Communists support plain packaging
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 8:37 Well, fancy that – the Communist Party of Australia has thrown its weight behind ASH and the campaign for plain packaging of tobacco.
The sovereignty of countries should be absolute and not influenced by multinational companies with complex accountability. This laudable move towards plain packaging must not be derailed by veiled tactics from companies with vested interests ...
Blah, blah, blah.
Full story: The fight for plain packaging of tobacco
As a companion piece you might like to read an article by Simon Hills, associate editor of The Times Magazine. Writing for Forest's sister campaign, The Free Society, in February, Simon commented:
One of the most informative journeys I ever made was across the then Soviet Union when Gorbachev was in power. It was a nation for whom big business, whether it was tobacco or life-saving pharmaceuticals, was as desirable as sick. Everything therefore, was sold in plain packaging. No advertisements, no colours. Often, of course, no products – a bit of a drawback when the product was food.
See: No choice, no quality, worse tobacco
Tough choice – communism or the free market. ASH must be so proud.
Simon Clark
The online magazine Spiked has today joined forces with Hands Off Our Packs to oppose plain packaging:
Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked, which focuses on politics, culture and society from a humanist and libertarian viewpoint, said: “Plain packaging is a free speech issue, plain and simple.
“In demanding that cigarettes be stuffed into boxes with no branding or logos on them, the authorities are denying companies the right to publish perfectly reasonable and inoffensive material: the names of their products.
“In any other area of life, such a heavy-handed obliteration of the freedom to state one’s name in public would be frowned upon. And so it should be frowned upon here too.
“Anyone who believes in liberty, democracy and choice should support the campaign to get the state’s hands off our packs.”
Full story: "Plain packaging is a free speech issue"
As some of you will know, Spiked was founded in 2000, rising from the ashes of Living Marxism.
Update: Spiked has today published articles on plain packaging by Chris Snowdon and Patrick Basham. See Old moralism in new packaging and Monkey see, monkey smoke respectively.
Reader Comments (3)
I've just read Patrick Basham's excellent article. I do hope that his confident prediction that tobacco companies could, and will, successfully sue HMG comes to pass. Having to foot the bill would be a small price to see tobacco control defeated on this.
I remember only to well the plain greyness behind the Berlin Wall,
the sanitised oppression on the other side of the Iron Curtain
Plain packets,plain everything including the clothing on the
ever present Volkspolizei
Yes, the Politburo were dispersed,but they did not go away,
they donned pretty dresses and smart suits and like an unseen cancer,they infested the corridors of the Western Liberals.
Unlike the Bubonic plague they did not manifest as boils and sores,oh no, they slithered into the hidden corners of media and politics not forgetting "worthy"campaigns
Their pestilence no longer needs Mig fighters or nuclear Submarines to spread their sadness and servitude ,now they
spout their pathos in the Commons and elsewhere ,wherever
the gullible gather.
be vigilant
no
Simon hows it been going?
Pretty good here my restaraunt is still smoking so I still get to enjoy. But I fight daily everywhere.
I just thought you might appreciate this story on the American communist party and second hand smoke;
NYC: Anti-Smoking Totalitarianism
Bloomberg Butt Out!
A pack of Marlboro Lights costs a cool $12 in Manhattan. Smokers have been driven from every office, worksite and public building, from bars and restaurants, left to shiver on the street in the winter and swelter in the sun of a New York summer. But this is not enough for New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council, which have now banned smoking on beaches and in parks and plazas, imposing a $50 fine on anyone caught doing so. What’s next: home invasions of suspected smokers or Prohibition-style raids on private parties allowing smoking? This is already a reality elsewhere in the country, as in Belmont, California, where it is now illegal to smoke in your own home. As CBS News (28 January 2009) put it: “If apartment building neighbors complain about a smoker next door, officers can come knocking.”
Bloomberg’s latest assault on smokers has an extra twist: it’s meant to “be enforced by public pressure,” as well as by some Parks Department personnel (Daily News, 12 February). In this scenario, if some anti-smoking fanatic catches you “in the act” and lectures you to cease and desist, and if you respond by telling them to mind their own business, they can run to the nearest person in uniform. Imagine the possibilities: grouchy old people finking on teenagers having a good time (or vice versa), racist yahoos targeting minority families on a picnic, anti-sex bigots turning in gay people taking in some sun. It’s going to be open season on anyone who has the temerity to light up, with all the class, race and sex prejudices imbedded in this capitalist society. In a hot, humid summer in New York, this totalitarian mobilization of anti-smoking citizen brigades to act on behalf of the state is a recipe for violent attacks by bigots.
Already, discrimination against smokers in housing is open and rampant. A look at “no smoking” listings on Craigslist shows what smokers looking to rent apartments face. Official acts of repression and the vigilantism of the self-appointed morals police reinforce each other.
Even the New York Times (4 February), an enthusiastic supporter of the various bans imposed on smokers in the city, has, for its own reasons (like wanting to maintain healthy tourism income), recoiled from the latest ban, editorializing that the mayor and City Council had “overreached.” It noted that: “Instead of smoking on Brighton Beach, what does a smoker do—take a boat out 12 nautical miles into international waters?... They need to take a deep breath and remember that we tried prohibition 90 years ago. They called it a noble experiment. It turned into a civic disaster.” As we’ve noted before, during Prohibition nine states banned tobacco as well as booze. Is Gotham, once mythologized as the center of cosmopolitan culture where the lucky few led the high life with scandalous abandon, now to be remade in the image of Puritan Salem?
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/982/anti-smoking.html