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Public Health Wales keeping themselves in work

E-cigarettes could be banned in Welsh public places to protect children, reports the Telegraph.

E-cigarettes could be banned in public places where children are present in a landmark vote in the Welsh Assembly.

The Labour-controlled government in Cardiff Bay is hoping to pass its Public Health (Wales) Bill in the Senedd on Wednesday.

If passed, the Bill would become a UK first and would restrict the use of nicotine inhaling devices in certain public places – such as schools, places where food is served and on public transport.

The move has been criticised by opposition parties and even divided opinion among health charities.
However, Health Minister Mark Drakeford insists the legislation will protect people from harm – and the curbs on e-cigarettes would make smoking less appealing to youngsters.

He said: “The Bill will help us to respond to a range of public health threats in Wales, including the risk of re-normalising smoking for a generation of children and young people who have grown up in largely smoke-free environments.

But if smoking could by some strange magic – some ingenious invention, let us say – be supplanted by a process that gave similar satisfaction but was much less dangerous, why would normalising that be bad? “Think of the children” is not an intrinsically bad argument. Hard-core libertarian though I am, I do concede that it would be better not to smoke around the kiddies. But making it harder for smokers to quit involves the consequence that the children of those smokers will not grow up in smoke free environments when otherwise they might have. I would have thought that the health of the children of smokers, the children we are told are being harmed with every breath they take, should be prioritized over the purely theoretical health problems that might or might not arise for a future generation after something that looks like smoking has been “renormalised”.

Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation, a couple of medium-fake charities that I would once have expected to join in the chant of “ban it” are showing surprising sense. No such weakening and deviationism is seen from Public Health Wales. Nothing will sway this “health body”, whose austerely modernist Three Random Word name is purged of all extraneous prepositions, from its work of protecting itself from evidence-based policymaking:

And health body Public Health Wales’ added: “We cannot sit around and wait a couple of decades to see whether or not the conclusive evidence that people might like to see is available before making a judgment.”

UPDATE: Mr Ed tells me that the measure failed to pass by the narrowest of margins after a considered and principled change of mind by Plaid Cymru. Nah, not really. It failed after a Labour guy called Plaid a “cheap date” and Plaid got into a huff. “Oft evil will shall evil mar”, as Theoden said about Wormtongue, a bloke almost as prone as the members of the Welsh Assembly to throwing his toys out of the pram.

15 comments to Public Health Wales keeping themselves in work

  • Paul Marks

    I was going to say that this action against E.cigs was insanity.

    But it is not insanity – it is wicked corruption.

    Thank you for explaining to the motivation of this wicked action Natalie.

  • Laird

    That final quotation says it all: we don’t care whether there is actually any evidence that e-cigs are harmful, we’re going to ban them anyway, because we can.

    And of course they take this approach because the only evidence which exists is to the contrary. The carcinogenic effects of smoking appear to be wholly related to the tars, not the nicotine, none of which is present in the e-cig vapors (or even in the vapours). So these statist neo-puritans have to find some other basis for denying people this small pleasure. Why not trot out “for the children”? It’s always worked before.

  • It is not about health, not in any way, shape or form… it is about a pathological need to control the lives of others. These people do not give a fuck if you live or die, just so long as you live and die in the manner they have laid out for you.

  • OldBob

    And all the other bansters will soon be claiming everywhere else should ban them because “it worked so well” in Wales

  • Eric Tavenner

    It’s not about the children, it’s about some small souled loser living in constant fear that someone may be enjoying life.

  • Mr Ed

    The measure failed by a tied vote, with the tiebreaker lost. Reporting indicates that the Welsh Nationallists voted against Labour after a personal insult.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-35812561

  • CaptDMO

    I think it’s GOOD legislation, provided that “children” are subsequently banned from ANYWHERE.

  • James Hargrave

    This is what you get from a Labour political fiefdom and the stupidities of unbalanced devolution – the devil makes work for idle hands and idle brains. A look at their legislation on organ donation and landlord-and-tenant matters will show the usual urge to regulate (counter-productively). In my case, the first encourages me to opt OUT, and the second will simply increase rents.

  • CaptDMO

    “And health body Public Health Wales’ added: “We cannot sit around and wait a couple of decades to see whether or not the conclusive evidence that people might like to see is available before making a judgment.”
    Gosh, in the US we have strong, intelligent, independent, woman who stand before their peers in the legislature and cite “We have to PASS it (PP ACA), just to see what’s IN it!”
    Once our Supreme court (why was it before the SCOTUS you ask?)”made tax law” by reinterpreting what the act actually said, with “No, we think that would be a tax, so it’s OK”, the rent-seekers were falling all over themselves to find incompetent Software designers to provide plausible deniability for graft and fraud.
    Um…In My Humble Opinion of course.
    Now let’s chat about “conclusive evidence” that Global Weather means “show me the money”…oddly, for more “research” into global warming, and Solar Panel “feasibility” in “independent” residential liens on actual home owners.

  • Nicholas (Excentrality!) Gray

    I know people are already trying to edit cigarettes from movies made about Churchill, so how long will it be before you are not allowed to mention that explorers brought back tobacco from the ‘new’ world? When will tobacco-growing states of America, like Virginia, be blanked out so the tobacco word doesn’t even appear? How far can this political correctness go?

  • Julie near Chicago

    Speaking of Churchill, and tobacco.

    It is truly amazing how fast long and sturdily entrenched cultural practices can disappear.

    Take smoking and the French. As few as 20 years ago we smokers over here were noticing the burgeoning anti-smoking lobby. We consoled ourselves:

    They’ll never ban cigarettes. And think of the French! The French are not ABOUT to give up smoking!

    Now let’s think about Churchill, and The River War, and his experience of Somalia. (At least the way I remember it, it was Churchill and Somalia in The River War. If I err, please beat me with a wet noodle and not a bamboo cane.)

    First visit there: Muslims jolly chaps, come round to the pub for a bit of a tipple and good talk; women dressed in the latest fashions just like women everywhere, dancing the latest dances, all behaving in general in ways relaxed and at ease, enjoying life, and not particularly strait-laced.

    Comes back 30 years later: Ease and jollity gone, reversion to the strictest of Islamic laws. None of this fashion nonsense for the women: You’ll wear a tent, or at least a hijab, my girl, and like it. And no going out alone. Absolutely on no account ever is a Muslim to allow Demon Rum to pass his or her lips. Dancing? Faugh! Etc., etc.

    So when we horses are frightened, for instance about how the army would treat Americans during an actual insurrection or even serious civil disobedience, and whinny about “the American people won’t stand for it” and suchlike, I am not much comforted. And the same around the world.

    So for god’s sake, don’t let the iron-fisted Nannies dictate what’s to be airbrushed out of your culture and your heritage and your very memories. OUR culture and heritage and memories! If Churchill loved his stogies, so what! It is a true fact,and loving your stogies is hardly a moral outrage.

    And speaking of Queen Victoria, would you not only hide indelicate parts of human anatomy under fig leaves or fabric, but actually androgynize Michelangelo’s David — or smash the damn statue and be done with it? To the bonfire with The Garden of Earthly Delights, and with Botticelli’s “Venus on the Half-shell”!

    At least Victoria Regina had the sense not to be alarmed at the sight of the male anatomy. “Sir, do you know how many children I have?” she said, dryly.

    It’s all ridiculous, and should not be allowed.

  • Mr Ed

    I read an excellent book, First Light, by the youngest Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot, Geoffrey Wellum DFC. Later in the war, as part of Operation Pedestal, the relief of Malta, his flight’s mission was to fly Spitfires off an aircraft carrier to Malta, taking off as early as possible with extra fuel. In order to save weight, they took off with no ammunition for their guns, using height for safety. However, in order to boost morale for the besieged troops on Malta, the armourers loaded up the ammunition bays in the wings with cigarettes. He flew high over Luftwaffe Me109s in Pantelleria thinking it was a good thing no one challenged him with nothing but fags to defend himself.

    I can imagine such a step being banned today.

  • Julie near Chicago

    Absolutely, Mr Ed, and a good thing too. Just as is sending the troops into combat with orders to conduct battle in a manner that is environmentally friendly.

    It’s important not to disturb either the rattlesnakes or the king cobras, after all.

    Or, of course, the climate. Either of global meteorology or of opinion.

  • Nicholas (Excentrality!) Gray

    Ed, did they also drop lighters to go with the cigarettes, or was it all a vast joke?

  • Thailover

    Vaping LOOKS like smoking, so they’re swinging the ban hammer. Never mind that actual nicotine is no more habit forming or bad for you than caffeine. It’s the additives in commercial tobacco that makes it extremely harmful and extremely addictive. It’s the garbage in smoke that’s cancer-causing, not nicotine and certainly not steam…steam being the delivery system in vaping. What’s next, banning drinking coffee around children?