Don’t let cigs fascists get you down

11:40am Sunday 27th April 2008

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IN response to the article on page 10 (LT, April 22) concerning the Sahara Cafe and the letter by Councillor Salim Mulla in the same edition.

Chris Allen, head of Environmental Health and Trading Standards at Blackburn with Darwen Council, said: "We don't take any great pleasure in this (referring to the enforcement of the smoking ban). We are just doing our jobs."

How many people have we heard uttering those words over the last couple of decades?

Let us not forget the smoking ban was enacted in totality, with no choice, by a Health Minister whose policies border on "health fascism."

There was room for compromise with smoking and non-smoking venues but, like a petty dictator, the Health Minister took away the right to free choice.

So much for the democratic rights of any person in this free' country.

The smokers of this country paid taxes four times greater than the amount spent on the treatment of smoke-related diseases. Now, along with the profits of restaurants, cafes, pubs and the multitude of businesses that relied on tobacco as their income, that revenue has been lost.

To achieve what? Live longer, so that pensioners can be kept in penury deciding whether to eat or heat?

To do without the simple pleasures of life so that the Health Service can concentrate on arthritis, brittle bone, dementia, myopia, senility and the multitude of illnesses and disease that old-age brings and the young can look forward to?

To live longer so that small-minded idiots can have a good old whinge about the amount of pension paid to these pensioners who dared live longer than retirement age?

Coun Mulla was right. If tobacco becomes too expensive or difficult to buy then people will turn to the black market.

This is already happening. Black market tobacco at less than half the cost of retail is certainly easy to come by - the treasury is now losing money.

The pubs, clubs and restaurants have already lost my business because, being a long-term smoker, I choose my right to smoke, Do you know what? I don't miss those places in any form.

As a matter of fact, I've saved a fortune by not going out (and in the case of restaurants, home-cooked does taste better and I can even have a cigarette between courses).

Smoking is legal and approved by the Government.

It must be, because it is not even a class C drug and the Government still collects taxes on tobacco.

But if the health fascists have won and it keeps little jobsworths happy, who am I to bother about it?

I will be content in my home, puffing away merrily and will probably die young so the tax-paying whingers can't complain about my pension.

And the joke is, no matter what, we are all going to die. Ask the health freaks in the cemetery.

ALAN LIGHTBOWN-WHALLEY, Douglas Place, Roe Lee, Blackburn.