Goodbye nanny state, hello nudge

The Free Society website has been dormant for a while. My fault entirely. I had intended to appoint a commissioning editor after our series of debates last summer but I got side-tracked.

Anyway, I am currently speaking to potential editors and contributors and I hope that, very soon, we will have a new team of writers and, within a few weeks, the site will feature at least one new post every day.

In the meantime I am pleased to welcome our first new contributor. David Bowden works for the Institute of Ideas. He also writes for Spiked. Writing for The Free Society today, David comments:

How long ago those heady summer months now feel, with Britain emerging from the 13-year nightmare of creeping New Labour authoritarianism, heralded by a fresh-faced Coalition Government promising a new era of freedom. Yet, as we all scrambled around searching for appropriate terms to describe the new politics, it was apparent that another re-branding was well under way. Goodbye New Labour’s nanny state; hello to the Lib-Cons’ nudge.

Scottish Government delays tobacco display ban

The Scottish Government has announced that the introduction of the tobacco display ban in Scotland is being delayed from October 1, 2011, until further notice due to a legal appeal by Imperial Tobacco.

I have issued this response on behalf of Forest:

"We welcome the announcement by the Scottish Government and hope that this marks the beginning of the end for the tobacco display ban in Scotland.

"Banning the display of tobacco in shops is an illiberal measure that will do little to reduce youth smoking rates.

"It's an act of censorship that is designed to denormalise tobacco and stigmatise adults who choose to consume a perfectly legal product.

"Tobacco control policies should be evidence based. There is no evidence that a display ban will achieve anything apart from costing small retailers money that they cannot afford and inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of law-abiding consumers."

See ASH Scotland's response.

Hong Kong phooey

I was invited by RTHK Radio 3 in Hong Kong to take part in a discussion about smoking and whether it should be banned in all outdoor areas.

It would be broadcast live, they said, between 8.30 and 9.00am, which translates as 12.30 to 1.00am in the UK.

That was last night. In the event the discussion went on until 1.30. It was prompted, they said, by an article in a Hong Kong newspaper headlined 'Workers face demands for smoking ban outside offices'.

My fellow guests last night were Prof Lam Tai-hing, quoted above, and Dr Kwok Ka Ki. Honestly, there was no debating with these people. As far as they are concerned tobacco smoke is toxic and even the slightest exposure is dangerous to non-smokers.

The presenters tried to play devil's advocate but refused to accept anything I said about passive smoking because I am not a "medical expert", unlike Dr Ka Ki and Prof Tai-hing.

My argument that we shouldn't believe everything we hear from so-called "experts" fell on death ears. Talk about banging your head against a brick wall.

All in all, it was a rather tiring way to end a long day.

State of civil liberties in Britain today

Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, has produced a book that I warmly recommend.

Published by Biteback, it's called Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in modern Britain and it's available on Amazon and in the larger branches of Waterstone's, like this one in Piccadilly where I bought my copy on Thursday.

You will be familiar with the names of several contributors because they include a number of people who took part in our 2010 Voices of Freedom debates: Guy Herbert, No2ID; Mark Littlewood, IEA; Josie Appleton, Manifesto Club; Philip Johnston, author of Bad Laws: An Explosive Analysis of Britain’s Petty Rules, Health and Safety Lunacies and Madcap Laws; and Alex himself.

Another contributor is Brian Monteith, author of The Bully State: The End of Tolerance, published by The Free Society in 2009. There's also an essay by Simon Davies of Privacy International who has just completed a report commissioned by Forest that we hope to publish next month. Watch this space.

Update: Josie Appleton, director of the Manifesto Club and a contributor to Big Brother Watch (above), has written a piece on the rebellion against the Spanish smoking ban. "It's quite heartening!" she tells me.

Smoke free cars? Thanks for the tips

A new study published this week in Scotland claimed that "Smoking in a car exposes a child passenger to dangerous levels of poisonous particles … and even opening a window doesn’t protect them".

The findings, we were told, are so stark that NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC), which commissioned the study, has launched a high profile campaign "to persuade the thousands of Scots motorists who continue to smoke and endanger non-smoking passengers to make their cars smoke free".

According to the NHSGGC press release:

The study involved a child sized doll being fitted in a car seat with the very latest smoke monitoring equipment attached at the doll’s mouth so that precise measurements could be taken. The particles of tobacco poison were so high that they compared with the levels you would expect after being exposed to secondhand smoke in a busy smoke filled pub before the smoking ban.

Various "health experts" were wheeled out to comment on the "shocking" results. Surprisingly, no-one, not even Sheila Duffy, chief executive of ASH Scotland, called for a ban on smoking in cars, although I have no doubt that is their aim. Instead we were given some 'Tips for a smokefree car':

• Try to always take smoking outside
• Try to make your car a smokefree car at all times for everyone
• Have a cigarette before and after your journey
• On long journeys, stop, have a break and smoke outside the car
• Remove car cigarette lighters
• Clear out car ash trays
• Display a window sticker 'Our Car is Smokefree' (Ugh!)

A summary of the report can be downloaded from the NHSGGC Smokefree Services website.

The Scotsman has the story, including a short quote from me, here: Don't smoke and drive - it's as toxic as a pub fug for your children, insist doctors.