Showing posts with label Illiberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Illiberalism. Show all posts

More Limp Vaping Support From ASH & PHE

The ASH Twitter page believes in quality over quantity, which is why they proudly linked to this article in one of only two tweets today.


Here are a couple of interesting snippets.
In contrast to the known harm (yeah, right - DP) from secondhand smoke, there’s no evidence so far of harm to bystanders from exposure to e-cigarette vapour and experts have assessed the risks to be extremely low.
So therefore, an article entitled "Vaping in the home: advice for parents - by Jo Locker" should consist of a few lines after that saying it's none of their business, doncha think?

Course not, because this article was written by the £500m per year tax-draining Public Health England, and they have to be seen to be doing something with the money. So what does this guidance entail?
A parent who quits smoking in favour of vaping is one fewer smoking role model. However while they will no longer be modelling smoking, they will be modelling vaping.
Erm. And?
For those who find that allowing vaping indoors helps maintain a smokefree home, they might find it helpful to permit it. But those who don’t have a problem in keeping their home smokefree might want to consider what can be gained from permitting vaping indoors.
How about the fact that it is polite to allow people to do things they enjoy, and if - as the previous assertions imply - there is no harm, where's the problem?

They may as well be saying "be utterly selfish, do what you think is best for you and you only in your house, fuck visitors and anyone else who vapes". But then, as I've said many times before, tobacco control is built on selfish prejudice and greed and preys on the opinions of anti-social bigots, so it's hardly surprising.

More to the point though, is why PHE even thought this was a good way to spend our money. Why the blithering fuck is it any concern of theirs to tell others what they should be doing in their own homes? If householders are worried about vaping it's up to them to research it themselves. It might result in perverse outcomes from those sad enough to seek out the scaremongering stories just to suit their own prejudices, but how on Earth do PHE (and ASH) think that advice is going to counteract such attitudes?

They have just supplied two fantastic excuses for bigoted individuals to cite in banning vaping in private homes, and they can now say it is sanctioned by an authority such as Public Health England. This is how ASH's 'support' of vaping generally goes. It is half-hearted at best, mostly insipid, and always offers a nice option or two for those of a prohibitionist mentality to seize upon. PHE's is generally a load of over-cautious and unhelpful horse-cock too.

In other news today, ASH Scotland were asked to object publicly to a hideous policy from Aberdeen Council which bans smoking and vaping outdoors and has no other goal except to bully smokers and vapers.


Here is the 'vape-friendly' organisation's robust and outspoken response.



So, having subtlely changed their mission statements in 2010 to include nicotine in their definition of smoking and stay clinging to the gravy train, the Action on Smoking and Health collective have morphed into Inaction on Vaping Bans (and if you want to install one we won't get in your way, in fact we'll quietly hand you the tools and even "fully welcome" them).

I despise these so-called 'friends' of vaping, but even I didn't expect they'd eagerly tweet advice which advocated occasions where vaping bans are appropriate in private homes so soon. The plan must be coming along nicely if they're all that comfortable.

Remember, we're the angels; they're bound for hell.
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Home Smoking Bans: The Next Confidence Trick

Back in 2009, Deborah Arnott was caught off-guard and revealed the true extent of her prohibitionist ambitions.
It must have caught the fake charities as cold as it caught Forest though, as they were all wibbling at cross purposes.
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), said the charity was in favour of a ban on smoking in cars.

The risks were not just to children but to adults suffering from conditions like heart disease, she said.
That's the problem with being caught off-guard, Debs wasn't able to tailor her junk science quickly enough to the nonsense in hand so had to just grab what she was working on at the time - the total ban on smoking in cars, with or without children present. An interesting view into the future, I thought.
At the time, she was selling a policy of banning smoking only in cars containing children. She was very clear about that and would have told every MP who would listen that it wasn't an assault on property rights at all, oh no, merely an issue of protecting kids from a mythical exaggerated danger that her and her professional bansturbators fabricated to keep the gravy train going.

That unguarded comment in 2009 revealed that she may have had it at the back of mind but we now have proof positive that she was lying to politicians back then; a total ban on smoking in cars has always been her long-term plan.


It seems that she has now let slip, via The Guardian, another future policy goal; a ban on smoking in private homes.
Deborah Arnott, the director of Action on Smoking and Health, said: “While the ban on smoking in indoor public places resulted in significant health benefits, thousands of children are still exposed to smoke in the home and elsewhere. Growing up in a smoke-free environment is one of the best ways of ensuring that they are not attracted to smoking and lured into a lifelong addiction and ill-health.”
We all knew it was an end-goal no matter the oleaginous weasel words Arnott and her pals like to spew about their respect for personal rights. But that's the clearest sign yet.

Arnott once proudly boasted of the "confidence trick" she employed to con politicians into depriving private businesses of their right to determine their own policies on smoking in their premises. I hear that at the recent Royal Society of Medicine event, which Simon Chapman's fans all avoided, she was equally gushing about how she had conned parliamentarians into going for plain packaging.

Which begs the question. How do you think Arnott is going to convince MPs that banning people who own their own homes from smoking in them is a wholesome and liberty-loving idea?

She'll have a con trick up her sleeve no doubt, liars always do.
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A 44 Year Monopoly

Via this blog's esteemed mascot, it has been revealed that ASH has yet again been thrown a wad of our taxes with which to bully smokers and generally be a right royal anti-social and destructive pain in the arse.

The figure this year - a regular annual occurrence since ASH's inception in 1972 - is £160,000.

You can view the award letter below.


As usual there are a couple of laughable clauses in the document, most notably ... (emphases mine)
This award has been made under the provisions of Section 64 and may not be used for lobbying or to fund original research and consultancy services must not be offered under this grant. ASH has confirmed that the grant will only ever be used for tobacco control delivery and not for any activity that could be considered as lobbying, nor will it be used to fund research or provide consultancy services.
This is political sophistry of the first water! An organisation like ASH does very little else but lobby, it is exactly what officials and staff at the Department of Health set it up to do in the early 1970s.

This was most evident recently with the monumental lobbying effort Deborah Arnott and her fellow tax-spongers put in to convince politicians to bring in the pointless tobacco control gravy train-perpetuating plain packaging policy. They were in and out of Westminster tapping up MPs so often that they would have felt less exhausted if they'd pitched tents and sleeping bags in committee rooms instead of commuting!

It will also come as a hell of a surprise to vapers that ASH don't involve themselves in lobbying considering the extraordinary and sustained lobbying campaign they have directed towards first trying to get e-cigs banned, and then ensuring Article 20 of the TPD was rammed through in the face of perfectly logical and entirely reasonable objections.

Quite simply, if ASH didn't lobby, there would be no need for them to exist.

You might also be amused to read this condition of the award.
[T]he Department [of Health] has no commitment to renew financial support after the term of the grant;
Well, erm, considering this is the 44th year in a row that ASH has received free cash from taxpayers - without any kind of competitive tendering process as is supposedly required for all government-awarded contracts - we can take that one with a pinch of salt, can't we?

You may have noticed a familiar name signing off the award letter too, that of Jeremy Mean, the former head of pharma-funded MHRA who so nearly succeeded in strangling vaping at birth. Perhaps, then, this part of ASH's grant application appealed strongly to him and his former associates.
"Identify and communicate opportunities for local enforcement to support the effective implementation of the TPD including Article 20 on electronic cigarettes."
Yep, if you thought common sense and a new direction from PHE & RCP towards harm reduction might lead to a blind eye being turned towards the daft TPD regulations, think again. ASH is there to make damn sure any transgressions are properly punished, and promised to do exactly so when they were holding out the begging bowl.

Additionally, since Mean is now Deputy Director of Tobacco Control at the DoH, he could feasibly form part of the UK's delegation to the similarly pharma-funded WHO's COP7 jamboree in Delhi in November. You know, the organisation which currently wants to see e-cigs banned worldwide. Nothing like being given another bite of the cherry, now is there Jeremy?

There really is no other racket quite as blatant as the 'public health' racket.
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