Seek and you will find

One of the reasons I'm in Dublin is to find potential venues for smoker-friendly events.

This afternoon we're checking out a barge for an outdoor 'Smoke On The Water' style event. Unfortunately the deck that allows smoking is uncovered which is a hostage to fortune given the weather here.

This morning however we visited a couple of restaurants, each with a superb covered smoking area.

One looked as if it was largely enclosed but the devil was in the detail. You could see how it met the regulations and the result was perfect – it was like a large conservatory with comfortable chairs, tables, plants and heaters.

Smokers can be accommodated in comfort if the will – and the space – is there. All it takes is an imaginative proprietor and a local licensing authority that is prepared to be flexible.

Meanwhile I'm aware of a report that appeared in several newspapers today concerning the "positive" impact of smoking bans on public health:

Smoking bans cut damage such as heart disease to passive smokers, says research (Press Association).

I'll post about this later but I mention it now because 'research' such as this – and the headlines it generates – underlines the very difficult if not impossible task we face to amend public smoking bans.

After all, if the health benefits are so real and obvious, why would anyone want to change a policy that allegedly reduces the harm caused by cigarette smoke?

If you want to read my immediate reaction, based on a press release not the full research (which I haven't read yet), click on the link above and scroll down.

I've also been quoted by the Mail and, I think, the Sun but my response was edited so heavily it's almost meaningless.

"Imagine if Mr Clark was Secretary of State for Health"

Oops. I didn't know I had published this.

I was in Starbucks at Stansted waiting for a flight to Dublin and to pass the time I uploaded (in what I thought was draft form) a comment that had been posted on another thread.

I was going to tidy it up before publication but I must have pressed the wrong button before I rushed to Gate 40.

I am now in Dublin and only I realised I had published it in its, er, loose form when I saw people had started commenting. Oh, well.

Anyway, to recap, what follows was posted by someone called Trevor. I've tidied it up as best I can - it was a bit of a mess, frankly. (Long-winded comments like this are one of the reasons I use comment moderation.)

Here goes:

I just feel sad that grown men will have a conversation on national radio and TV defending the right to continue paying to ruin their health as well as the health of non smokers.

I mean these are men who will avoid a pothole in the road in order to avoid unnecessary damage to their cars but they will walk with their eyes wide open into the habit of smoking with no concern whatsoever about the harm which is done to their health.

I thought Britain is meant to be a civilized society? I'm clearly wrong, right? If I decided to steal the contents of my neighbors flat I'm liable to be punished by the law, but the same law will allow me to indirectly slaughter countless people by means of cigarettes and rake in countless billions part of which taken by the exchequer in tax revenue.

The same law condemns drug dealing (and rightly so) but if the condemnation is on the basis of threat to health. How can cigarette dealing be justified? All of that is the norm under the rule of Law and yet look at the harm it has caused and yet Simon Clark stands up and defends it?

Consider too the impact smoking has upon the NHS. Imagine if Mr Clark was Secretary of State for Health. Is it unreasonable to predict that the cost of running the NHS would increase simply cause he refuses to see smoking for what it represents?

The idea of people having the right to smoke is utter nonsense. That law was created to serve the interests of the Exchequer so that it would gain what would otherwise go into the coffers of criminals and rather than rejecting smoking and seeing it as a bad idea the government embraced it because they saw it as a dependable source of revenue and were therefore willing to allow it to be advertised in order to get as many people interested in it as possible and once they achieved their objective they cut back on advertising because they were clever enough to know that nicotine is powerful enough to keep the smokers going back for more cigarettes.

The apparent change of heart on the part of the government is nothing but window dressing because now it is fashionable to persecute smokers and so the people who initially betrayed the public who are now either dead from smoking related diseases or waiting to die from COPD, are now attempting to mislead the public into believing they have suddenly become responsible...hence the ban on smoking in public enclosed places and the laughable ban on smoking in cars with children etc etc. while at the same time 18 year old's are allowed by law to start smoking.

I'll be very surprised if this post is permitted to go live cause I'm being too bold in speaking out against a great wrong in British society but at the end of the day if you chose to be a fool to yourself, Simon.

Go ahead, but remember that your choice affects the lives and health of other people. You are in a position of influence, Simon. Why use that influence in a selfish and irresponsible way?

Without question selfishness greed and irresponsibility was at the heart of government when it legalized smoking. They were focused solely on what was beneficial to the economy rather than what is beneficial to public health.

Selfish and irresponsible people in positions of authority and influence does much harm to a society, Simon. It's as if you are closing your eyes to a stark reality, viewing smoking as a pleasure rather than a threat to health and life?

Evrry time I hear you on the radio defenfing the right to smoke I sigh deeply and shake my head in sadness that a grown man is willing to be a fool to himself and encourage others to imitate him.

I decided to be blunt with you cause you are blunt in defending what is clearly wrong so why should I sugarcoat my thoughts on the habit of smoking and those who support it?

My intention is not to offend but to give you much needed food for thought. After all, a society which has people defending something which has needlessly claimed the lives of millions is in desperate need of the voice of reason.

After reading that I need a drink and thankfully there's a pub - The Ginger Man - directly across the road from my hotel in Fenian Street.

If anyone else is in Dublin tonight come and have a pint.

Piers Morgan, one of my guilty pleasures

One of my guilty pleasures is Piers Morgan.

There, I've said it.

I read his gossip-fuelled column in the Mail on Sunday, and I enjoyed Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade.

I like people who give the appearance of enjoying life to the full. I'm not sure I could cope with it all the time but they make the world a better place.

I particularly admire people who come back from adversity and in career terms that's what Morgan did after he was sacked as editor of the Mirror.

He reinvented himself, first on British television, then on CNN in America.

Critics sneer and say he got sacked by CNN too but American TV is a cutthroat business. He did well getting the job in the first place and survived for three years, no mean feat.

Anyway, I met him this morning on the set of ITV's Good Morning Britain and contrary to his gobby reputation he didn't say much, leaving a lot of the talking to his co-presenter Susanna Reid.

The subject of our on air discussion was smoking in films and whether movies that feature the use of tobacco should have an 'adult' rating.

The Guardian ran the story yesterday (Films portraying smoking should get adult rating, says WHO) but it was only today that the broadcast media took a serious interest.

After GMB I was asked to do eight BBC radio interviews back-to-back, some live, some recorded.

This afternoon I did four more, finishing a few moments ago with BBC Hereford & Worcester.

The last frontier?

The World Heath Organisation has renewed its call for films that portray smoking to be given an 'adult' rating.

The WHO has been banging on about this for years so I suppose there's some comfort in the fact that no government has implemented the recommendation.

The British Board of Film Classification has also resisted the idea but I don't sense any strong ideological opposition. Instead they cite existing law and public opinion.

As we know laws can be introduced or extended quite easily and public opinion means nothing once politicians get an idea in their heads so it would be nice to hear a rather more robust defence of artistic freedom and expression.

Anyway the Guardian concluded its report with a short quote from me:

"Disney has a no smoking policy for its PG 13-rated films, and that’s fine, but films aimed at older audiences must be allowed to reflect real life, not some sanitised smoke-free world.

“Penalising films that portray smoking by giving them a rating equivalent to an 18 certificate is a clumsy and unnecessary attempt at censorship."

My full response included these additional comments:

"Smoking rates are falling throughout the Western world, especially among children, so there's scant evidence that films are encouraging young people to smoke.

"The portrayal of smoking in films should be a matter for the film industry and individual directors and producers, not the World Health Organisation.

"What next? Will films that portray drinking, violence and casual sex be given a similar rating in case they're a bad influence too?"

Have you noticed, by the way, how the "last frontier" in tobacco promotion keeps changing?

Fifteen years ago it was advertising and sponsorship. Then it was the display of tobacco in shops.

More recently it was packaging. Now it's smoking in films.

Eventually the mere act of lighting up will be the "last frontier" in tobacco promotion. Cue calls for the total prohibition of smoking.

Update: I'll be discussing smoking in films on BBC Radio Kent shortly after 9.00 and BBC World Service a little later.

Update: I'm also on LBC this evening after 7.00.

Wogan's world

In the late Eighties and early Nineties I had a recurring dream. Or nightmare.

In it I was Terry Wogan but I was also at university - which in reality I had left almost a decade earlier - and was about to sit my final exams.

The dream was always the same. I had done no studying because there simply wasn't time to do that and present a thrice weekly TV chat show.

As my exams got closer and closer I began to seriously panic.

The nightmare always ended the same way. I would wake up, heart thumping and mildly agitated, before it slowly dawned on me that that it was only a dream.

The relief was truly wonderful and made the escalating panic well worthwhile.

This anecdote probably says more about me than Terry Wogan but I mention it because it highlights the ubiquitousness that characterised that period in his career.

As it happens, a television chat show wasn't Wogan's natural habitat. The pregnant pauses and wry humour that made him unique on radio felt stiff and awkward on screen, especially when he was interviewing some charmless 'celebrity'.

A similar problem befell him on Children In Need where he looked increasingly out of place.

However a fellow broadcaster - the former MP Matthew Parris - described him as "quietly subversive" and that's how I'll remember him.

Blankety Blank, as presented by Wogan and later Les Dawson, was arguably the first game show that made fun of the genre.

Famously he also became the first presenter to openly mock the Eurovision Song Contest, his gentle but scathing commentary including quotes such as, "Who knows what hellish future lies ahead? Actually I do, I've seen the rehearsals."

One sensed that he was equally unimpressed by our increasingly intrusive style of government. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, for example, he once commented:

"The man on the Clapham Omnibus wonders why we're worried about personal information falling into the hands of untrustworthy people, who may use it to extract money from us. Since the Government had it in the first place, it's happened already."

A lifelong non-smoker he gave an interview a few years ago in which he commented on the number of pubs that had closed. Classic Wogan, he didn't offer an opinion as such, he simply noted that:

"People don’t smoke in pubs now, and they don’t want to sit out in the cold and smoke, so they don’t go at all."

In 'Wogan's World', his Sunday Telegraph column, he added, "I hate to break it to you ... but pub culture is over. Five blokes talking rubbish over a pint died with the smoking ban. It’s dinner at the gastropub, and bring your partner."

Refreshingly he openly admitted he enjoyed a drink and even described alcohol as his "big vice". In an interview last year he said:

"We, probably in common with every other middle class person of our age, probably drink too much, but there you are.

“Of course you shouldn’t drink every day, I’m not advocating people drinking, but the fact is that, yes, I have a glass of wine with my dinner and I may have a dry martini before my dinner.

"When you get to a certain age you think, ‘Well, how much longer have I got to have a dry martini?’

“So you’ve got to make the most of it. I make a wonderful dry martini and an excellent champagne cocktail, with a cube of sugar, bitters and Cointreau. It’s delicious.”

We'll never know what he thought of the Chief Medical Officer's latest guidelines on drinking but I like to think he would have considered them every bit as ridiculous as Eurovision.

PS. I started with a tenuous link so I'll end with one.

Several commentators in Ireland have commented today on the role Wogan probably unwittingly played in diminishing any anti-Irish feeling in Britain in the wake of the IRA bombings in the Seventies and Eighties.

Well, I shall be in Ireland later this week and I will happily raise a glass or two to Terry Wogan, the UK's favourite Irishman who became a duel citizen in 2005 and was a fine ambassador for both countries.

In honour of the great man I shall ask for a champagne cocktail with a cube of sugar, bitters and Cointreau. I'm told it's delicious.

Vaping causes shrunken penises - you read it here first

Just stumbled on a news report from July 1998.

It made me laugh because there have been some strong denunciations of junk science in relation to e-cigarettes.

This week, for example, it was claimed that vaping could lead to hearing loss, a suggestion that first surfaced last year.

One of the most outspoken critics of this and other attempts at scaremongering has been Clive Bates, the former director of ASH who is now a leading advocate of vaping as an alternative to smoking.

Listen to tobacco control campaigners like Clive and you'd think junk science and public health propaganda are a relatively new phenomena.

If only.

See 'Penis shock tactics 'could cut smoking' (BBC News, July 1998) and this quote in particular:

Clive Bates, director of ASH said: "There may be people out there who don't care at all about the risk of getting cancer later on, but might be really upset if they thought it was interfering with their sex life.

"The advantage of the penis from a communications point of view, is that it is easy to imagine it shrivelled up and shrunken, whereas damage to other vital organs such as the heart is much less obvious or easy to visualise."

Fancy that! 

The suggestion that smoking may be a significant cause of impotence or some form of erectile dysfunction always struck me as one of the more desperate arguments against smoking.

After all, when smoking was at its most popular in the Fifties, with 80 per cent of men puffing happily on their fags, Britain and other Western countries were enjoying a baby boom.

It's only a matter of time, surely, before someone suggests vaping can interfere with a person's sex life or, worse, shrivel men's penises. When that day comes I look forward to Clive's indignant response.

Meanwhile, here's that quote again. It's so good I had to publish it twice:

"The advantage of the penis from a communications point of view, is that it is easy to imagine it shrivelled up and shrunken, whereas damage to other vital organs such as the heart is much less obvious or easy to visualise."

PS. I've just had an idea. 'The A-Z of Junk Science'. Now, who wants to write it - and what shall we put in it?

What a waste of time and money

According to BBC Sussex, 'an exclusive BBC Sussex investigation has found that Sussex Police didn't issue a SINGLE penalty for SMOKING in a car carrying children - within the first three months of the new law.'

Invited to respond Forest commented:

"We're not surprised. Apart from the fact that it's almost impossible to tell if there's a small child in the back of a moving vehicle, the police have far more important things to do than stop drivers for smoking in their own cars.

"In addition, the overwhelming majority of smokers know it's inconsiderate to light up in a car carrying children and don't do it.

"This is a classic example of a law that is not only impossible to enforce, it's totally unnecessary. Introducing legislation has been a complete waste of parliamentary time and money."

I said much the same thing on BBC Radio Sussex this morning.

In a clip I heard Amanda Sandford of ASH suggested another "mass media campaign" to inform smokers they can't light up in a car carrying children.

That seems to be tobacco control's answer to everything – let's have another mass media campaign. Sounds to me like a pitch for more money to maintain all those offices and staff ...

Vapers, did you really think they would stop at smoking?

If anyone doubts that the endgame for 'public' health is the elimination of nicotine as a recreational drug, here's more evidence.

An advertising feature placed by Liverpool City Council in the Liverpool Echo includes two revealing passages:

Roy Castle FagEnds can provide support for people to give up e-cigarettes, as well as traditional tobacco.

"I'm now encouraging my son Sean to get support from Roy Castle FagEnds to help him give up e-cigarettes."

To those vapers who insist on cosying up to public health (aka tobacco control), don't say we didn't warn you.

The die has been cast. E-cigarettes are the new tobacco. Public health campaigners have spotted a brand new market for their nicotine cessation services.

Did you really think they would stop at smoking?