All dressed up and nowhere to go
Tuesday, June 24, 2014 at 0:35 Further to yesterday's posts the BMA story rumbles on.
I was booked to appear on the Daily Politics with Andrew Neil on BBC Two this morning.
They wanted to discuss the BMA motion to ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after the year 2000.
I got up at 5.30, put on my best suit and drove to London.
At ten o'clock my phone rang. It was a researcher telling me I'd been dropped from the programme because there were "technical problems" and the BMA couldn't (or wouldn't) put up a spokesman of their own.
He was very nice about it. They would have me on "another time".
It's good the BBC is so concerned with balance. How many times, though, have we had to listen to anti-tobacco campaigners (and politicians) banging on about some anti-smoking initiative without an opponent in sight?
I was also asked to do Channel 5 News this evening but I'll be on The Elizabethan ahead of tonight's Smoke On The Water boat party. I suggested some alternative commentators instead.
Update: The BMA has just voted to lobby for a ban on smoking for anyone born this century.
Good luck with that!
Update: BBC News has the story here - Ban new smokers, call from BMA conference - with a quote from Forest.
Ditto the Guardian - Doctors vote for ban on UK cigarette sales to those born after 2000.
Update: Just done an interview for Channel 5 News. I'll be on BBC Radio Merseyside at 4.50 and something else (?) in the morning.
Reader Comments (5)
Ages and dates are of no significance. What the BMA conference has just voted for is prohibition. Odd, is it not, that Prohibition in the USA is being repeated almost exactly a century later.
I'm on BBC Radio Newcastle tomorrow morning.
The BMA conference is hopefully not representative of the medical profession as a whole. What these people need to understand is that. in the internet age, outside the highly specialised fields such as surgery, we need them less and less. There is absolutely no reason why the NHS should waste our money on public health doctors at all. What they do does not require a medical degree or the high salaries often paid. Medicine like the other other professions is becoming less respected by the wider population and increasingly anachronistic. With public confidence in their profession at an all time low, I find it stunning that these arrogant people choose to play authoritarian politics.
'What the BMA conference has just voted for is prohibition.'
Spot on J.
This would be a 'one off' of course, with absolutely no chance a similar tactic would be applied to the other stuff. Well, perhaps not until 30+ years down the line they discover that people are still contracting and dying from so-called smoking related diseases. That's their problem isn't it? They might eradicate smoking, but there's no way they're ever going to succeed in creating a healthy older generation. As things stand, increased longevity is directly related to an increased drain on NHS resources. Still, perhaps TPTB will counter this by raising the retirement age to 75+.
Isn’t the most worrying facet of this suggestion the fact that it actually proposes a change to the basic principal that the law should apply to everyone equally, regardless of age, race, sex (or, these days, sexuality or religion)? The law is supposed to try to ensure (as best it can in a complex world) that everyone is treated fairly and equally “without fear or favour.” So a suggestion such as this, i.e. that some people should be denied a right (disapproved-of or not) which has hitherto been granted, and continues to be granted, to everyone else, simply by virtue of the date on which they were born – as unchangeable a fact as the race or sex that they were born – is, in and of itself, categorically unfair!
For once, here’s an anti-smoking proposal in which the issue of smoking itself actually isn’t the most important one to be concerned about; opening the door – even only slightly – to a system which could result in the law applying one way for one group of people and another way for others, is. We all know that exponents of such measures habitually deny the existence of a “slippery slope,” but this is short-sighted in the extreme. Just because the BMA are “only” making this proposal in respect of tobacco doesn’t mean that somewhere down the line some other single-issue group won’t make the same proposal about something else. The BMA are, I suspect, wilfully closing their eyes to this possibility, on the basis that to accept it would put their "pet project" in jeopardy. But the fact is that if such a principle is accepted once by policy-makers, then it would be difficult for them to argue against its being used in the same format for other situations, and - given the knee-jerk, hair-trigger emotional reactions of our easily-influenced politicians - it wouldn’t be out of character if it was.
I do hope, Simon, that if you do have a chance to air your views in public on this one, that you’ll check out the opinions of some members of the legal profession to see if they regard this violation of the basic principle of the law as either a good or a bad thing. Because, in my view, this is the main point at issue with this one. And I’ll bet you that, smoker, non-smoker or anti-smoker, most of them will throw up their hands in horror – and rightly so.