Now we celebrate another new Health Minister: Andrew Lansley has been sacked and Jeremy Hunt is to take his place. In a further move, we understand Anne Milton has just been replaced.Will this make any difference to the inexorable march of the Tobacco Control Industry lobbyists and the anti-smoking agenda pushed by civil servants?

Jeremy Hunt MP’s connections with Rupert Murdoch have been questioned by others. His voting record on smoking is ‘ambiguous’ according to They Work For You. He was ‘absent’ for some of the key votes. So, how will he stand on Smokers’ Rights?

We are not smokers: we are human beings first and foremost, who happen to smoke. But we are discriminated against to an inhuman and unacceptable level.

We want the basic human right to congregate together without let or hindrance to consume a legal product.

Discrimination against people who smoke also harms non-smokers and leads to a fragmented and unjust society.

We don’t want pensioners or people with disabilities who smoke to have to be separated from friends and thrown outside in the cold and the rain when they meet for a cup of tea and they wish to smoke. Those who live in sheltered accommodation and smoke are banned from meeting together socially even in communal lounges.

We want our live music venues back and thriving, as they used to be. And our bars. And our cafes. And our Darby and Joan Clubs. And our Shisha bars. And our traditional pubs. And our traditional working men’s clubs. These are an essential part of the social fabric of our community lives, and they were places where people who smoked and people who didn’t smoke met together happily. They’ve been ruined by the smoking ban, and so has the economic and creative contribution they made to our lives.

Cameron’s ‘The Big Society’ has become a joke to us as we have seen these ordinary community meeting places for non-smokers and smokers alike destroyed, and we also know that loneliness and isolation are far bigger killers than smoking.

We don’t want people who smoke and who live in ‘social’ or any other housing to be forbidden to smoke inside their own homes.

We don’t want people who smoke to be refused medical treatment: people who smoke already pay in taxes far more than they cost the NHS, but in any case that shouldn’t matter.

We don’t want kind and loving people who smoke to be denied adoption or fostering opportunities, nor for these opportunities to be loved and cared for to be denied to children.

We think it is sadistic and inhumane to force dying people in hospitals and hospices to go outside in the cold and rain.

We also think it is sadistic and inhumane to force relatives and friends of patients and those who are recently bereaved to stagger outside hospital grounds in their grief and distress.

We think it is callous and adds enormously to mental distress, mitigates against recovery, and is against the wishes of professional staff, to ban patients in mental hospitals from smoking in a safe indoors environment.

We have looked at modern ventilation engineering and believe that it would in all the above cases remove any unwanted smell indoors, while the growing wish to ban smoking in the open air such as parks and pavements is, frankly, barking mad.

We have studied the evidence and believe that the danger of ‘second hand smoke’ is a myth, and any danger to staff employed where smoking occurs was invented by the UK Tobacco Control Industry and ASH as a way for the indoor ban to get through the UK Parliament under Employment Protection legislation instead of through Environmental Health legislation, because Environmental Health did not produce the results the Smokefree Industry wanted.

We are 1 in 4 of the UK’s voters, and we are real people, and the smoking ban has politicised many of us for the first time.

We are people who smoke, and we want our human rights, and we want those rights now.

 We’ve got new generals; our leaders are new

They sit and they argue and all that they do

Is sell their own colleagues, and ride upon their backs

Or jail them, or break them, or give them all the axe;

Screaming in language that no one understands

Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands…

We want our rights and we don’t care how

We want a revolution…Now

From the musical Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss