Ninny state
KEIR Starmer’s nanny state clampdown on smoking and fast food is doomed to fail.
He must resist the siren calls of health campaigners and misguided celebs and rethink it. Its sole effect will be economic harm.
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Sir Keir knew he would get blowback from those like The Sun who have for years opposed such illiberal restrictions.
But, PM, we are not wrong.
Nor are the backbench Labour MPs joining the growing rebellion against his looming law banning most outdoor smoking.
Take Mary Glindon, leading a Commons bid to block it.
She knows well what a policy universally agreed among chin-stroking liberals at London dinner parties will mean in reality for pubs and punters in her working-class Newcastle constituency.
“People have the right to smoke provided they harm no one else,” she says. “And that can be done outside.
“Have a thought for those who see smoking as a crutch in a difficult life.
“Remember older people, particularly single men, who nurse a pint and a tab outdoors and feel less isolated and even looked out for.”
Mary also knows it will “drive some and maybe many pubs out of business and undermine the night-time economy”. She is right.
The ban will only bankrupt businesses, destroy jobs and strip communities of their pubs.
It will not help the NHS. It will save no lives, nor improve anyone’s health.
Not smokers, who will stay home for a ciggie instead, nor non-smokers who are not remotely at risk in the open air anyway.
The same goes for the curb on TV and online ads for fast food, a forlorn attempt to somehow hide its very existence from kids.
It is a desperate measure straight from the panicky “something must be done on obesity” school which gave us George Osborne’s idiotic fizzy drink tax in 2018.
If that had genuinely cut any waistlines why would we now need more nannying, more regulations, more taxes?
Will this constant erosion of our freedoms “to save the NHS” never end?
The Government’s focus should be on education about diet and exercise.
Instead, rich politicians who snootily disapprove of smoking and “junk food” indulge their own unhealthy habit:
Misusing their power to outlaw or punish everyday pleasures millions of working-class people enjoy.
Callous cut
THE Government’s betrayal of OAPs over the winter fuel payment gets worse.
We now know why Labour has not published an estimate of how many pensioners could die from the cold as a result.
They didn’t commission one.
Imagine the outrage had the Tories stripped millions of vulnerable people of a benefit without caring enough to research if it could kill them.
Age UK reckons 2.5million may now struggle to keep themselves warm.
It is reckless and indefensible.
