Never been much of a politician, never been one to dress up words in fancy packages so that when you’re about to be shot it sounds more like a nice little present coming! Me? What you see is what you get – and I just cannot fathom why some people don’t like that; at least I’m up front.
One such person who obviously dislikes my style of ‘batting’ is my East Midlands MEP, Glenis Willmott (Lab), who could not reply to some searching questions of mine a few weeks back whilst preparing to celebrate World No Tobacco Day. I was not rude, in fact I was very polite although I did ask how she would feel if being ‘stood up against a wall to be shot’, which is basically what has happened to the new lepers of our twisted society – the smokers! This ‘good lady’ obviously took umbrage at the very thought that ‘herself’,’ wall’ & ‘shot’ should even enter the same correspondence let alone sentence. Let us investigate the reasons this ‘eurocrat’ is actually yet another ‘europrat’!
For reasons best known to ourselves we elect these people into positions of power in an unelected government sitting somewhere over the water in Belgium They become members of the European System of rule which makes them ‘eurocrats‘ – but do they rule and help make laws that actually benefit us? Do we actually know what manner of demon we have voted into power, I don’t think so? In fact, we only judge these people on what we hear them preach at ‘please vote for me’ rallies, so unless we know the prospective candidate personally it is very much a guessing game!
Now Glenis, for her sins, is a non-smoker (like me) but there is where it ends for she sees only the greater good of eradicating smoking from this country as a means of saving our NHS £2.7bn per annum in treatment costs. Admirable idea but totally impractical, as people that seriously enjoy a cigarette will always smoke…err…seriously enjoy a cigarette!
Invites abounded for various people to join her in celebrating this great day that marked the restriction of people’s freedoms-not that I got an invite, I just happened to see one…..and got the hump, hence the letter to said MEP.
What I fail to see is why, just because the likes of Glenis abhor smoking (and probably smokers), we should all have to suffer the bullying tactics of these ‘eurocratsprats, not to mention the expenditure incurred in their pursuit of their smokefree dream! Unsurprisingly not all MEPs agree with the views of our East Midland ‘europrat’!
We already know that our own hospitality sector is crumbling before our very eyes and we already know from Paul Nuttall (MEP) that every 10,000 newly unemployed cost this government £1.53m per week in “Jobseekers Allowance” alone and we already know that the smoking ban is the primary cause of closures over the past 4 years-though some CAMRA-ites would have you believe those naughty supermarkets suddenly started selling cheap beers to spite the pubs! (Yawn)
Unsurprisingly the objective of EU tobacco policy “is to reduce the harm caused by smoking, by informing and warning consumers of the dangers of cigarettes, by making packs and promotion less attractive, and making the product less available.” The underlined are my illuminations for they are, in a way, fair enough points but the last few words are simply ridiculous – and making the product less available.
Simply by making the product ‘less’ available these people move from being eurocrats to being complete EUROPRATS! By making legal supplies of this legal product more difficult to come by using legal means these imbeciles wearing a badge of power are playing right into the hands of ‘white van man’. Except it gets a damn sight more sinister than that folks, for we delve into the realms of organised crime syndicates, HIGHLY organised crime syndicates!
Through the wonders of technology, a picture dropped onto my desk depicting a ‘20 pack’ of Chinese (to all appearances) Jin Ling cigarettes; they are not made in China, but in Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg (where?).
This is an orphan Russian enclave, separated from the main Russian territory and enclosed by Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea. (Thank God for the internet) It is bandit country, mafia territory-we are talking major BADLANDS where anything can be bought and sold & life has little value.
Part of the ‘europrats’ strategy is to decorate fag packets with cadavers, rotted teeth, multi-coloured lungs etc which are supposedly to deter hardened smokers from being quite so hardened and the “I wanna try smokers” to not “wanna try”. In actual fact, all I have found so far from friends that do smoke is a certain alacrity at ‘collecting the full set’! Indeed, such is the absurdity of this gruesome picture gallery that we now have proof from our American friends that these images are indeed manufactured with the intention of causing fear to possible users of the perfectly legal product. These Jin Ling fags have a warning on them but what on earth it warns of I do not have a clue for it is written in (I am assured) Cyrillic script. Having never met Cyril I cannot interpret! The point is that they are cheap, look kosha and easily flood the marketplace of the disadvantaged. Remarkably, in a very short space of time this contraband brand has made the top ten in the German market. In short, they cost our greedy, greedy government a small fortune in lost revenue, they deprive many of our corner shops valuable turnover and worst of all-do you actually know what goes into these Jin Ling smokes? I don’t.
Now let’s go ‘one step beyond’ (well, it is total bloody madness!). We are now hiring an extra 200 UKBA staff to supposedly halt this illegal importing of such tobacco products-yeah, righty ho then! Every time another punitive measure is imposed upon tobacco another ‘truckload’ of illegal import comes into the country. I doubt there are many people about now, especially on council estates, who don’t know where to get a few packs of tobacco from at half the UK price! All the 200 extra UKBA personnel will do is pursecute holidaymakers bringing back 30-50 packs of tobacco for their own personal use as they will ‘tie them up in verbal knots’ in order to deprive them of their rightful purchases. The anti-smuggling brigade have been so successful over the past few years that S Ireland is now widely considered the “Tobacco smuggling centre of Europe”! It’s on the very edge of Europe yet, absurdly, a centre at the same time! Now that is truly Irish!
Now let’s bring this anti-tobacco issue even closer to home. Nottingham actually. Yes, for those of you with better retentive powers that I, it is the stamping ground of one Glenis Willmott, anti-tobacco crusader extraordinaire. A quick ‘google’ tells us that:
Combining two large multinational organisations like Imperial Tobacco and Altadis inevitably created an overlap which had to be addressed to improve efficiency and strengthen competitiveness. Before the acquisition the employees were around 14,000 but at the moment they are around 38,000 employees.
Now if Glenis has her way and the ‘eurocrats’ somehow succeed in stamping out tobacco usage, period, then where are 38,000 employees going to find other employment for it sounds to me very like “Imperial Tobacco” is Nottingham’s major employer. It sounds to me that “IT” keep this Midlands city financially afloat. It sounds to me that if “IT” were to say ‘sod this’ and move out, a hell of a lot of shops would soon close through lack of retail business, more pubs would close due to even less customers beating the doors down, banks would be streamlined as people would not need them as much, unemployment offices would be over-run with ‘signing on’ people and there wouldn’t be anywhere near enough job vacancies for the newly unemployed 38,000 to try for. But then we had 645 (approximately) applicants for one paltry job at a Tesco ‘One-Stop’ store in Leicester not long ago!
So, Glenis Willmott, do you see why your interfering & meddling with people’s lives makes you just another EUROPRAT? Have you any idea what your elevation to MEP status is doing to the very people that elevated you in the first place? Do YOU think THEY wanted you in power to deny them a peaceful life, to make everything they try do as financially painful as possible? Do YOU think that THEY ever thought that their considered selection could easily cause a once thriving city of lace to become a wastelands, a ghost town?
I have a very good friend who left Nottingham for he (and his good lady) could see nothing bright on the horizon for their hometown, so they found their own little ‘island paradise’ on the coast, soon located ‘man with white van’-and retired. They are not rich but selling their property 2 years ago certainly got them £15,000 more than selling it today would have and they are happy in retirement-for neither has a hope in hell of getting another job in this climate. But Glenis, they are happy with their lot. They know that this country is going to the dogs because of the intolerances of people like YOU and your fellow Europrats. I know many MEPs, some that smoke & some that don’t but they do not believe in stomping all over peoples freedom2choose for themselves, exactly how they spend their lives. You and your mob of intolerant Europrats cannot see the mass of unintended consequences piling up every time you come up with some new hair brained way of denormalising a perfectly legal & treasury friendly product simply because YOU don’t like it! I cannot stand the sight of ‘mushy peas’ Glenis, the very sight & smell of them makes me heave.
I could almost take up smoking to obliterate the stench of such ‘mush’ (which is of great pleasure to some I hear), but rather, I think as my MEP, t’would be better you start a Europrat campaign to eradicate this evil from our diets as the resultant explosive wind they cause is putrid & offensive! After all your ‘CV’ does list: Environment, Public Health & Food Safety
To join this campaign to save us from obnoxious odours, please lobby Glenis Willmott at: –
Glenis Willmott, MEP (Labour)
Harold Wilson House, 23 Barratt Lane
Attenborough, Nottingham NG9 6AD
Tel: 0115 922 9717
office@gleniswillmott.org.uk
www.gleniswillmott.org.uk
Committee: Environment, Public Health & Food Safety