It's the way she tells 'em

Deborah Arnott: She might have a face like a rentboy's ringpiece but she's got a marvellous sense of humour

(nb. I am not the Devil's Kitchen)

Honestly, you wait weeks for a barking mad quote from Action on Smoking and Health and then two come along at once. 

On smoking in cars:

"Cars are small tin boxes, with not much air in them. Smoking just one cigarette, even with the window open, creates a greater concentration of second-hand smoke than a whole evening's smoking in a pub or a bar."

Really? That sounds rather, erm, implausible. Is there any evidence for this, or is it a case of - as The Daily Mash might put it:

"What study? Fuck you, that's what study."

On a roll, Arnott then responded to a survey showing that a large majority of shopkeepers feared that having to piss two grand away on pointlessly hiding their tobacco products was a threat to their business:

“All this survey shows is that the Tobacco Retailers Alliance, a tobacco industry-funded body, has managed to frighten small shopkeepers into thinking that putting tobacco out of sight will kill their businesses.

“Yet again the tobacco industry is crying wolf, just as it did with smoke free legislation, which it said would destroy our pubs.”

You fucking what?!?!

Weekly pub closures in the UK

2005: 2

2006: 4

2007: 27

2008: 39

2009: 52

See if you can guess which year the smoking ban came in...

(H/T F2C blog)

Incidentally, the whole 'let's ban smoking in cars' debate was entirely engineered by the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation, who not only invited some authoritarian quack to hold forth on the issue but gave the bugger his own webpage and then invited two fake charities - ASH and Brake - to support it. They then ran the "story" under the headline:

Call to ban child-in-car smoking

Nice lobbying, Auntie. Within hours, thanks to heavy coverage across radios 2, 4 and 5, the Beeb had turned an issue about which no normal person had ever given a moment's thought into something that the type of pitchfork-wielding mouth-breather who calls up Jeremy Vine thinks requires drastic action. 

And just in case the 'debate' wasn't unbalanced enough, the Beeb then cancelled an interview with the Forest spokesman - the only person invited to provide a counter-argument. 

Beneath the 'think of the chiiiildren' window-dressing is a more serious purpose: to redefine cars, and then homes, as 'public places'. It also paths the way for banning smoking around adults, an aim which, as Dick Puddlecote has spotted, Arnott didn't even bother to conceal:

It must have caught the fake charities as cold as it caught Forest though, as they were all wibbling at cross purposes.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), said the charity was in favour of a ban on smoking in cars.

The risks were not just to children but to adults suffering from conditions like heart disease, she said.

That's the problem with being caught off-guard, Debs wasn't able to tailor her junk science quickly enough to the nonsense in hand so had to just grab what she was working on at the time - the total ban on smoking in cars, with or without children present. An interesting view into the future, I thought.

There's not much to add to Dick's analysis. Go have a ganders at the whole thing.