Welsh van man fag trap

A self-employed van driver in Wales has been fined for smoking in his own van. What is it about the local authority mindset, why is it even worse in Wales, and do the local police have nothing better to do?

In my post Smoking Snoopers of 25 February 2007, I commented on the fact that the government had handed £29.5 million to local authorities to help them enforce the smoking ban. It coincided with the news that the police no longer bothered – as a matter of policy – to attend at the scene of a burglary. I did not know it at the time, but the sum so allocated was exactly twice the amount which the Treasury (Gordon Brown Prop.) had shaved off the budget for flood relief.

My focus was on the sort of people who would become smoking snoopers, getting their thrills from lurking to catch people enjoying themselves. They would include, I said:

The sludge which collects at the bottom of every local authority pond who get moved from department to department because they are really unemployable even in that undemanding environment, but who cannot be dismissed through political correctness or union strength.

Imagine being all that and Welsh with it!

Verboten to photograph the Fuhrer

We used to mock the Germans for the devotion to the outward forms of authority. Back in the days when everything was allowed which was not forbidden, and when Britons were allowed to make their own assessments of risk, we laughed at Fritz because he would do nothing without a notice to tell him he was allowed to and felt adrift if his next step was not laid out in a manual.

Condemning the sludge in the public service pond

I do not often run ad hominem attacks on public servants. It is often hard to distinguish between their personal failings and those of the system which they work in and, for the most part, it would be like criticising the dog because his treadmill malfunctions, or beating one of those bovine creatures who push a pole round a well because the water dries up. We employ whole offices of people like that – whole departments of state in the case of DEFRA or the Home Office – and can’t really complain because dull unthinking drudges perform dull unthinking tasks in dull unthinking ways.

Politicians are different, of course. They solicit our votes by their claims to competence, honesty and personal charm, and if Ed Balls fails on all three counts, it is proper to say so. Caroline Flint cares about us all so much, but we don’t care for her and I hope she knows it (although she, of course, has more in common, intellectually speaking, with the pole than with the ox which pushes it, and may not notice the general air of mockery and contempt which attends her every pronouncement).

The silly cow of Milton Keynes

Housing Minister Caroline Flint, seeking to justify the so-called eco-towns which the government proposes to dump on rural Conservative areas, tells the Times that Milton Keynes has more bio-diversity than the fields which preceded it.

I remember the fields which used to be there, the lanes which wound around them and the villages which interspersed them. A very attractive place it was too, with more than enough bio-diversity, and real cows, not the concrete ones which gave Milton Keynes its only claim to fame.

Now we have another real cow keen to build more Milton Keyneses, this one with concrete between her ears. Caroline Flint is obviously keen to give a green veneer to Gordon Brown’s vast new housing estates.

Few no smoking signs in New York

Why do we need all the no smoking signs? Is it because Caroline Flint was herself too dim to manage without signs everywhere, or is it just corrupt government spreading its patronage to buy votes?

New York is famously not short of signs and notices. I cannot put my finger on why, but they do not offend in the same way as they do over here. That may in part be that the context suits them better, but somehow they generally seem more useful. A high proportion of them actually convey information which people need.

New York has much the same laws about smoking in public places as we have. What it does not have is screaming notices to tell you about it. Those places which had such signs anyway – food shops for example – still have them, but there is no equivalent of the statutory obligation to display a sign in every doorway.

Googling for Caroline Flint’s bits

Time for an update on the continuing saga of Caroline Flint’s body parts.

Regular readers will recall that I have a double interest in Caroline Flint (see the posts here). One was deliberate – as a libertarian smoker, I have a deep hatred of politicians and others who think they know better than I do what is right for me. She also gave me a model piece for testing theories about Google searching.

A useful role at last for Caroline Flint

The Times carries a story about pubs hiring strippers to try and woo back the trade lost as a result of the smoking ban. It wonders of this is an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. I wonder if stripping in pubs might provide a useful occupation for Caroline Flint before she loses her looks entirely.

The spirit of the smoking ban

I don’t take the The Sun, so I missed its story of 14 July about the smoking snoopers of Maidenhead. I came across it in an American web site which charts world-wide excesses of power.

The story Mad council stokes fag-ban fire concerned a visit by smoking snoopers (that is “smoking ban enforcement officers”) to the Greyhound pub in Maidenhead. They ordered the manager to close the windows for the summer because smoke might drift in from those exiled outside by the smoking ban. I emphasise the “might” – there was no-one smoking outside at the time, still less any evidence that smoke was actually drifting in.

Brown meets the little people

At a party on Saturday, someone was talking about Leona Helmsley, the multi-millionaire American hotelier who went to prison for tax fraud in 1989. She achieved notoriety for her view that “only the little people pay taxes”, an aggravating factor in the lengthy sentences which were handed down.

Gordon Brown is pretty contemptuous about “little people” as well, as we know from his advisers’ views on grannies losing their blouses and the “losers” hit by his pension raid – see Brown tramples on losers and grannies. As Chancellor he could ignore them, skulking in the Treasury whilst Blair faced the cameras.

Caroline Flint – new Gauleiter for Yorkshire

Caroline Flint, the humourless harridan-cum-bimbo, Blair groupie and former Health Minister, has been appointed Gauleiter for Yorkshire and Humber. The formal title is Minister of State and Minister for Yorkshire and the Humber, but I bet she is getting herself some fetching black boots and toying with the idea of collar tabs with red facings and gold piping.