spinoff

Two problems are posed by Parliament’s vote on smoking. Well, that’s nonsense, obviously – there are many problems, not least of which that the policy wasn’t in the manifesto (but then again, neither was invading Iraq, of course); potential loss of revenue to pubs and clubs, coupled with additional costs of creating – as has happened in New York and Dublin – smokers’ areas in the form of terraces or fenced off pens outside; a £2,500 fine for lighting up (which is less than one gets for many real criminal offences); the collapse of the cigarette vending machine industry and so on.

 

Problem 1 (of many) is the fundamental wrongness of the bases of the law. ‘Passive smoking kills, just look at Roy Castle’ is an extremely poor argument when there is no actual evidence of it doing anything of the kind (and don’t quote the US EPA report – it’s rubbish, and been proven to be so).

 

It smells, yes, and stings the eyes, certainly – like smoke machines, actually. But no-one’s talking about banning them now, are they? ‘Smoking costs the NHS millions a year which we could be treating little kiddies with’.

 

Yes, smoking related illnesses cost £1.7bn per year (figures from ASH). Smoking related taxation raises £9.9billion a year (or it did in 2004: £8.1bn Excise duty, £1.8bn VAT). £9.9bn minus £1.7bn gives a profit of £8.2 billion to the Exchequer.

 

Smoking doesn’t cost anything. It makes money – the little kiddies are being funded through tobacco taxation, and don’t you forget it. Smokers pay for hospitals, battleships, social services and all of the wonderfulness that is the state, and because of taxation they do it truly disproportionately to others So. Passive smoking doesn’t kill, and smokers don’t cost the NHS anything.

 

Bar staff, apparently, will not have to put up with second hand smoke. That’s good. Any chance we could ban, say, drinking in pubs so they didn’t have to put up with being regularly threatened by drunken punters? Or with cleaning up their vomit?

 

What’s worse is that smoking is still, nominally, legal. No Chancellor wants to lose £8.2 billion, so no-one will take the truly logical step. Rather than limiting where people can smoke to, effectively, doorways and their own homes, if this truly was a public health measure, smoking should be banned. It kills people. Ban it. You can’t own a gun, and there are fewer gun deaths in one year than there are of smoking in one week.

 

So the bases of the law are wrong. A true public health measure wouldn’t tinker, but would ban smoking entirely. You’d lose billions in revenue, but at least you’d be principled. And this is the other problem. The self righteous squawking of the anti-smoking lobby seems designed to make most smokers go out and buy a packet of 20 in sheer anger.

 

Deborah Arnott, of anti-smoking group ASH, was quoted by the BBC saying she was "amazed" and "very delighted" by the Commons decision. Cancer Research UK was quoted as saying it was the biggest step forward in public health for half a century (what, bigger than advances in antibiotics? The abolition of polio? Are they quite mad?).

 

There is nothing more designed to put the back up of the recently defeated than a gloating victor. But truly, there’s nothing worse than a gloating victor who has won an argument on the basis of false information. Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, called it a ‘victory for Britain’s insufferable paternalists’.

 

It’s that, and more. It is an proscriptive measure taken for the shakiest of reasons, an easy hit to placate the increasingly vocal lobby in government that seems to believe that because it has little power over deciding big issues, it must legislate over the little ones. The smoking ban is inconsistent, half-hearted and illiberal. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

 

Yours etc., Spinoff.

Does god have a sense of humour? If there is a god, and he invented everything that we have, that we are, that we see and that surrounds us in the known universe, then it stands to reason that he also must have invented our ability to laugh.

 

And so if god invented the sense of humour, does it not stand to reason that he himself has one? How odd therefore that god is always portrayed as being a solemn, humourless individual. How odd that we presume the almighty has no conception, or ability to join in with a manner of communication that he himself must have bestowed on us in the first place.

 

A startling example of this came with the publication in a Danish newspaper of satirical images of the Prophet Mohammed. Muslims were upset, and have started boycotting Danish goods. Today, the EU building in Gaza was surrounded by protesting gunmen.

 

Images of Mohammed are banned because it is thought they encourage idolatry. Create a portrait of the divine, and you will end up worshipping it in place of your actual god. But a humorous image is absolutely not a suitable image of worship. Therefore it is not an idol. It is satire – humorous, and not an agent of idolatry.

 

It is a humorous image of the divine. Is this bad? This question brings us back to whether god has a sense of humour. Well - why shouldn’t he? After all, there is nothing degenerate about humour.

 

Why should humour be associated with baseness and corruption, when it is elevating and enlightening? It is a device for communal pleasure, as well as for pointing out our foibles, and therefore for understanding ourselves better. This is the very essence of humour. Also, critically, it is the essence of religion.

 

The gunmen in Gaza? Saudi Arabians refusing to buy Danish mayonnaise? I bet he’s up there laughing his bloody head off.

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.

The problem with democracy is that you can’t control its outcome. Not from the outside at least.

 

But inside the country, it's a different matter. After all, if you’ve got a few quid and a burning urge to get your hands on the presidency of the United States, say, then there are one or two wheels that can be, as it were, greased from within the political machine.

 

Or if you're a brutally shrewd, public school, politico-careerist armed to the teeth with script writers, stylists, PR people, a quick-response unit and a booming-great spin department, then yes - you're probably going to have some effect on the democratic preocess.

 

Control from inside the country is one thing.

 

Control from the outside, on the other hand, is quite another.

 

This is a problem brought staggeringly to light in the recent Palestinian elections that saw Hamas get its hands on the reigns of power. Hamas, for the uninitiated, has spent the last god-knows-how-long blowing Israelis up because they don’t believe Israel – and hence Israelis – have the right to exist. And now they are the ruling party in Palestine.

 

Hopefully, this complete cowpat of an election result will set one or two brains whirring in Palestine about the advantages of the political process over the bomb.

 

Hopefully it will also set the cogs in motion down Washington way. The rather unfortunate conclusion they may wish to consider is this; that democracy can dish out vary very nasty results indeed - like this one -  and in this light, is it altogether a good idea to force democracy on nations in the middle east who might well end up electing similarly brutish arseholes like Hamas?

 

Which leads to the most troubling question of them all – can democracy be imported at all? And if a political system that you call 'democracy' is imposed from outside, then is that system not democracy by the very fact that it has been imposed rather than chosen?

 

"Bringing Democracy to the Middle East," suddenly stops looking like quite such an attractive prospect.

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.