect at midnight ban smoking in many public places including railway stations, trains, toilets and offices.

Okay, not that "severe", but then in 2008, the BBC told us:

Dutch smoking ban goes into force

A tobacco smoking ban has come into effect in cafes, bars and restaurants in the Netherlands.

The country is following a growing trend across Europe and the world of bans on smoking in public places.

This was followed by widespread protests from the Dutch which, of course, were not reported by the BBC:

Dutch cafe owners rally against smoking ban
Nov 29, 2008

THE HAGUE (AFP) — Dutch cafe owners on Saturday took to the streets of The Hague in protest at a smoking ban they say has seen business drop by up to a third.

And last year, a court ruled that the smoking ban didn't apply to owner-run bars (again, not reported by the Beeb):

Dutch smoking ban is up in the air

The appeals court in Den Bosch has ruled in favour of the owners of a Breda cafe who defied a national smoking ban, effectively repealing the smoking ban for small bars and cafes.

As I saw with my own eyes last week, there is effectively no smoking ban in the Netherlands (not Amsterdam anyway). The places I saw didn't look owner-run to me, and some of them did prohibit smoking, but most didn't. So either the ban is being widely and openly flouted or there's been a change to the law. The point is that I don't know because the issue is not being reported. 

Spain, meanwhile, was reported to have a smoking ban in 2006. Anyone who's been to Spain since knows that the ban's a joke. It hardly applies to any bars at all. But if you relied on the British media you might believe that the Spanish ban was comparable to that of the UK. 

The Spaniards were supposed to bring in a UK-style ban this year but, with half the country opposed to such a measure, that is now looking unlikely:

Anti-smoking ban postponed by Spain in search of consensus

Sources of the Health Ministry on Monday said that a parliamentary debate on tougher anti-smoking legislation has been postponed by the Spanish government in the hope of mustering more support for the controversial plan. The government had intended to present the law during the Spanish European Union presidency in the first half of this year, but may only do so later in the year, the sources said.

It may do so later in the year, but - as this article implies - the intention was to do so while Spain holds the six month EU-presidency. Once that ends, the idea of impressing the EU with tobacco control policies will lose its appeal. The government might decide to deal with some real problems instead, like its 19.5% unemployment rate.

All of which will mean that of the 27 EU states, only 2 - the UK and Ireland - will have a total smoking ban*. So who is really 'in line' with the rest of Europe here?

* Italy, France, Malta and the Scandinavian countries all allow designated smoking rooms

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