The Pub Curmudgeon - Change your hearts or lose your inns

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H/t to Frank Davis for this letter recently published in the Blackburn, Darwen, and Hyndburn Citizen:

Change your hearts or lose your inns
The English pub was the envy of the world, where it was copied but never equalled – until recently!
The pub is what defined much of our culture, a place of close social interaction that brought together diverse characters and where long friendships were formed, a place where the world could be ‘put to rights’ and where social norms were defined.
Real pubs are almost extinct now, thousands of jobs have gone and ex-customers spread far and wide, many friendships lost.
Many old and infirm have been sent into isolation to watch their 32” plasma with a bottle of Glenfiddich for company to await their end. No longer tolerated by the gullibly health obsessed, old Tom can no longer sit at the end of the bar and puff on his pipe. Old Aunt Elsie no longer goes on her weekly jaunts to the bingo with her friends because they have closed too, so she sits at home watching the ‘box’ with her cat as company.
On a wider scale, society has been fractured socially where division has replaced inclusivity, tolerance superseded by intolerance and for what?
To please a few anti-smoker nutters and even fewer gullible new age puritans?
To improve the health of the nation?
We hear daily how the smoking ban has ‘saved’ millions of lives so the normalisation of intolerance, the suppression our shared identity and loss of thousands of our pubs is a price worth paying right?
Unfortunately, the ‘saved lives’ idea is nothing but propaganda to maintain an anti-smoker agenda based on 1950s science!
This saved ‘death toll’ is a computer generated prediction, an illusion based on flawed information.
If so many lives have been saved, why have new cancers almost doubled in the 15 years to 2006, why does so called ‘smoke-related’ disease continue to increase despite the reduction in smoking?
It is the smoking ban that has caused this destruction of our heritage using junk science to justify it!
It is not natural evolution as some anti-smokers would have us believe, but forced change.
Prices only rose as a result of this coercion that has driven custom away from pubs and left us in this desperate situation.
Take note: Hilaire Belloc also astutely said: “Change your hearts or you will lose your inns, and you will deserve to have lost them.”
Kin Free

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