by Mabon Dane

Created on: February 18, 2010   Last Updated: February 19, 2010

"If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law." -  Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill will be remembered in the UK for standing up for his people against fascist Germany, and for smoking big cigars.

By 2010 the UK Government has within a decade unleashed ten thousand regulations to curb all manner of freedoms, including against smoking.  Winston Churchill would I imagine be turning in his grave to find some rather fascist looking politicians curbing the British freedoms he defended, and especially his rights to smoke big cigars.

Smokers will be delighted to hear that I am speaking as a British non-smoker, an individual who has never smoked in his life, but who regards smoking as a vice that should be discouraged, but not outlawed.

I have lived long enough to remember the funny Hamlet cigar adverts on television in the 1980's, an experience that has now been outlawed by the UK Parliament.

It is the impression of this writer that a movement towards making tobacco smoking an illegal offence is the ultimate aim of those that drive the anti-smoking legislation in the UK, but done so in small intricate steps, due to the political unpopularity of any clear attempt to ban smoking altogether. 

The small legal steps have been to target advertising, packaging, sports and arts sponsorship, displays, and areas where people could smoke. There has been extensive anti-smoking advertising campaigns, anti-smoking schemes in the National Health Service, and anti-smoking lessons in schools. 

Smoking parents are also an area that is being included in child protection schemes and databases involving social workers. One of the biggest victories by the anti-smoking campaign was to ban smoking in pubs, public buildings and even in communal areas of flats. An effort is being made to further reduce the places a smoker may smoke.

As a non-smoker I welcome the opportunity to travel on trains, visit public houses, and work where I am not subjected to second hand smoke. I also welcome the schemes and campaigns to encourage people to stop smoking. But, I feel that the anti-smoking campaign has gone from justified protection of people like me from second hand smoking to an oppressive abuse of the rights of smokers. 

Over ten years I have seen an UK Government that has tried to socially engineer their version of how the British should live, behave and think through ten thousand regulations, ten thousand officials and lots of databases. It has reached the point that we all, smoker and non-smoker, have said enough is enough.

We recall that statement by Churchill: "If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law."  I, and many like me, will vote against this UK Government in 2010, as we feel as a British Pub Landlord at pub closing would say: "Time, Gentlemen Please!"

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