Forest Director Simon Clark said that “The health risks of smoking are well known but it’s a legitimate habit that millions of adults enjoy. Banning the sale of cigarettes to future generations won’t stop people smoking. It would merely drive the sale of tobacco underground and into the hands of criminal gangs. The current smoking rates are the lowest on record and an increasing number of smokers are switching voluntarily to reduced risk products like e-cigarettes without government intervention. Given all the problems facing the NHS and the country at large, it’s laughable to think that tackling smoking might be considered a priority for a future Labour government.”, when responding to the shadow health secretary for the Labour Party that banning smoking and the sale of cigarettes may become a priority for the next government for eradicating smoking, which will most likely be formed by the Labour Party according to the voting intention drawn out by polls.
But banning the sale of cigarettes may not become a priority in comparison to a more serious application of the law that was declared in the 2017 Labour Party Conference which took place in Brighton: that of forbidding meat consumption and killing animals to obtain our food, which is making the right use of the law instead of the wrong one.
With most of the 2017 Labour Party conference agreeing with and applauding Michael Mansfield the renowned lawyer said that “I think when we look at the damage eating meat is doing to the planet, it is not preposterous to think that one day it will become illegal. There are plenty of things that were once commonplace that are now illegal, such as smoking inside. We know that the top 3,000 companies in the world are responsible for more than £1.5 trillion worth of damage to the environment, with meat and dairy production high on the list. We know that because the UN has told us so. It is time for a new law on ecocide to go alongside genocide and the other crimes against humanity.”
It was also commented in 2017 that “Thirty years ago, people didn’t bat an eyelid if you lit a cigarette in a pub or restaurant. But now society accepts smoking is harmful and so we legislated against it. The same could happen with eating meat.”
This is what the law is used for. For banning meat consumption rather than banning smoking. Bringing up the issue with Labour in power will not give the priority of using the law as a means of exerting social control for the ‘common good’ with smoking in comparison to banning meat consumption. The law is used for preventing underage smoking and the smoking of substances other than tobacco, by legislating their prohibition, not for unconstitutionally defining smoking bans and other rights violations that it does not currently respect or recognise.
Violating the rights of companies to sell named products to their customers with tobacco plain packaging and those of everyone else to move freely while smoking or not is not within the scope of the law but is already defined constitutionally. Those are not allowed to those who are enacting smoking bans, or tax hikes and intellectual property functional dismantling just like they are not allowed to be exerted by somebody else. If it is not allowed for me or you to ban indoor smoking from the rest or a group, to enforce plain packaging to industries or sell products three times higher then the cost-price, then why is the same allowed to government ministers and members of parliament, given that everyone is equal to each other? It probably is not.
Michael Mansfield is now 83 years old, and he has represented the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, the families of the victims of Bloody Sunday and the families of victims of the Hillsborough disaster.
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