An astounding piece of information has been released this afternoon, actually, several pieces of astounding information!

“NetDoctor” which releases all the up to the minute health news has bestowed the ‘fact’ that 67% of smokers want to quit! (according to research by the Office for National Statistics [ONS]). Now it doesn’t say who carried out the survey, on which merry band of folk the survey was carried out upon nor even where the survey was carried out-was it even in England? I will grant you that it is a different percentage to that which ASH endlessly scream from the rooftops-but it is the same tale.

You would think that after 4 years (almost) of anti-smoking terrorism, all these silly departments of correction (in the case of smokers) would think to themselves that all smokers who wanted to give up would have done so by now! After 4 years (almost) of agonising ‘shall I, shan’t I’ those who obviously didn’t give up simply don’t want to give up, yet ‘they’ still make it sound as if smokers are being forced to smoke against their will. The bullshit never stops! Old hands at this game will now already be suspecting a touch of the ‘YouGov’s’ here.

Apparently nearly 70% of householders do not allow smoking indoors (now I do remember this coming up on a YouGov survey!) The same questions as above apply – who, which where? There is not even a glimpse of any ‘people participation’ anywhere so you are entitled to be thinking that we are on the propaganda stakes yet again. Try as I might, I cannot see hordes of smokers sitting on their doorsteps around here!

Then we come to the bit that tells us the truth… it is all bullshit!

Quote:- “81 per cent of people are in favour of the existing ban on lighting up in public places.”

OK, I’ve stopped laughing now folks so I’ll continue with this sorry tale. This is an out & out ASH figure. I haven’t got a clue where they plucked it from, probably YouGov) but they plucked it and have produced it whenever necessary. To counteract that idiotic statement, we only have to refer to the Licensees Study  to see that out of 570 public houses surveyed, more than 460 (81% +) stated “they wanted improvements to be made to the law to accommodate smokers”.

Now that might seem a strange opposite to most folk but the licensees are the reality, ie, they actually live in the real world of dying businesses – pubs. The people who sit behind a desk, dreaming up numbers to suit a particular desire live in a world of fantasy, hence the massive 162 point discrepancy! The 9,000 businesses that have closed forever have done so because of the lack of customers since July 1st, 2007, which is exactly why the smoking ban needs to be amended immediately-if not sooner! In ‘fantasy world’, everybody adores the ban (smokers more so than non-smokers seemingly) and 9,000 venues have closed down because 9,000 licensees suddenly became useless businessmen/women overnight and lost all their regular customers through stupidity and poor people skills.

Just to hammer the point about smokers being those dirty, filthy breed that cost our NHS a fortune (no, I’m not going to bother) we read this snippet :- A statistician at the ONS said: ‘The scale of the health problem caused by smoking is clearly shown by the fact that there were approximately 1.5 million hospital admissions in 2008-09 with a primary diagnosis of a disease that can be caused by smoking, and this figure has been rising steadily since 1996-97 when the number of admissions was 1.1 million.’

OK, so in 11 years there have been 400,000 more admissions-just hold on a minute here folks! In 1996, we were hovering around the 58 million inhabitants mark so 1.1 million of them were admission cases.

To 2008/9 and we find that the figure was up to 61,792,000 so we have an approximate increase of 3.792m in those 11 years (and there were 60-70,000 immigrants running around that the government had no idea of their whereabouts!) population rose by 3.72m and admissions rose by 0.4m! Many of the immigrants come from high density smoking countries: Nigeria 33%, Indian’s 33.2% , Serbian’s 39.6%, Kazakhstani’s 42.9%, Romanians/Hungarians 45.5% and we have many more nationalities here!

To say that admissions have been rising over the past 11/12 years without relating to the population increase as well is extremely biased number manoeuvring, not to mention the high propensity of smokers from other countries moving here! Amazing how easy it is to word things to your advantage, but then we’ve got used to ASH, CRUK et al doing that all the time! (A good friend of mine went to the Doctors, suspecting gout. First question do you smoke? Would that be a smoke related admission to hospital?) So, the statistician ‘at the ONS’ needs to go and relax in a bath and see if he can agree with Archimedes Principle before venturing statistical evidence again.

Reading this ‘report‘ it is very easy to see how ASH totally hoodwinked the Blair government-they must have thought they were saving the whole sodding planet by the time Arnott & crew had finished with them! Very strange how Cherie Blair told her old man to ‘step down’ three whole days before the implementation of said ban!

People are born to die, some live extraordinarily long lives and some very, very short lives but for most of us 60-70 years looks to be about the norm. The anti-tobacco lobby are promising us innumerable years as ‘bonus life’ if we give up smoking yet nobody actually knows when they are going to die so no one can tell if they have had an extra five seconds of life, five minutes of life or five years of life! What does matter to most people however is quality of life and the anti-smokers are suffocating that quality for 25% of the population simply because ‘they’ don’t like the smell of tobacco.

You see folks, they have got into our lives so much (thanks to idiot governments) that they now want to tell us what to eat, drink, when to sleep, when to exercise so as to live longer etc, but (and here is the killer) because of the baby boom in the 50’s & 60’s they cannot now afford all the pensions needed to cater for our elderly. They don’t actually need fit & healthy people as we are now a drain on national resources, they actually want a few million of us to conk out-aged 64 and 364 days old would be perfect! (5 years less for women of course).

So really, to suit government finances, the headlines should read “Two Thirds of British Smokers have Quit Quitting”. The bullshit just never stops!

(h/t to Sheila)

(Link to Story no Longer Available)