As signalled back in May of this year, the regime has today announced that the public display of cigarettes will be banned [1]. The reason? For the sake of the children, think of the children (cue South Park sketch):
Alan Johnson [Health Secretary for England] said: “They see the point of sale display and as a result of seeing it, it encourages them to take up smoking. This is the key evidence as to why we have 200,000 11 to 15-year-olds smoking.”
So that’s why kids smoke, because all those shiny packets are right there in front of them so near yet so close, like jars of sweeties. What kid can resist the magpie allure of a packet of Embassy Regal or Superkings, with their cool ‘Smoke and you die horribly’ messages plastered artfully across their covers? Surely a temptation too far, any Right-minded person would agree.
Of course, this is bollocks. Kids and teens smoke for all sorts of reasons, the visibility of fag packets being a long, long way down the list. You want to look like a hard nut, you want to look cool, you want to hang out with the ’smoking crowd’ under the science block, you want to be rebellious - those were all reasons why I and my schoolmates smoked. Add to that these days a future of unemployment punctuated by spells of casual labour in McJobs and you’ve got depression and lack of self-respect to add to the list. If the regime really wanted to tackle smoking, binge-drinking, and drug-taking amongst young people, it would address the causes of these problems, but that would mean directly criticising the capitalism and obscene wealth inequalities (such that a CEO can ‘earn’ 400 times more than an ordinary worker) that NuLabor and its Thatcherite predecessors have worked so hard to create. After decades of privatisation and neo-liberal ‘economics’ with domestic manufacturing industry mostly destroyed, there are piss-all jobs for the working class to do. The chattering classes whitter endlessly about ‘dependency culture’ and ‘dysfunctional families’ without having the brains to realise that it’s their consumption, and their votes, which have been crucial to the emergence of such a savage form of capitalism.
But no, we can’t be doing with criticising capitalism and pointing the finger to it as the cause of societal ills, perish the thort. Instead, you blame the victims and take cosmetic measures that assuage the consciences of the chattering classes and single-issue lobby groups like ASH and, laughably, the BMA. (Doctors telling us to be responsible in our drug-taking? That’s like Peter Stringfellow preaching sexual abstinence (see Physician Heal Thyself).)
The purpose of this latest wheeze is the same as that of all the other anti-smoking measures: stigmatisation. Turn people who smoke into either passive pitiable suffering victims or evil subhuman scum. Turn them, indeed, into ’smokers’, whose life and character is defined by burning the evil weed. (See Psst! Got any fags under the counter? earlier this year.) This tactic is working, not surprisingly in a society of minimal political consciousness that blames others for its misfortunes. Crap housing and McJobs? Blame all the feckless immigrants and asylum seekers. Child poverty? Blame ‘dysfunctional families’ and ‘welfare dependency’. High public spending? Blame fatties, smokers and druggies for putting a “burden on the NHS” (and certainly don’t blame the billions spent on ‘defence’ and Trident, that would be unpatriotic).
Blame everyone else but yourself, or, more importantly, the very economic and political system that we labour under. Once upon a time, when there was such a thing as political and class consciousness, we’d have ‘left-wing firebrands’ pointing the finger at capitalism and calling for concerted worker action, but the destruction of the Labour Movement after the defeat of the miner’s strike [2] put paid to that. Now the Great British Public [TM] has the collective political consciousness of a lobotomised flea and is literally incapable of seeing systemic problems, so that such problems come almost literally like a bolt from the blue, as acts of a capricious god. In an atomised society without community or solidarity, we can only see individuals and groups as the problem, and can only lash out wildly at them as we seek scapegoats for ills which are structural, an integral and inevitable part of modern capitalism.
Which of course suits the rulers very nicely indeed, thankuverymuch. Keep the plebs fighting amongst themselves and they’ll not even notice the Suits and Nobs, let alone unite against them.
[1] Ban on tobacco displays announced. BBC News, 9/12/08
[2] Thanks a bundle, Nottingham. See “The Miner’s Strike and its legacy: thanks a bundle, Nottinghamshire” on Harry’s Happy Hamster Home.
