9 August 2010

Smile. It’s not that bad. Ask Irene Graham, of Boscombe, who delighted an audience with her reminiscences of a German POW who was sent each week to do her garden: “He was repatriated at the end of 1945,” she recalled. “He’d always seemed such a nice friendly chap, but when the crocuses came up in the middle of our lawn in February 1946, they spelt out ‘Heil Hitler’.”

Or how about Stuart Isbister, who runs a small gift shop in Nottingham? When the smoking ban was introduced, he refused to display a “No Smoking” sign on his window. “We just don’t think it necessary to have a sign. We have a small amount of space and wanted to keep the door area simple and uncluttered. It is completely disproportionate and totally unnecessary. People just don’t smoke in shops. We don’t have signs on the door saying no thieving and no dropping your trousers, yet both of these are against the law.”

As part of its war against smokers the previous Labour government generated a massive bureaucracy and an army of enforcement officers employed by councils (that means YOU in case you hadn’t realised) requiring all stores, public buildings, even churches, to display a No Smoking sign.

Nottingham Council took Mr Isbister to court, and lost, because they hadn’t followed the correct procedure, but it’s only a matter of time before smoking is banned totally. Already the EU zealots are getting into the act. As reported by the News of the World last year: “Brussels chiefs want to outlaw beer-garden ciggie areas – and even extend the ban to open air concerts like this weekend’s Glastonbury Festival. It says non-smokers in outdoor areas are still in danger from passive smoking.”

Sorry if I lose a few of you here, but this is utter madness. I can accept that shops, churches, restaurants etc should be non-smoking, but pub landlords (and private clubs) should be free to allow smoking if they want; and banning smoking in the open air is health fascism from the asylum. Please remember that the first person to ban smoking in Europe was Adolf Hitler (though only among women; his generals warned him that if he wanted to lose the war, all he had to do was prevent the troops from lighting up and the Russians would be in Berlin by next Wednesday).

But with the eurozone in meltdown, I suspect this proposal has been temporarily stubbed out, so let’s keep smiling and light up another jolly old gasper.

David Challice

UK Independence Party

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