Alf Garnett was right — smoking is your patriotic duty
Hardly a day goes by without another hysterical health scare. a new Netflix documentary even claims that eating just one egg a day is more harmful than smoking five cigarettes.
No, it isn’t. But this is what passes for ‘news’ these days. There’s not a single food or drink which hasn’t at some stage been linked to an early death.
you won’t be surprised to learn that this latest piece of alarmist propaganda is based on a series of interviews with vegan campaigners and doctors who advocate a plant-based diet.
It’s funded by wealthy animal rights supporters and produced by the actor Joaquin Phoenix, himself a militant vegan. There’s no reasoning with these people.
Jamie Oliver has been complaining about his restaurants being targeted by gangs of vegan extremists — ‘weirdlooking fellas putting iPads of slaughtered animals in front of kids having spaghetti bolognese on a Saturday lunch’.
Most of us respect the decision of those who choose not to eat meat, for whatever reason. That’s their prerogative. But it’s no excuse for trying to frighten children.
Same goes for those lunatics who make death-threats against medical researchers working in laboratories which test life-saving medicines on animals. There’s even a Milk Is Murder lobby these days.
you could try to persuade them otherwise until the, er, cows come home. But you’d be wasting your breath. They have the uncompromising zeal of the jihadist.
The same can’t be said for the so-called scientists and experts who produce regular reports damning everyday foodstuffs. Pay them enough money and they’ll conjure up any result you want, no matter how contradictory.
WheNthese ‘authoritative’ surveys are commissioned by companies, they are simply marketing tools designed to convince people to change their spending habits — i.e. buy low-fat, or high-fibre, or gluten-free.
When the ‘ research’ is funded by Government bodies, it’s all part of the relentless processes of policing lifestyles, of telling us what to eat and drink, as well as what to do and think.
They never give up. When the number of people smoking cigarettes fell significantly, the public health police turned their attention to ‘passive smoking’.
Soon we were told that more people were dying of passive smoke than tobacco itself. Now the (admittedly filthy) habit of smoking is dying out, helped by the popularity of vaping, you might think Those Who Know What Is Good For Us would be happy.
Far from it. always on the lookout for something else to ban, they’ve come up with the concept of ‘passive vaping’ which is going to wipe mankind off the face of the earth — that’s if the global warming doesn’t kill us first.
They’ve found ‘experts’ who have identified allegedly carcinogenic particles in the vapour given off by e-cigarettes, which they now want banned, too.
I haven’t smoked since I was about 19, but until fairly recently I always used to fire up a small cigar on National No Smoking day, just to get up the noses of the antismoking nazis.
It was said of the puritan that he wanted to ban bear-baiting not because of the pain it caused the bear, but because of the pleasure it gave to people.
The same goes for the anti-meat, anti- cigarettes, anti-booze, antiabsolutely bloody everything brigade. They just can’t bear the thought of people exercising the fundamental freedom to enjoy themselves, even if it puts their own health at risk.
Occasionally, someone tries to counter the constant drip-drip of abstentionist propaganda with a report attempting to prove that a little bit of what you fancy does you good — for instance, wine in moderation, etc.
One of my all-time favourite studies ‘proved’ the best time to take up smoking is when you retire — since nicotine can ward off alzheimer’s disease and the harmful side- effects of tobacco won’t have long enough left to kill you.
I have only the anecdotal evidence of my late grandfather to support this finding.
a committed smoker of roll-ups all his life, he was persuaded to give up in his 70s. When he died in his mid-90s he had contracted alzheimer’s, but there was nothing else wrong with him, apart from old age. he might just as well have carried on smoking.
Grandad littlejohn, a london docker, was a great fan of alf Garnett, the grotesque creation of the genius Johnny Speight, from TV’s classic comedy Till death Us do Part. alf is, of course, banned just about everywhere because his splenetic, bigoted outbursts are distasteful to modern ‘diversity’ sensibilities.
What Speight — and Warren Mitchell, who played the character — were always at pains, usually unsuccessfully, to point out is that people were supposed to laugh
alf, not with him.
BacKin 1996, when I was working at london Weekend Television, I had the privilege of being part of an audience With alf Garnett and listening to a variation on one of his rants about the antismoking crowd.
It came back to me yesterday when I read a report from a think tank, the Institute of economic affairs, claiming that, far from being a drain on the economy, smoking is worth £15 billion a year to Britain, through taxes on tobacco and the fact that smokers die early, saving the NhS a small fortune.
I’d heard that somewhere before. The rant Speight wrote for alf went something like this:
‘I am smoking for the health and prosperity of the country. The money that is derived from the tobacco tax is enough to pay for the National health Service, and a lot else besides.
‘It’s the only thing what keeps the country solvent, innit?
‘It’s patriotic to smoke. People what give up smoking ’cos they’re scared of it should be given white feathers for cowardice.
‘I am smoking for england — and the Queen!’