Something Pat Nurse said recently has been niggling at my mind:
…there may be something we can do to sue the Govt for removing our consumer rights under The Sale of Goods Act 1979 which says that consumers must be assured they they know what they are buying and can be assured of the quality of the goods. Of course when plain or standarised packaging comes in, we won’t have a clue.
Plain packaging for cigarettes makes no sense. If, as the antismoking drones believe, kids are still able to buy single cigarettes in some shops (I rather suspect that that has not been happening for quite some time) then of what relevance is packaging? How can they be at all affected by the shiny packets, when they are buying one cigarette?
I don’t care if all tobacco comes in plain packs. I have already taken to using a cheerful tobacco tin which carries no warnings at all. Sell it in black wrappers with ‘The Dried Leaf of Death’ stamped on it, I don’t care. I’ll transfer it to this happy little tin box and throw the wrappers away.
Plain packs will have no effect on anyone at all, ever, other than the criminals.
As it is, if a counterfeiter makes a fairly good copy of a branded pack, he can fill it with his crap smokes and sell it to some bleary-eyed bloke in a pub. What he will find much harder to do is to sell a caseload of it to a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper is likely to spot the forged packs because he has them in his shop and sees them every day, even if he doesn’t smoke.
Forged plain packs will be much harder to spot. They all look the same. The only thing the forger needs do is type the name of the brand he’s forging on the front of them. So the forged tobacco can move from the bleary end-of-evening pub car park to selling by the truckload in Tesco. Tesco will spot it? How? All you need do is get into the supply line at any point and the unsuspecting legitimate system will do the rest.
Take a caseload of fake tobacco worth, well, nothing at all, really. Get your mates in the warehouse to swap it for a case of the real thing. You now have something worth a goodly sum, and since you have replaced it with something that looks exactly the same, nobody knows it’s gone. This is what the Health People are setting up. This is what the BMA think is a good idea.
This is what your government is arranging for you.
It goes further. Pat mentions the Sale of Goods Act, so can we expect all those consumer groups to get involved? Not a chance. ‘It’s only the smokers’, so they will not do a damn thing to help us. The government will amend the Sale of Goods Act so it’s nicely woolly and vague, and plain packs will come into being. And all those consumer groups will smile and pat the smokers on the head and say ‘never mind’.
Next it will be booze. Again, the consumer groups will do nothing because ‘it’s only the drinkers’. If necessary, the government will further amend the sale of goods act to let them have their grey beer bottles.
It will continue to spread. Eventually it will hit some group of consumers that the consumer groups actually give a shit about and they will rise up, enraged, and say ‘You cannot do this. The Sale of Goods Act…’
Oh, but the Sale of Goods act now says yes, they can do this. To anything they like. There’ll be no point in the consumer groups existing, there will be nothing they can do any more. The laws they used to quote to defend consumers will have all been torn down.
It starts with plain packaging for cigarettes. Once that is passed, it’s then too late to moan that all cars must be grey and all houses painted the same colour and you can’t have a picture of whatever you’re buying on the box and you don’t know what clothing you’ve bought until you get it home to find it’s yet another set of blue overalls.
The smoking ban set off a whole new wave of puritanism that is still going, but plain packaging is an entirely new dimension of control. It is the destruction of brand image. All of it For every brand, everywhere.
It’s not even about smokers any more. The target is capitalism.
Maybe it always was.
I think you’re right. It is about destroying capitalism, too. Socialists despise capitalists and free markets (unless you buy the socialists’ £75 books on how to control people’s lives… that’s OK, because it’s their propaganda for the greater good, they say). It’s about changing human nature.
The same people who advocate for plain packs also want to bankrupt all of us peons with endless amounts of government-subsidised “green energy” crap (solar panels, wind turbines, etc.,etc.), and gun control for countries that haven’t banned them yet, and expensive organically-grown foods approved by health nazis. For these people, the government’s trough is bottomless.
They want to create a new world order where no one has individual rights, where no one has the ability to fight back; we will live only to serve our elite masters who know what is best for us. They are here to save us from ourselves, because in their view, we are all too stupid to survive without them.
And it all starts by removing any sort of [brand] identity one may have formed in a capitalist society. Thus by removing one’s freedom of choice, the individual is ultimately destroyed. If there are no individuals and human nature is suppressed, then capitalism is pointless.
Anyway, at the moment, there are 33 elected sheep minions in Parliament who have publicly backed the plain packs campaign. There are 53 MPs who have spoken out against plain packs. The other 560-something MPs have been rather quiet. I suppose we’ll see what happens.
This level of control has been tried over and over again throughout history and it always ends in disaster. The reason it always fails is that it does not, and can never work for long. The controllers regard the people as cattle more and more until they get to the point where they cannot believe the people are even capable of plotting against them.
But they are. Every time.
North Korea is still going, but even that won’t last forever.
Just wait until all your whisky comes in a plain bottle!
If Oily Al knew anything about Scottish history, he’d know that it started out in plain bottles. Not even labels
Some Victory Tobacco to go with your Victory Whiskey? I hear the rations have gone up!
I hear the cigarette pack size has been increased to 15 and the length increased to three-quarters of an inch.
It’s not so much about the packaging as it is about Govt controlling the size and contents of what’s inside that packaging and that is the point of “standardised” which means the only baccy available in the UK will be Govt baccy and Govt will decide that it must taste foul, we must pay an arm and a leg for it, and we will have no choice but to buy that one foul brand or quit.
And yes, to proceed the Govt will have to amend the sale of goods act 1979 and when the consumer protection is remobved from it, then all other consumers of products deemed “unhealthy” can expect in time to have their rights to brand recognition and price comparison removed too.
You know my plan Leggy and I still intend to pursue it but, without wanting to say too much right now in public, I am just awaiting a response before proceeding further.
The plain packaging fiasco is the likes of the Dreadful Arnott and her drones exercising their spite muscles. What’s interesting is that they get so much funding to do it. Funding from the Pharmers makes sense, because Dreadful is helping to take down their opposition for nicotine supply.
Funding from so many other places though, places that really should have no interest in smokers and also from Governments who make so much money out of the whole business, does not make sense.
Unless the smokophobes are useful idiots, pushing an agenda that’s well out of sight of their limited brains. Once that Sale of Goods act is broken there’ll be no stopping the control freaks. Well, until they reach the point they always reach – when the population explodes.
I’m sure that it is political, but I suspect that politicians as such are just pawns. When prohibition was repealed in 1933, did the Eugenicists who sponsored prohibition go away? No, what they did was move over to Germany where Adolf was on the road to gaining power. At that time, they were still able to be racist, although not ostensibly purely based upon colour. As we know, Jews, homosexuals and gysies became to new underclass. After WW2, the whole racist idea was dropped. Instead, health in iteself became the eugenisists’ driving force. I think that party politics is irrelevant – the eugenisists have taken over the WHO, the EU health dept and our own DoH. What party is in power and who is minister of health doesn’t matter in the slightest.
We need a Churchill with the strength to take on the healthists and there is a way that they could be ousted. One thing that politicians still have control of is the purse strings. Take the healthists’ money away from them and they will disappear. But that would require our Chuchill to recognise the enemy, of which there seems to be no sign at the moment
I would say that NuChurchill is Nigel Farage.
Let’s hope so. I don’t see Boris fitting the bill somehow.
The best hope is for the EU to disentigrate! It is EU mandates behind much of the ban movement besides the WHO thru a UN treaty folks were forced to sign.
Underdog look in your comments bin I posted some very interesting stuff! Many will definately want to see it!
You’ve been released. The site tends to be suspicious of multiple links, although it does seem to be more forgiving once it gets to know you.
Yes, it’s coming from above our politicians. It’s far too clever and devious to have originated in the simple minds of Westminster or Holyrood or that place in Cardiff where they put all their loonies.
Intellectual Property Office UK
Intellectual Property Protection for Brands
Intellectual property rights provide legal protection for some of the most important aspects of a brand e.g. the name, logo, design, domain name and sometimes the product itself.
Systems for the registering and granting the excusive use of brand-related intellectual property rights to their owners have been developed in order to allow companies to prove their ownership of brands, and then enable them to legally prevent others from copying or ‘free riding’ on their brand investments.
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/tm/t-about/t-whatis/t-brands.htm
WTO AND PUBLIC HEALTH
A Joint Study by the WTO and WHO
http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/who_wto_e.pdf
What is relevant to health in the TRIPS Agreement?
48. The areas of intellectual property covered by the TRIPS Agreement that are relevant
to health include: patents; trademarks including service marks, which are relevant,
for example, to combating counterfeit drugs; and undisclosed information,
including trade secrets and test data (see box 2). In respect of each of these areas, the
Agreement sets out the minimum standards of protection that must be adopted by each
Member. Each of the main elements of protection is defined, namely the subject matter
to be protected, the rights to be conferred and permissible exceptions to those
rights, and the minimum duration of protection. The standards build on those in the
main pre-existing WIPO Conventions, substantive provisions of which are incorporated
into the Agreement by reference. While the focus here is on patents, this is only one
part of the TRIPS Agreement. One of the purposes of the TRIPS Agreement is, for
10. Intellectual
Box 2
The relevance of trademarks and “undisclosed information” to
health
Trademarks. The agreement defines what types of signs must be eligible for
protection as trademarks, and what the minimum rights conferred on their owners
must be. It says that service marks must be protected in the same way as
trademarks used for goods. Marks that have become well-known in a particular
country enjoy additional protection.
Yes, old man, Capitalism was always the target, always and from the start. the GramscoFabiaNazis always did mean what they said. The trouble was, we, being normal and human, didn’t take them seriously, because we said they were “loony lefties”.
Lefties are not loony at all and never have been. This has bee a very, very big and well-planned job, and the riposte can only, in the end, be force.
Sometimes I wonder if Orwell actually wrote ’1984′ as a manual, and not as a warning.