That is not their intention. They do not, and never have, given a shit about health. They want to persecute smokers for no other reason than that they are small-minded bullies who think they have an easy mark to push around.
At first that was largely true. They hit all the smokers who believed in the ‘you will die’ hype and who had accepted the training to feel guilty about being who they were. They are fast running out of easy targets and are left with the nasty core who won’t be hit without hitting back. ASH are the only ones who don’t realise this.
So what is the real intention behind this new persecution?
It will operate just like everything else these days.
Businesses will be ‘asked’ and then ‘encouraged’ to give ASH money to ‘help their smoking staff quit’. It will not work. It is not intended to work. Businesses, especially in these short-of-money times, will not want to waste resources on someone else’s silly propaganda.
Then we will hear the cry we hear on so many fronts these days – ‘The voluntary approach is not working, we need legislation’.
Businesses will be legally obliged to pay ASH for their ludicrous nonsense that pretends to kelp smokers quit. The big boys will support this because they can afford it and their smaller competitors cannot. It will be one more thing to drive the small companies to the wall.
There is only one way for any buisiness to avoid paying this new ASH tax.
Employ no smokers. And there you have ASH Wales’ real motive.
If you are a smoker and you vote Tory or Labour or Lib Dem or SNP, you are voting to become unemployable. If you have a smoker among your friends and/or family and you vote for any antismoking party, you are voting to condemn them to a life on the streets. If you vote for any of those parties and you have any shred of conscience, consider that you are voting to make 20% of the people of this country into a poverty-stricken underclass. Can you live with that?
Some can. Some would delight in it.
Do you want to be like them?
underdogs bite upwards 
“Employ no smokers….real motive.” Agreed. Bastards.
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Errr maybe, but my current workplace couldn’t function as a business without smokers
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The antis would close the business with hypertaxation rather than let smokers have a job. Even if everyone on site was a smoker and it was a business making and selling cigarettes.
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The world is changing faster than the speed these people’s minds operate. Soon only the drudge industries will live in hyper regulation land. All the people with imagination and brains will conduct thier business entirely through augmented reality, trading in bitcoins. Things will be made in places like China, companies will be registered in places like Barbados, money will be stored invisibly in the sky and records of it all will be hidden by Tor like encryptions. Shops will vanish from the streets and couriers will replace the rush hour traffic. Elections will become farcical with less than 5% of the country even knowing we still have a government. Silk Road is just todays Napster and soon the war on drugs will be quietly forgotten the way the war on music piracy has been (remember that one?). People will lose faith in a ploice force that endlessly persectutes non crimes but does nothing to protect us from organised fraud and perversion. Soon people who hate such criminals will get rich and start their own cyber police to hunt down and dispose of these monsters. Piss analysers will tell us why we are feeling ill and what you need to fix you and 24hr doctors will be as common as 24 hr call out plumbers (and will be as bloody expensive too). Most medicines will be freely availiable to buy from dealers of repute online. The NHS will lose its monopoly on about 50% of sickness. Companies will fight fires for free using the most annoyingly handsome firemen just so their logos can be seen on the side of fire engines, and so on…
And in the background the puritans, all of them from Arnott to Hitchens, will keep screaming that they alone are the morally perfect idols that we must all be forced to emulate. And they will face their last days like a dark parody of Oscar Shindler, holding aloft rings proclaiming that if sold it could have made just one more person as unhappy as them.
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“Elections will become farcical with less than 5% of the country even knowing we still have a government. ”
Already well under way – a recent poll on whether we should stay in the EU or not was abandoned when the pollsters realised a large percentage didn’t know we were already in it.
I bet there are already a few who couldn’t name the current PM.
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Cheers for the link
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‘Twas a good link.
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Once I left the workplace, I quit smoking.
That is not correct.
Once I left the workplace, I noticed that the desire to smoke left me.
Good enough for government work. Let us proceed.
Once I left the workplace, I quit drinking intoxicants.
That, too, is not correct. But I no longer felt the need to get hammered every evening.
That is correct.
Simply by cold-eyed examination of what lead me to smoke and drink, I realized that, on my own, I did not have the desire to smoke or drink. That realization was a thunderclap in my mind.
Strong drink resides in my home. Every week or three, I will imbibe. Not to intoxication, but a tot or two to remember bygone days. Every week or three, I smoke a small cigar. Not for any reason other than that first mind-tingling smokey rush (no nicotine rush? You poor dear. I have experimented with a gaggle of intoxicants, but the absolute very best is that momentary hit when you light up a nonfiltered Camel for the first smoke in weeks.)
I actually do sometimes smell tobacco smoke on someone. So what? I also smell your perfume. Why don’t you just take a bath? Early enough in the morning, I smell your toothpaste. So what? Good for you. Better Crest than whatever you ate for breakfast. Were you to bottle and market the smell of my boyhood home while my mother baked Christmas cookies I’d buy and use it. It is a smell, but to me no odor competes.
Screw’em. They want to turn you into a pauper, because paupers are easy to pacify. Perhaps you have little money, but you don’t have to be intellectually destitute as well.
I warn you. From the bottom of my heart I beseech you; allow for the individual difference. It is what makes us worthy.
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I sometimes smell tobacco smoke on someone. They don;t smell it on me. Those people don’t smell of smoke because they smoke – it’s because they don’t wash themselves and their clothes. If they gave up smoking they’d be a smelly nonsmoker instead.
Thing is, nonsmokers who don’t wash smell worse. There was one who used to visit the shop and you could always tell when he was in there long before you’d see him. At least the non-washers among the smokers have the stench of BO hidden.
But I don’t want to force these people to wash. Let them pong if they want to, I’ll just avoid them. It’s a big planet.
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Somehow we need to the pols to realise that the 20% that figure reresents all have a vote, the embuggeration is trying to get that 20% to act as a bloc. If that could be achieved in any significant amount then we can start to make some headway.
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Smokervoter has been working on that for some time now – http://smokervoter.webs.com/
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