Note: "Smoke Shack" provision is separate from bills to change the so called "Freedom to Breath"act. Greg Lang
Hello Everyone -
Just a quick update. In case you hadn't heard, the "smoke shack" amendment was stripped out of the bill last week. Only a short time remains of the legislative session and if nothing happens there it will surely happen in November....election time to be exact! You know, things are heating up around the country and across the pond. People are getting pretty tired of the "nanny" laws. I have copied a few articles below from the Forces website. We are now joining hands all across the world to combat this assault on our personal freedoms....Germany is doing a great job against the anti's and in the UK they are taking their battle to the polls. All is not lost...it has only just begun!!! Enough is enough and I hope you legislators are listening. The American Cancer Society and American Lung Association may have oodles of money but all of us have the power of our votes. Come this November we will put them to good use and it doesn't cost us anything!!
Article One with link:
http://forces.org/News_Portal/news_viewer.php?id=1087
SUNDAY EXTRA - The Aldebaran TreatyJohn Gray4th May 2008
A landmark agreement amongst anti-prohibition advocates has been established at a summit meeting in Holland.
During the last few days covering the 1st to the 3rd May a group of people gathered for a Summit meeting on board the Aldebaran, an old sailing ship docked at the small port of Hoorn, in Holland. (Hoorn is fairly close to Amsterdam.) The purpose of this Summit was twofold: firstly to establish the existence of the International Coalition Against Prohibition (ICAP), and secondly, to plan for the 1st International Conference Against Prohibition intended to take place either in mid-autumn of this year or early next year.We are pleased to announce that the Memorandum and Articles for ICAP were successfully agreed and signed by an international body of subscribers and the document will now move forward to Companies House (UK) where ICAP will be registered as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee. This has been a significant agreement between national representatives, many of whom had never met before, which will be known from now on as The Aldebaran Treaty.Planning for the International Conference will also go ahead although there is an enormous amount of careful and painstaking work necessary to that planning.As representatives of European and transatlantic nations and organisations we are now bound in solidarity against smoking bans and the many other damaging prohibitions that are lucrative to special interests and crassly fashionable amongst followers of "political correctness" in today's world of scientific fraud and political stupidity, where adults are treated as children, and freedom of choice is under threat. Furthermore, although all our strategies and objectives have not been fully agreed or aligned, as much of this will be decided at the coming International Conference, we now have the vehicle with which to coöperate, nation with nation, and this coöperation has already started. Also, as a result of the Summit, one of the participants — the well-known British publican and freedom fighter Nick Hogan — has already been invited to Brussels by a British MEP in order to lobby and network.Countries represented by the signatories of ICAP's governing document include: England, Scotland, Wales, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Italy, America and Canada.Organisations represented at the Summit were:Freedom to Choose (UK)Freedom to Choose (Scotland)Forces InternationalForces ItalyForces HollandForces GermanyDaRy (Denmark)The Danish Smokers' PartyThe Party Against Nannyism (Holland)Smokers' Interest (Holland)The Association of Dutch Coffee ShopsThe Hungarian Association of Smokers' SocietiesWe are on the march and will not stop now!
Article Two with link:
http://forces.org/News_Portal/news_viewer.php?id=1058
What Pub Landlords Say30th April 2008
Freedom 2 Choose of England has asked British pub owners what they think of the smoking ban.
The British pub industry has been devastated by the smoking ban. Thousands of pubs have closed since last July and the toll keeps increasing by dozens every week. Poll results are interesting. The landlords (pub operators, also referred to in Britain as publicans) by a margin of ninety-eight to two put the blame squarely on the ban. Although the “hazards of secondhand smoke” touted by prohibitionists are an absolute fraud the propaganda has managed to scare more than half of the publicans, who nevertheless tended to believe risks had been exaggerated, and that alternative solutions such as ventilation had been impudently dismissed by prohibitionist legislators.
Fully 97% of publicans feel that government is contemptuous of their industry (Link 1) (Link 2) while 96% expect still more restrictions. In result, according to the Morning Advertiser, support for the shrinking Labour party is down to a microscopic 3% amongst pub operators, while an imposing 65% of the publicans have by now come to align themselves with the expanding United Kingdom Independence Party, the only party in Britain supporting reversal of the smoking ban. One publican explained: “I would vote for whichever party reassessed the smoking ban.”The strikingly dramatic change in voting patterns is more than understandable and likely to spread as awareness of the horrific consequences of eugenic technocracy reaches ever more sectors of the populace. Real change will further require more organization, communication within and beyond our movement, massive resistance, defiance, and demonstrations leading to social disruption that cannot be ignored. We are up against the devil himself in this.
The Labour Party Mayor of London was just defeated. Greg Lang
Article Three with link:
http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=16&storycode=59575&c=2
Pete Robinson: German ban goes up in smoke
29 April, 2008
By Pete Robinson
There's a war going on in Germany, and this time they're winning.I'm talking about the German smoking ban, currently jammed firmly in reverse gear. Angela Merkel's government has faithfully copied the tactics employed by our own beloved Nu-Labour - lies, propaganda and junk science - yet they've failed miserably in theface of people-power.Remember when we were being told our pubs had nothing to fear from the smoking ban? How commercially successful it had been in Ireland and the USA, where bars were teeming with 'new' customers?In my discussions with German landlords and their customers, when I inform them of the damage it's doing to our own licenced trade I'm always met with gobsmacked, shocked surprise. "No-oooo! You Englishers WANTED your smoking ban! Your pubs are all very busy now, we know this. Ya?"They're being spoon-fed the same diet of State-sponsored bull***t that we were. They are told we Brits have all 'embraced' our ban, that our pubs and clubs have never been so busy, and that most smokers are giving up the weed as a direct result.Amazingly they have all heard of the "Scottish Miracle", where heart attacks were virtually wiped out within one year of Scotland's smoking ban. I always said that lie would run and run - now we're exporting it.The Germans blame you and me for their smoking ban, believing it's us Brits who are arrogantly imposing our current obsession with health matters on the rest of Europe. If only they knew the truth. All I could do was bleat on about... yes, we have meekly accepted the ban without putting up a fight but under our elected dictatorship we had little choice. "Ve vere only following orders. For us ze var ist over".But the Germans are made of sterner stuff and their smoking ban has a troubled history. In 2006 Angela Merkel's government introduced a nationwide blanket smoking ban. Within days it was humiliatingly repealed following massive public outcry and a series of legal challenges. You see the German people are constitutionally protected from State-imposed unpopular laws, originally to protect them from any Nazi resurgence. So the ban was passed on for decision at local level in Germany's 16 different states.The end result has been a patchwork quilt of watered-down restrictions which has thrown up all sorts of daft anomalies. In a small town near Trier, for example, I found a Shisha Cafe next door to a large, traditional tavern where smoking was banned. The owner told me his wet sales had plummeted by 50% as customers had simply moved to the town's smaller bars where smoking was permitted. In fact most states have opted for 'soft' smoking restrictions, where larger premises need merely to provide separate smoking and non-smoking rooms.Bavaria had introduced the harshest bans, with smoking even banned inside the vast drinking tents of the annual Oktoberfest. Hardly surprising as the state is governed by the sister party to Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union.However last month Bavarian voters gave them an absolute roasting in the local elections, barely two months after the ban was introduced. Now those same, previously 'anti' politicians are back-pedalling furiously having decided they now hate smoking bans. Indoor smoking is already back on at the Oktoberfest, also in Munich and Nuremberg's historical brauhouses. Exemptions still in the pipeline will include fairer rules for most bars and even some restaurants.This bizarre spectacle has been nervously scrutinised by other hard-line states who are moving heaven and earth to soften their restrictions. In Berlin enforcement of their ban has been deferred until August while, following court action by a consortium of bar owners, small bars are to be exempt provided they display signs to warn customers they are entering a smoking venue.Similar court cases are being heard all over Germany, much to the chagrin of German antis. Otmar Wiestler, leader of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ, their equivalent of our CRUK) is enraged at this turn of events. "We are miles away from implementing comprehensive protection for non-smokers," said Wiestler. Despite the positive news there are a great many German landlords losing out through this uncertainty. The German Hotel and Restaurant Association (Dehoga), which actively rallies against the ban, has released a report claiming that 58 percent of their member establishments have seen a sharp drop in business in 2008.Uli Stegmaier, a Berlin barkeeper and father of five children, hanged himself last month having left a suicide note blaming the new public smoking ban for his decision.Significantly ASH-uk highlighted this in their daily bulletin, as if it were something to gloat about.But in general the anti-ban lobby are tipping the scales. There are regular demonstrations where thousands of bar owners march to raise awareness of their fears.What I can't help but notice is a sense of unity about what they are doing. There are very few pubcos in Germany so representative bodies reflect the bar owner's interests, not the misguided greed of men-in-suits.German 'community bar' owners have mobilised their customers who are only too willing to support them. Petitions abound everywhere and they are quite prepared to "fight them on the beaches". Plus Germany has no equivalent of ASH, the obsessive, powerful state-sponsored 'charity' with a vested interest in the decimation of our pubs. Antis have far linfluence in Germany where the words 'majority opinion' aren't considered offensive.Which begs the question we must all ask ourselves: if the Germans can fight to successfully gain a fair interpretation of anti-smoking laws at what point will we follow suit?When we've lost half of our pubs? Two-thirds? Or never?
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