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Smoking ruin
WITH one foolish, nanny-state-on-steroids edict, Labour will put a match to its supposed growth agenda and see it go up in smoke.
Along with thousands of communities’ pubs and huge numbers of jobs.
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We never thought any Government would care so little for personal freedom, not to mention livelihoods and the economy, to ban smoking outdoors.
That this new law could even engulf vaping, the most effective anti-smoking pastime ever, shows how absurd it is.
The health concerns the Government has swallowed sound utterly spurious. How many of us get cancer from a whiff of second-hand smoke in a pub garden?
For our pubs, though, it IS a death knell.
Battered by soaring costs and dwindling punters, especially since the 2007 indoor smoking ban, thousands have already closed.
Others survived only by pouring money into outdoor areas for smokers — who will now stay home to enjoy a ciggie, at least while that remains legal.
This incendiary idea wasn’t in Labour’s manifesto, nor the King’s Speech.
And we know why. The Tories dismissed it four years ago because “banning outdoor smoking would lead to significant closures and job losses”.
Labour’s Business Department made the same objection but was overruled.
Again and again the Government says economic growth is its No1 priority.
Again and again it makes ideological decisions all but designed to destroy it.
Brexit in peril
KEIR Starmer says he wants a friendlier relationship with the EU. But relations are perfectly cordial already, eight years on from the Brexit vote.
The concern is that the closer ties he has agreed with Germany’s Olaf Scholz follow exactly the Remainer plan set in train after the demise of the second referendum Sir Keir championed.
That is to bind us so tightly to the EU that Labour can persuade voters we might as well just rejoin.
First step, the “youth mobility” scheme Germany wants — free movement for under-35s.
The PM has “no plans” for it. Yet.
Despite Labour’s performative gloom, Brexit Britain is thriving, with G7- leading growth.
We do not need to buy favours from recession-hit Germany . . . unless it’s part of this plot to rejoin.
Many Leave voters who reluctantly backed Labour’s Remainers at the election would not forgive backsliding on Brexit.
Sum might stay
PRICE-gouging over the Oasis gigs is grimly inevitable.
It is still outrageous for a Manchester hotel to cancel bookings already made at £90 and relist them for £400.
Bosses insist it was a “technical error”.
Will they correct that by charging only the standard £90 price for Oasis nights?
