Forget Booze Cruise, Now It's The Fag Drag

We ought to have reached the point in the life of this Labour government when satirists and polemicists start to lay off them and turn our attention to The Conservatives who will surely sweep to power next may though given a little luck it will be with a small enough majority to allow minor parties to exercise a moderating influence. Labour are now in such a bad way that satirising their increasingly incompetent efforts is like trying to get laughs by kicking a corpse.

But even as we turn our guns on the equally inept and uninspiring Tories, Labour are such masochists they cannot resist setting themselves up for another pummelling.

The latest example of Labour's love of being headbutted and simultaneously kicked in the bollocks is a crazy new law that prevents cigarettes being displayed in shops. The logic here is typical of the irrational thinking of the Politically Correct Thought Police, they think that seeing cigarettes and tobacco products displayed encourages people to smoke or at last to think of smoking as a normal activity.

This is pretty rich coming from the people whose Nanny state ticks us off for describing man / woman action that does not involve whips, locks and chains, marmite or underwear with spikes sewn in it as "normal sex," that wags a disapproving finger when we talk of "normal" people who have jobs, drink alcohol in moderation, shun all but the prescription variety of drugs and relax with activities that do not involve throwing themselves off buildings, swimming in raw sewage or tattooing themselves with a pin and a bottle of Quink. We cannot describe Gordon Brown as "a mentalist" or even suggest someone who wears their underpants outside their trousers is two prawns short of a cocktail. Instead we must celebrate diversity and respect people's right to be different.

But woe betide you if you want to be different by having a quick smoke. Unless it is Cannabis of course. The Cannabis question is just too complex for their contorted moralising.

Otherwise Labour's Politically Correct Thought Police would rather you swam in raw sewage than smoked in the privacy of your own home and just as the Puritans of old would cover the legs of their pianos lest those knobbly wooden stanchions made young men think of a Lady's slender ankle and thus become inflamed with lust and rape the piano, so seeing a packet of B & H or a bag of Golden Virginia will fill lifelong non smokers with an insatiable craving for tobacco.

The people who make Labour policy then have little contact with reality. Certainly less than the Conservatives who at least are honest enough to admit they are only interested in looking after Number 1 (and getting the moat cleaned at the taxpayers expense, less even than the Liberal Democrats who are so deluded they still think they have a chance of winning next year's election but at least don't think seeing a packet of ciggies will make anyone into a smoker.

So non - smokers, does seeing a shelf full of ciggies in your local shop or supermarket make you want to take up the dreaded weed? It doesn't inspire me to smoke but I'm not normal… or rather to be politically correct, I am normal but having brain damage makes my normal different to everybody else's. The only message a display of tobacco gives out is: "This shop sells cigarettes, if you want to buy some we can be of service."

Do the pumps outside a petrol station turn drivers into speed freaks and Clarkson worshipping petrol heads? Does a pie shop make people obese? Are these great seducers too much for our weak minds to cope with or can we in fact think for ourselves more competently than the Nanny State can ever think for us?

Now we get to what is really annoying about Labour and their Politically Correct attitudes. It is their belief we are all dribbling simpletons. Thus they make the facile leap of logic to believing that if cigarettes are out of sight and thus are kept out of mind everyone will stop smoking. It is impossible to quantify how wrong this is and in how many ways it is wrong. One thing comes to mind though that demolishes the whole argument.

The Fag Drag.

We are not talking about a motorcade for gay and transvestite drivers here. Now that supermarkets regularly run beer and spirits as loss leaders few people feel the need to do a booze cruise but the Fag Drag is becoming more popular. I don't know if the term is generally used, it has probably been banned in other parts of the country by the Thought Police but here, and you can call us old fashioned if you like possums, a faggot is a meatball known for inducing euphonious farting and a fag is a small stick of tobacco wrapped in paper. So The Fag Drag means going to a place where taxes are lower and dragging a load of ciggies and rolling tobacco back. These can be sold on at a reasonable profit and a hatchback can carry enough to make the trip worthwhile.

My son and other acquaintances who frequent pubs more shady than those I go into nowadays guess at least half the tobacco sold in town has never seen the cigarette shelf of a local shop.

There is a passage in the Terry Pratchett novel Making Money which describes perfectly why government attempts to micromanage human existence are ultimately doomed due to the resourcefulness of human beings at evading any attempts to restrict their ability to think for themselves. Making money also explains the financial crisis perfectly and there are more laughs than in a dry, academic tome.

To be able to predict the outcome of Labour's war on tobacco we only have to look at the prohibition era in the United States when the outlawing of alcohol made organised crime that nation's biggest industry.

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