Enough Already!

On Thursday, obsessed anti-smoking MP Alex Cunningham will be demanding that the government bully smokers even more than they already do.

Cunningham is the same MP who initiated the ban on smoking in cars which has been such a massive waste of time that the police say they're not interested and which has done the square root of fuck all for the health of the nation. It's such a balls-up that he should be hanging his head in shame for wasting our taxes on such an illiberal and barmy idea.

It is also the same Cunningham who vehemently objected to Channel 4 coming to film in his constituency for their Benefits Street programme.  He professed at the time to be sensitive to his constituents' concerns but it became clear during the show that the ones he was apparently worried about in front of the TV cameras had never seen the berk in their street before. He turned up just to give himself some airtime and got a flea in his ear from the residents for his trouble.

Perhaps if he spent more time visiting them and not wasting his efforts on an irrational hatred for smokers he may be better regarded.

Still, he's going to continue being a one-eyed waste of parliamentary space on Thursday, which is a bit stupid considering the public think his kind should just stop being arses.

Forest released a report today that points out what most people outside of the Westminster bubble already knew; the public are just not interested in anti-smoking rhetoric any more. Here are some takeaways from the polling.

• The public overwhelmingly believe the government has more pressing priorities than tackling smoking – investing in new doctors and nurses, for example.
• There is no appetite for additional tax rises on tobacco products – a huge majority believe that tobacco duty is already about right, too high or far too high.
• A significant majority of the public believe that purchasing illegal tobacco is an understandable response from consumers faced with the high cost of tobacco products.
• Measures to restrict smoking in outdoor public places such as parks and beaches have no popular or scientific legitimacy and would be hard to police.
• Following a dramatic fall in the number of people using NHS stop smoking services a significant majority of the public believe there should be a review of how these services are funded.
• A majority of the public believe the government’s tobacco control policies should be independently reviewed and should not be driven by taxpayer-funded lobby groups.
• Almost a decade since smoking was banned in pubs and clubs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and ten years since smoking was prohibited in Scotland’s pubs and bars, a majority of the public believe that pubs and private members’ clubs, including working men’s clubs, should be allowed to provide a well-ventilated designated smoking room to accommodate smokers.
• More than half the public also believe that actors should be allowed to smoke on stage and screen when smoking is integral to the plot or characterisation of the play they feature in

It is most encouraging to note from the report that, still, there is not a majority in favour of the kind of smoking ban we have had forced on us. 

Despite what state-funded tax-spongers like ASH like to pretend, this has always been the case. There was no majority of public opinion in favour in 2006, nor in 2010, and there still isn't. It shouldn't come as a surprise. Despite an avalanche of propaganda, the public are clever enough to know they are being lied to and more people than not don't believe the hype.

It won't stop extremists like Cunningham from carrying on displaying their single issue contempt in public, though, because that's just what his brand of prodnose do. Even though there is little appetite for further smoking restrictions amongst the public, he's going to waste scarce resources on Thursday blathering on about the subject once again anyway. 

Perhaps, instead, Cunningham should spend more time talking to the people in Kingston Road in his constituency about the issues that they actually worry about rather than using his exalted and highly-paid position in parliament to pursue his own personal prejudices. Just a thought. 

You can read the Forest report here. 

Charge!

Phew, that was a close one!

A longstanding 'public health' lie came close to destabilising the NHS over the weekend.

A move that could have seen obese patients refused surgery in an attempt to save money is to be reviewed after national NHS bosses intervened. 

A proposed restriction by the NHS Vale of York Clinical Commissioning Group would have seen non-life threatening procedures delayed by a year for those with a body mass index exceeding 30. 

The rule would also apply to smokers. 

NHS England, which can intervene as the CCG is under special measures, said the group had agreed to rethink the move.

As Snowdon has already noted, this is not how most people would expect the NHS to operate.

Rationing healthcare on the basis of lifestyle was never part of the NHS's plan in 1948. It it had been, there would have been even more resistance to the nationalisation of the industry than there was. But after years of wrongly scapegoating smokers and fat people for the NHS's spiralling budget, it's no surprise to find the service being turned from a free-at-the-point-of-need Ponzi scheme into a tool of outright coercion and punishment.

Indeed.

It's what happens when health nazis torture statistics in order to play on bigotry and prejudice and pretend that smokers and the overweight are taking more than their fair share of NHS resources. Because that's exactly what this is all about, as alluded to in the BBC article.

"They are trying to lose weight in the vast majority of cases and to deny them treatment that they need on the basis of their weight, without then offering them effective help to help them lose weight is rather like discriminating [against] a segment of the population on the basis of their colour or religious persuasion."

Besides which, it has, quite simply, never been true (like almost everything you ever hear from 'public health') that unhealthy lifestyles unnecessarily harm NHS finances. Whenever economic costs of socialised healthcare are calculated, it is always the 'healthy' - and not those who choose riskier lifestyles - who put the most burden on health services.

It should be obvious, especially since 'public health' wants to simultaneously tell us that smokers and the obese live far shorter lives. Healthcare costs for those who are considered healthy are more expensive to the system both short and long-term, and the largest financial commitment any government commits to - pensions - are hugely more costly too.

When tobacco controllers, or any other 'public health' charlatan, tell you that x costs the NHS y amount of money, they are lying by way of only giving you one side of the equation.

It's not hard to understand really.

While smokers and the overweight are often criticised for the financial impact of their unhealthy lifestyles, an obese person's medical bills actually average 10 per cent less overall than those of a person of normal weight. 

Smokers require even less treatment, say the researchers. 

The reason is that the healthy tend to live longer and so, while they might not have to battle lung cancer, heart disease or diabetes in their fifties, they may need long-term care for illnesses of old age such as Alzheimer's. 

As a result, any "savings" made by them being healthy when young are more than offset by their being ill in old age.

Tobacco controllers - who know better than the rest of us that smokers don't actually cost the NHS more than anyone else, quite the opposite - usually counter this incontrovertible fact with shrill straw men such as "so you're saying that governments should encourage smoking because it's good for the country's finances?". Well no, we are just arguing that 'public health' lobbyists should stop using outright lies to push their agenda.

The result of all this wholesale lying by health lobbyists is daft policies like that proposed by the ignoramuses at NHS Vale of York. To save money, they have taken the stance that the best thing to do is penalise the people who cost them the least amount of money in the long run. It's why they are not handling budgets or performing actuarial calculations in the private sector .. because if they were they'd be sacked.

Restricting treatment is just one stupid policy recommendation that 'public health' lying creates, the other is the regular call - which you may have heard from the most easily-gulled in society - to charge smokers, drinkers and the obese for NHS treatment. You know, because it's self-inflicted, innit, and why should they pay for the healthcare costs of others.

This is very dangerous ground for the NHS. Once you get into that line of thinking it renders the NHS unworkable. There's little need for those lucrative sin taxes now, is there Mr politician? Just think of all those treatments the NHS provides which the public regularly object to, and there are very many. If we can pick and choose who is treated and who is not, there are going to be a lot of green ink letters from Mr & Mrs Disgusted of Cheltenham.

There are also dozens of dangerous activities anyone could name that might end in long-term and incredibly expensive palliative care, why should the public collectively pay for extreme risk-taking? And you know that unwritten contract we have whereby we pay our taxes and you promise to treat us accordingly? Well, there is just the taxation now, if the benefit is being withdrawn for large sections of the population, we'll see those taxes dramatically cut so we can source healthcare elsewhere at our own cost, Mr Politician Sir, or we'll see you in court.

You can't have a protection racket without the protection, now can you?

It only takes one successful case and the NHS could be holed beneath the water line. Imagine the free-for-all as those most able to negotiate the red tape and best-placed to afford it opt out of a portion of their taxes and go private. Oh joy!

I've written about this kind of backward thinking from NHS administrators (who ironically are the biggest direct drain on the NHS) before, and whenever I do I find myself thinking "bring it on!", just before health service grandees intervene and tell the local idiots to shut the fuck up and stop trying to derail the gravy train.

Just like this weekend.

Oh well, these instances are becoming more and more frequent, so better luck next time, eh?

As a footnote, Snowdon also mentioned the appalling 'nurse' Jane "They'll just have to die" DeVille-Almond in his piece. If you've not heard her contribution to the "do no harm" principle of the medical profession before, you can listen to it below.