In defence of freedom

Thanks to everyone who attended our ‘Nanny State of the Nation’ event in Westminster on Monday.

It was good to see both new and familiar faces, and I apologise if I didn’t speak to more than a handful of people individually on the night.

Guests included a number of parliamentary researchers, but I was especially pleased to see our old friend, and Daily Mail columnist, Tom Utley.

I first met Tom at Auberon Waugh’s Academy Club in Soho 23 years ago.

Bron was a supporter of Forest and he persuaded me to sponsor a series of monthly drinks parties for writers and journalists.

The Academy Club (a delicious misnomer) was actually a small, extremely spartan, room on the first floor of rather Dickensian building adjacent to the offices of the Literary Review where he was the editor.

Apart from some wooden tables and chairs, there was nothing other than a tiny bar where ‘members’ could help themselves to tea, coffee, or alcohol.

Most of the guests at our monthly events were people he had persuaded to write for the Literary Review - almost certainly without payment - and this was his way of saying thank you.

I recall the air being thick with smoke (most guests were smokers) but that merely added to the atmosphere, which I loved, and if it got too uncomfortable you could sit by one of the two open sash windows that overlooked Lexington Street, but I don’t think it ever did.

Another person I met for the first time at one of those Academy Club soirées was Claire Fox, and by coincidence Claire was on our panel of speakers on Monday night.

How we would have laughed had we known that, almost a quarter of a century later, she would be a member of the House of Lords and a baroness!

At that time she was the publisher of LM (formerly Living Marxism) and a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Chaired by Ella Whelan (Academy of Ideas), the other speakers on Monday were me, Henry Hill (ConservativeHome), and Reem Ibrahim (Institute of Economic Affairs).

Apart from a short introductory speech by yours truly, we kept it reasonably informal, with the audience given plenty of time to make points or ask questions.

The discussion was filmed (a video will be posted on YouTube later) and streamed live, which was a first for a Forest event such as this.

We had the UnHerd team to thank for that, and I must say something about the venue.

Old Queen Street Cafe is run by UnHerd, the online magazine founded by investor Paul Marshall who is also one of the major financial backers behind GB News.

The cafe/restaurant and the UnHerd office sit side by side, a short walk from Parliament Square.

The former is on the ground floor, and on the first and second floors are a number of rooms that can be hired for private events, although they are in frequent use for UnHerd events that are also streamed to members of the UnHerd Club.

Compared to the Academy Club, it’s like night and day. Goodness knows how much money has been spent to create its comfortable coffeehouse ambience that harks back to those 17th and 18th century establishments, but they share a similar spirit, I think, even if Old Queen Street Cafe is clearly run as a serious business, unlike the Academy Club that, if I remember, relied on patrons paying voluntarily for their coffee, biscuits, and booze.

For Monday night’s event we hired the Club Bar and Library, which was perfect for the number of guests we anticipated. (Eighty people registered, around 55 attended, a disparity that in my experience is normal for a free event like this.)

It went pretty well, I thought, and we’ve had plenty of positive feedback.

People will nevertheless question the point of events such as this, but with a very limited budget what should we do - nothing?

Yes, it was a relatively small gathering but that doesn’t mean it won’t have a ripple effect.

On its own it won’t stop the Tobacco and Vapes Bill but that’s no reason not to try and, as Claire Fox pointed out, freedom is always worth defending.

PS. Thanks to Stuart Mitchell for the photos. Full gallery here.

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

I don't want to seem ungrateful because I appreciate all you have done and still do to fight for the right for smokers to choose to smoke while also standing up for us against this modern persecution based on carefully crafted propaganda from a very powerful professional and influential bunch of puritans.

But, I have to agree the battle is lost and partly because the sort of people who pay lip service to smoking as a personal issue also say "meh" and move on immediately after each piece of drip, drip restriction becomes law.

The audience too seemed unrepresentative of the smoker on the street, like those in Hull and Blackpool where there have been complaints that there are too many "bloody awful chavs" in working class and underclass areas still smoking and something must be done to force them to quit.

Where are they represented? Government inspired by the bullies in Tobacco Control know they are easy to push around and no one will speak up for them. Meanwhile, as you know, as long as Tory MPs can save their cigars, they don't give a toss about the cigarette lover - and vaping orgs and vaping supportive so called libertarians, speak with fork tongue. On the one hand, in front of our face, they talk support for the smoker's right to smoke while on the other urging Government not to restrict their product of choice because it will help the bully state achieve it's aim of a future with no smokers in it.

I could not be more depressed about this and wonder how long, exactly, until the lie that criminalisation of smoking will only affect the 2009 generation is exposed for what it is - a foot in the door of banning smoking to everyone born before and after 2009 as the only way to enforce it.

Who will be around to fight then? Not the chattering classes who see just about any other issue of freedom of choice, freedom of thought and freedom of action as far more important than this one.