Comment
THE SUN SAYS
Keir Starmer’s invasive ban on smoking outdoors will be catastrophic for the nation’s pubs – what is next for the chop?
And when it comes to fuel duty the RAC apparently no longer wants to 'keep it down'
Booze next
IN his first speech outside Downing Street Keir Starmer promised a new politics which “would tread more lightly on our lives”.
What, we now wonder, did he mean?
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The PM can’t have meant socially.
Because just eight weeks later the Government plans to ban smoking outdoors . . . in pub gardens and other sanctuaries for smokers.
Hundreds of pubs will be bankrupted, with thousands thrown on the dole and communities robbed of their focal point.
Three pubs are expected to close every WEEK.
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Even anti-smoking campaigners say it will backfire.
And police will presumably be diverted from real crime to collar illicit smokers.
Labour capitulated to the unions, unsuccessfully bribing them to stop striking.
Now it has done the same to the public health lobby, which has pushed this wrong-headed policy for years.
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And if this new prohibition is “treading lightly”, what might Labour treading more heavily look like?
Smoking and vaping to be banned in pub gardens and outside football stadiums
That we can tell you . . . and we fear it is inevitable.
Once outdoor smoking is outlawed — on an evidence-free hunch it will “ease pressure” on the NHS — logic dictates that the health establishment puritans will target other “unhealthy” activities.
Brace for demands to curb chocolate or other “junk food” supposedly causing obesity and burdening the health service.
How about rationing bacon or booze?
The metropolitan Left already sneer at such base pleasures.
Can you see them rejecting calls for new laws to restrict those too?
Pump chumps
WHEN it comes to fuel duty the RAC apparently no longer wants to “keep it down”.
It says profiteering petrol retailers don’t pass on the current 5p cut to drivers — so the Chancellor might as well end it and jack the pump price back up.
Has it gone potty?
Our Keep It Down campaign to freeze fuel duty has saved drivers billions since 2011.
The answer to the profiteers is for the Competition and Markets Authority to hammer each and every one.
Not for us to grimly accept this ripoff, then let the Treasury fleece us for even more each time we fill up.
Russian lesson
COMPARE and contrast.
In Ukraine citizens were raped and butchered by invading Russians.
In Kursk, invading Ukrainians feed and look after Russians too infirm to flee.
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Yet, depressingly, these war-hardened people still have few regrets over Putin’s warped imperialism, or even much interest in it.
President Zelensky has a mountain to climb if he still hopes a popular revolt can change the Kremlin’s mind.
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