French connection
Saturday, May 4, 2024 at 17:11 At the Conservative Party conference in Manchester last year I met a French journalist, Laure Van Ruymbeke.
Laure writes for Le Point, a weekly political news magazine published in Paris.
We spoke again a few weeks ago when I gave her some quotes for an article about the generational smoking ban.
It’s in French but according to Google Translate the headline reads, ‘Tobacco-free generation: the bold bet of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’.
Further use of the app revealed that:
In the United Kingdom, a bill plans to ban smoking for life to everyone who turns 15 this year. A minority opposes it in the name of individual freedoms.
Representatives of smokers – who have little influence in the debate compared to health organizations – are protesting against the interference of a “nanny state” in the private sphere.
Director of Forest, an organization which defends the freedom to smoke, Simon Clark believes that Rishi Sunak, far [behind] in the polls for the next legislative elections, “is seeking to leave a legacy in the little time he has left. Smokers are a very easy target because they are in the minority.”
A few days after the article appeared Laure told me she was working on a similar story for Arte, a French/German public service channel that broadcasts European news stories.
She wanted to speak to a politician opposed to the generational smoking ban so I suggested a few names including Baroness Fox, or ‘Lord Baroness Claire Fox’ as she is dubbed in the report.
Fair play to Le Point and Arte. Their balanced reporting puts many British media outlets to shame. Oh, and the Arte report (below) is in English.
Reader Comments (3)
The public was so clearly in support of Rishi's ban, as spun by the tobacco control industry, that the party got the worst trashing for decades at the polls. The elephant in the room shows once again the reality of smoking bans forced on a public that has had enough of nannying, against the propaganda fantasy of the anti smoker industry.
Labour never won a general election again after the smoking ban in 2007 and it is likely to win now only by default because the public pissed off with being pushed around thinks the Tories deserve to lose - especially after all their promises about slimming down nannying quangos. Stabbing the electorate's choice, Boris, in the back and cosying up to the left wing extremist anti smokers was not the best plan to win public support.
Any party in any country that considers it should reflect on that and also take heed in NZ where the party that implemented it was kicked out in favour of one that binned it as the stupid and discriminatory idea that it is.
Anti-smoking Nazism is an authoritarian regime that will stop at nothing until they have achieved their goal of worldwide tobacco prohibition. For years they have appeared unstoppable, but I hope that in the not-to-distant future they will get their just deserts. The anti-smoking Third Reich too appeared unstoppable, but by soon after the war Hitler had committed suicide, his minister of health was hanged at Nuremberg, and cigarettes had become Germany's principal form of currency.
Once again, they grossly over-estimate both the health and productivity costs of smoking, and fail to acknowledge that “smoking-related diseases’ (mostly cancer and heart disease) are also non-smoking related, In fact, since non smokers outnumber smokers, they have a greater number of actual cases. One then begins to wonder if they get their exaggerated costs by counting every three-year old with brain cancer and every 90 year old nun with a heart attack.