You will already get royally fucked over here if you get caught texting while driving, or using a non-hands-free cellphone. Which is why I suspect this product might not catch on.
In reality the UK law enforcement attitude to driving pisses me off, but we do have some of the safest driving stats in the world, so I guess they have a point.
Although it’s worth bearing in mind that we do badly on pedestrian safety, especially for children, compared to the rest of Europe.
The Highway Code carries some weight in court, at least when it comes to the severity of sentence handed down by magistrates. I wouldn’t be quite so dismissive of it, having been on the wrong end of a JP myself in my time.
This Smoking Licence thing, meanwhile, comes from some Blair crony and worryingly doesn’t seem to have been dismissed out of hand by the government. It is the sort of proposal that can only appeal to people who never really got the whole “liberty” idea. “70% of smokers actually want to stop smoking”, says Professor Le Grand. But, Professor, that doesn’t mean that they, or the other 30%, want to be forced to stop smoking. Or that all non-smokers have surrendered their right to become smokers without state interference.
He also throws in the illiberal’s favourite line, “it would benefit the NHS”. Yeah, so would banning skateboarding, or banning walking, or banning ever leaving your house. Health services are supposed to look after us while we go about our lives, pursuing happiness and all that. Not pursuing happiness with the proviso that we’re not allowed to go hang-gliding or whatever. If the rule is that you can receive NHS care as long as you don’t do <list of things that current and former Prime Ministers disapprove of>, then it’s a shitty health service.
Where are you? There’s one in just about every bar here, and the ones that don’t have them keep smokes behind the bar.
Actually, if I was under the auspices of the NHS (which I’m not, anymore) I wouldn’t mind that.
If Joe Idiot decides to base jump off Ben Nevis and requires 12 operations afterward, I can’t help but think he ought to pay for them himself.
Oh no, I wasn’t denying this, but it’s simply not the case that putting it into the Highway Code is a prohibition of the activity.
[temporary hijack, sorry]
boggle Is that a Micropixie reference?? She says that in her song “Cognitive Dissonance” on her album Alice in Stevie Wonderland.
Or did you and she both get it from somewhere else?
[/hijack]
“Cloud cuckoo land” is a common phrase in the UK, meaning a perception of reality that isn’t rooted in actual reality.
It’s a very old reference
There’s talk here about banning smoking in cars also. They use the 2nd hand smoking, won’t someone think of the children argument here rather than road safety though.
Ah, ok, thanks. That definition fits how she uses it in her song, and she is English.
ETA thanks to both jjimm and yojimbo.
Good ol’ Boston, Massachusetts. We’re way ahead of our time in regard to descriminating against unprotected classes.
I understand the minimum wage clerks can also be charged and fined, at least it did happen in the movie Clerks.
It’s perfectly possible for that to happen in Britain, but it very rarely does. One reason is it could be a PR disaster for those trying to enforce the law - anybody working in a shop for the minimum wage simply isn’t going to be able to pay the fine, and if they’re an attractive young woman they’d be a cause celebre for the tabloid press. Secondly, I suspect that they’d have a very easy defence in court, that they genuinely believed the customer was 18.
GorillaMan, I used to work, years ago, in a convenience store in Massachusetts. There, the fines for selling tobacco to minors were assessed on the clerks. I don’t know if the store would have faced a higher fine, itself, but I knew I was at risk of one.
Here in NYS the law seems to allow fining just the store, even if they don’t card someone who looks 25 or under. The law seems to be written to really take any reasonable doubt defense away from people.
Again, I think it’s a matter of a state by state enforcement and legal codes, so some states have the clerks at risk, others the stores.
I think it’s a terrible idea. If we license smokers, that means we’re endorsing the activity and this will only make it harder to justify rounding them up for deportation or wholesale slaughter.
I look at the fact tobacco grows even in Wisconsin, and always wonder how high they can tax people until they grow their own. I know it won’t be the same, but that savings should be worth it to a few people.
Um - the smoking ban did kind of ban smoking in cars, at least in company-owned cars. Citing the usual moronic ‘health reasons’ for non-smokers, all company cars are considered ‘work places’ and therefore you cannot smoke in them. When I had a company car at last job, we were required to put ‘no smoking’ stickers in the car’s rear windows and windscreen.
Ridiculous! The idea that me having a fag in my car, then at some point in the future picking up a coworker and giving them a ride or loaning them my car, and putting their health at risk from ‘second hand smoke’ from smoking at some point in the past. Just plain stupid.
Damn this nanny state, sometimes. Personal liberty always takes a back seat to some boffin reading a statistic and trying to pass a law ‘for our own good’.
Really? Is that one of those “England and Wales” laws? I ask as the security men around the university only ever seem to smoke inside their vans, in fact it’s the only time you see them in their vans at all. Still, better than smoking right underneath the intake for the air conditioning in admin 
Possibly - we were told when the smoking ban came in that it included company cars as well as any other company property (offices, hotel rooms, rented flats, etc…)
And, bizarrely, phone booths These all have the sticker on now. And railway platforms which are 100% outside in any case.
The powers that be seem to have redefined “passive smoking” from spending some substantial time in smoggy room, to simply being able to smell a fleeting wisp of tobacco smoke.
Just a thought, are prisoners allowed to smoke in jail?