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Floaters and voters – politicalbetting.com
Floaters and voters – politicalbetting.com
75 of the 100 constituencies worst hit by sewage spills last year are held by Conservative MPsLib Dems' @timfarron claims Tory MPs facing a “reckoning at the ballot box” in general electionStory here ?https://t.co/WuchANqtT8 pic.twitter.com/bG4jzPhrdj
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I am all for tobacco cessation but am not convinced this is the best way,not least because of practical issues .
In her introduction Truss insists she has not written a conventional political memoir. This broken promise, and the millenarian title, imply that Ten Years to Save the West is the sort of bracing polemic one would expect from a politician now marooned far adrift of establishment respectability. I wish it were. Instead Truss has managed to combine the more tedious hallmarks of both genres into a book that is for whole chapters readable only in the most literal sense of the word, like the ingredients on a crisp packet. At its worst it reads as if the publisher Biteback, which paid Truss an almost disrespectful advance of just over £1,500, asked ChatGPT to imagine Keith Joseph and Richard Littlejohn reading Wikipedia to one another.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/liz-truss-book-review-ten-years-to-save-the-west-qgxgzkc8n
So yes, the new law will look a bit odd, with the boundary effects but so what? We have other boundaries in society around age. I can’t live in a Macarthy and Stone Apartment yet, for instance. More seriously ther are age limits on many activities.
If not this, then what? See people continue to wreck their health and die of lung cancer? Isn’t this better than keeping driving the price higher and higher?
The second hand smoke argument is a load of codswallop because they are banning vaping and nicotine patches as well which doesn't generate second hand smoke.
Personally I don't care if people smoke or not as long as it is not by me.
We are getting to the stage where any health lobbying group will propose a ban on something on the pretext of saving rNHS. Irrespective of whether it works or not.
This will simply fuel, the already booming, black market.
To start with older friends will buy for younger people.
In 40 year's time, young people will simply buy from criminal gangs like with other drugs, assuming this moronic law lasts that long.
I’m not aware of any other product with a 50% death rate for regular use that we allow to be sold legally.
Ouch!
Absent a miracle this is the year they get forced to the bargaining table, and at that point Putin already wins. Then the West will wring its hands and say 'Shucks, that's bad but we have to accept the status quo'.
There is a segment of smokers (the “irreconcilables”) who will never give up and are a net cost on health (the tax surplus comes from those who smoke for a period or not heavily).
The key is to avoid more people joining that group - and the best way to do that is to stop them starting
Additionally they screwed up badly on the regulation of vaping and this allows it to be fixed without admiting that
Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss review — as readable as a crisp packet
The former PM’s 300-page self-justification of her disastrous premiership is whingey, wooden and baffling
Your assumption is that this policy will accelerate the decline in smoking usage. Around the same percentage of 16-24 year olds use marijuana or other illegal drugs as that smoke cigarettes, so I'm not sure there's much evidence a ban will be the more effective route than a continuation and expansion of the current policy.
On smoking if its so bad then theres no reason not to ban it completely. If its OK that people above a certain age smoke then why not ok for everyone to make such a disgusting choice?
So either get rid of it or don't, not this weird half measure.
Generally, making it harder to get something decreases use.
A nationalised utility privatised because it needed investment and improvement (there being nothing new about sewage in British rivers and coasts) but little investment actually occurring in reservoirs and treatment plans, just being used as a way to skim off dividends for shareholders of whom many are overseas.
But if you made it completely illegal from 2025 I am pretty sure it would lead to significant boon in organised crime revenues, and therefore police corruption, money laundering and probably violence from turf wars too. Those seem unlikely at the significant level with this policy.
The difference with most drugs is that it’s really obvious that you’ve been or are smoking. You can see the clouds of smoke, smell the cloud of smoke, smell it on the person - there is just no way of doing it subtly. You can do a line of coke at work and not be noticed doing it but you won’t be able to sneak out for a crafty fag.
Yes people smoke cannabis but they will always likely not give a shit for the law and frankly it will be harder to get away with it in public if nobody smokes fags anymore as the cloud of smoke won’t be confused for anything else.
There is absolutely nothing good about smoking - I wish to god this law had been rolling before I started smoking so that I hadn’t.
I wish also I had moved onto a vape sooner as since the beginning of January I’ve gone from sometimes 20 fags a day to finding the smell of cigarettes absolutely vile. I started vaping with the frequency of smoking and I’ve gradually, without actively trying, just got down to the bare minimum and have just switched to my next level down of nicotine strength liquid. After that I will have the zero nicotine so that when I’m having a drink I have that comfort blanket of something to puff on.
The thing is I shouldn’t have to be going through hoops to stop something horrifically bad for my health and other people but I do because nicotine is terrible. There are people who probably won’t be able to scale down as surprisingly easily as I have managed and I can imagine it’s awful always wanting a fag.
So anything that makes someone less likely to smoke is fine by me.
As I said: just as many young people use illegal drugs as smoke. Cigarettes will be even easier to access given most of the population can buy them freely (and young people can buy them overseas to bring into the UK).
I fail to see why this will have a large impact on smoking rates nationally. A renewed, wholesale campaign targeting across all age groups would be far more effective, and far less illiberal.
Not only are we a country incapable of basic sanitation, we have the governing party sneeringly dismissing the issue and backing the private companies making it unsafe for people to go near rivers or on beaches.
https://twitter.com/BriefcaseMike/status/1778821188694753341
It ought to have been recognised back in Thatcher's time that the market is a non starter as a principle for managing a universally essential public utility.
Anybody depending on the enduring commitment of the US to the cause was always heading for disappointment.
Given that you might as well go for what works.
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.6371245,-1.1801822,3a,75y,184.33h,75.94t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sAF1QipO0TBldXU99qo0x_QK2QPGvQ_SRNEjjkwshQNDG!2e10!7i5376!8i2688?entry=ttu
The question for the appeasers id this: where is your red line? How much of other people's territory - and how many actual other people - are you willing to gift to a fascist empire?
https://www.libdemvoice.org/ed-davey-i-will-vote-for-smoking-ban-and-i-hope-the-bill-passes-75023.html
Looking at the comments below the line, there is some disappointment amongst party supporters.
For example:
"Please don’t characterise those of us who think Sunak’s proposals are foolish as “libertarians [with an] obsession with extreme civil rights” . it’s not helpful in getting people to “disagreeing well, ” when many of us have been card carrying liberals and liberal democrats for decades.
Please don’t think I think smoking is a sensible thing to do , that I think the health risks are minimal or the pain of the diseases over estimated – I did 4 years of post grad cancer research, and my mother died of cancer. But personal freedom is important, and smokers pay towards the costs of treating the diseases cigarettes cause. No one can genuinely say they don’t know smoking is a health risk. Life is not risk free.
Couple all that with the likelihood of the ban being essentially ineffective (diminishing respect for the law) and the cigarette trade likely to move to criminal gangs (no health warnings etc etc as well as supplying such gangs with copious income as with current banned drugs). These are respectable, rational and defendable liberal positions, and they are those we use to defend the Party’s support for decriminalisation of cannabis.
I am very pleased to hear the vote is not whipped. I hope as many of our MPs as possible do not support the Conservative and Labour positions, to make good liberal and antiauthoritarian points.""
I despise smoking, but dumb as saying it will kill but you can still buy it is, at least all adults are being treated the same.
- It focusses solely on the sale of tobacco in the UK. So it is as strict on vaping as it is cigarettes.
- It does not make smoking illegal for anyone, so no one can stop a young person smoking or allow the police to question where they got them from. It's perfectly legal for them to buy cigarettes or vapes abroad and bring them into the UK, or be gifted them from someone older.
- The above fact means it will simply encourage the small-time black market and reduce taxation from tobacco.
So even if you support its goals it's a pretty crap piece of legislation.
{browses adverts for sea going power boats - cigarette boats}
I wonder how many of the noisy libertarians smoke themselves? The price of liberty is other hopelessly addicted people dying of lung cancer.
The geographical distribution is interesting.
It's going to be a day of evidence free Scot-Gnattery on Twitter isn't it, since this data is England only?
"Look at THEM! Look at THEM! Look at THEM THEM THEM!"
The voters will be used to that.
How they vote is up to them, but aid has the support of the majority.
There was even a hilarious attempt to try and get the locals to oppose the covering of the Acton Storm Tanks - open water storage that smelt awful if it dried out. They have been covered over and form part of the Thames Super Sewer.
The peak moment was an "activist" at a meeting demanding more support - the locals were apparently betraying themselves, by allowing development.
So the Supreme Court is the last and ultimate legislating body.
If we want to protect our current rulers and our broken system we will have to do it ourselves.
UK inflation falls as meat and crumpet prices drop
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68833077
What percentage of CPI is dependent on the price of crumpets?
You can never get too much crumpet
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/ten-years-to-save-the-west-review-liz-truss-memoir/ (£££)
Other than that, I am reminded of the quote by Willie Whitelaw about people going around stirring up apathy.
The complication for me is the impact on others from smokit. I'd happily oppose the ban and instead criminalise smoking inside where any under 18s are present or outside within x metres (depending on research) of under 18s - both those to protect children with parents who are smokers. But that's unenforceable in practice. On balance though, I think I'd probably have to vote against the ban, while continuing measures to discourage smoking.
I'd need to see the liberal case for a ban to change my mind. I'd love smoking to end, but I can't make a case for it that aligns with my principles.
Between this and the apparently rather knee jerk response to the Cass review*, my enthusiasm for voting LD rather than Lab at the next GE is currently fading. At present I don't see all that much point.
*the post on the LD website, though only apparently from the LGBT+ group, was vague and unsatisfactory and suggested a lack of evidence led thinking. There are valid criticisms to be made, particularly in the leap from patchy evidence to practice changes, but I wasn't impressed by that.
I think Nudge can have value, as can softer edged enforcement. I think the concern about "what about telling the difference between an X year old and an X+1 year old" may be overdone in practice. It gives a time to adapt, as when stopping smoking is not easy to go from Zero to Hero in one jump.
I think a softer edged change - as a nudge which gradually goes into stronger enforcement over a period of years - may be one way of gradually ramping the reform in.
A 33 year old is tricky to tell from a 32 year old, but the practice in many shops for alcohol is to challenge "those who our staff think may be under 25" rather than trying to tell (say) a 17 year old from an 18 year old. There's no reason why the same approach cannot be used here - and before long it will be "no one under 30 can purchase tobacco", when teens will be clearly identifiable.
Do I think it will work? Not sure, and I'd like to hear of any alternative proposals.
@Ratters first point seems strange - how does regulation of sale of tobacco affect vaping, which aiui only carries the nicotine across, not the tobacco?
https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/investment-in-the-water-industry/
Whether by enough I don't know.
Aside from better regulation perhaps we need to pay a bit more on our water bills - I've always thought that water was cheap compared to other utilities or the bottled variety.
Most people who smoke want to give up. That's because nicotine is astonishingly addictive. Most people smoking are doing something they would rather not be doing, because they are compelled by their addiction. That is a restriction on people's freedoms. We increase liberty by banning an addictive drug.
China will have noted the West's weakness and lack of resolve. Do people not realise that this failure will have consequences?
Crap for Britain! Vote Conservative.
Why be snide about other posters just because they disagree with you?
Perhaps those of us supportive of Ukraine have tired of your snide remarks, and those of others willing to abandon a democracy to conquest by a dictatorship?
I don't need to justify my support of Ukraine or fulfil a quota of parts about the subject to satisfy you that my resolve hasn't wavered. Fuck off and keep fucking off.