Bob FM, you must have missed Trevor Coleman's talk, Piers Morgan's excellent analysis and a number of other very positive speakers at the meeting in the West Country. Were you outside having a fag?
Geoffrey is correct. Votes count. Most electors do not care about the EU or our party's position on it on a daily basis. Many people are very concerned about the rapid disappearance of pubs - at present rates about 10% will be gone within 2 years of the ban. That is 10s of thousands of jobs and hundreds of thousands of unhappy punters. Half the villages in West Oxon, a major tourist area, already lack a shop and a pub. This means that people already have to use their cars, at great expense to themselves and the environment, if they want to go out for a pint of beer or milk. Killing off more pubs in the name of PC is, to me, lunacy.
If you want to protect children ban them from pubs which are allowed smoking rooms in a reformed licensing system. It's easy.
The government doesn't give 2 hoots about safety. There are no figures for death by inhaled carcinogens whether they be from passive smoking or standing in the local bus station inhaling diesel fumes. There are figures for road deaths - 3000 per annum. Serious injuries are tenfold the deaths. There are no moves to ban cars and, apart from the default increase in petrol prices, nothing designed to reduce their use. There is no policy to increase public transport use, in fact train fares are prohibitive for most people. As stated, half the communities around here have no shop or pub so road transport use with its attendant risks and pollution is increasing.
The public will vote for a variety of reasons and I think the smoking ban is one of them. The closure of local post offices is an inconvenience once a week, ruining people's social lives is far more personal. The ban is allegedly supported by a majority, but they are the ones who don't smoke in front of their TV, since they certainly aren't the ones who go to pubs or clubs to not smoke. The election will turn on a few thousand votes in marginal constituencies. There is nowhere in the country where a majority of a couple of thousand or less could not be overturned by smokers changing their votes, IMHO. A third of the population don't vote implying, I reckon, that they might not care too much about the whole raft of policies if there was one thing that would get them to the ballot box. Oddly I don't think a candidate will lose votes for promising to review the effects of the ban and to remove it in certain limited circumstances.
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When in Woking do as the Wokes do.
"I do not wish to form my opinions by thoughtlessly quoting others; I wish others to support their opinions by sensibly quoting me." Paul Wesson (Aardvark) 13th April 2008
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