Release Date: Sunday 4 September 2005 2005
Release Time: Immediate

Contact Details:
Sean Gabb, 07956 472 199, sean@libertarian.co.uk

For other contact and link details, see the foot of this message
Release url: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/news/nr031.htm

"GO BACK TO EMPTYING BEDPANS - LEAVE SMOKERS ALONE", SAYS FREE MARKET AND CIVIL LIBERTIES THINK TANK TO BRITISH NURSES

The Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group, condemns the demand by the Royal College of Nursing for a total ban on smoking in public.

Libertarian Alliance spokesman, Dr Sean Gabb comments:

"There is no good evidence to support the claims about passive smoking. Breathing the cigarette smoke of others has no proven adverse consequences for health. This being so, smoking is a purely personal matter. There should be no ban on smoking in public. This should be left to the choices of consenting adults.

"These nurses are overwhelmingly employed by the National Health Service. Our taxes pay their salaries. As such, it is impertinence on their part to start telling us how to live our lives.

"Their job is to help put us together again whenever we present ourselves for treatment. It is none of their business what we do with ourselves in the meantime.

"What we do with ourselves is our own business alone. As for the financial argument, smokers pay taxes that many times over cover the alleged greater costs of treating them. Even otherwise, that would be an argument against a health service funded by compulsory mass insurance - not for turning the country into a therapeutic police state.

"These women should confine themselves to the duties they have been employed to discharge. These duties include emptying bedpans and preventing bedsores.

"Any nurse who longs for a less subservient relationship with the British public should resign at once from the National Health Service. She should then have cards placed in all the telephone boxes of Central London, these to say: 'Nurse Sadie Offers Stern Discipline to Naughty Boys and Girls'. I have no doubt she will find all the willing clients she could ever handle. I wish her well in her new occupation.

"Any nurse who wishes not to work in the voluntary sector should remember her place, and keep her mouth shut on issues that do not concern her."

END OF COPY

Note(s) to Editors

Dr Sean Gabb is the Director of Communications for the Libertarian Alliance and edits its journal “Free Life”. His latest book, "Smoking, Class and the Legitimation of Power", is available at Amazon. His other books are available from Hampden Press at http://www.hampdenpress.co.uk.

He can be contacted for further comment on 07956 472 199 or by email at sean@libertarian.co.uk

Extended Contact Details:

The Libertarian Alliance is Britain’s most radical free market and civil liberties policy institute. It has published over 700 articles, pamphlets and books in support of freedom and against statism in all its forms. These are freely available at http://www.libertarian.co.uk

Our postal address is

The Libertarian Alliance
Suite 35
2 Lansdowne Row
Mayfair
London
W1J 6HL
Tel: 07956 472 199


Associated Organisations

The Libertarian International - http://www.libertarian.to - is a sister organisation to the Libertarian Alliance. Its mission is to coordinate various initiatives in the defence of individual liberty throughout the world.

Sean Gabb's personal website - http://www.seangabb.co.uk - contains about a million words of writings on themes interesting to libertarians and conservatives.

Hampden Press - http://www.hampdenpress.co.uk.- the publishing house of the Libertarian Alliance.

Liberalia - http://www.liberalia.com - maintained by by LA Executive member Christian Michel, Liberalia publishes in-depth papers in French and English on libertarianism and free enterprise. It is a prime source of documentation on these issues for students and scholars.

Libertarian Samizdata - http://www.samizdata.net - a topical blog set up by LA Executive member Perry de Havilland..