Fag Ends?

‘TODAY New York, tomorrow London and the rest of the United Kingdom – but not if Health Secretary John Reid gets his way.

The happiest days of our lives

The Scot yesterday blew a big cloud of smoke in the eyes of the British Mayor Bloombergs by suggesting that cigarettes were often the only enjoyment for people living on sink estates.

The Indy hears Reid suggest that controls of smoking were an obsession of the middle classes and there were far worse problems affecting the country’s poorest neighbourhoods.

‘What enjoyment does a 21-year-old single mother-of-three living on a council sink estate get?’ he asked. ‘The only enjoyment they sometimes have is to have a cigarette.’

Of course, encouraging the poor to smoke serves the Government’s purposes – it gets to take their money without having to look after them in old age.

But Reid insisted that empowerment was better than instruction and that any controls on smoking would be introduced ‘in the British way’.

In other words, inconsistently, inefficiently, incoherently…’

Posted: 9th, June 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink