Esther McVey: Holocaust comparison to smoking ban is breathtakingly thoughtless repugnance, however...

To further illustrate her lack of understanding, and the fact she doesn’t give two hoots about the offence she has caused, McVey doubled down on her having used a poem written to warn of the horrors of the Holocaust to compare the Prime Minister’s determination to stop unwitting bystanders inhaling lungs full of others’ secondhand smoke.

She wrote: Nobody is suggesting that banning smoking outside pubs can be equated with what happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Er, yeah. You did, Esther.

In that subsequent rant she goes on to play the victim, suggesting that the bullies from the politically correct elite were out to silence her. Poppycock. You don’t have to be anything but right-minded and half-bright to see why the Board of Deputies of British Jews is right; her comparison is ‘breathtakingly thoughtless’ and … as they state, thoroughly repugnant.

Yet, and I bet you weren’t expecting this twist in the tale, the kernel of her repugnance is one that must not be flushed away with the rest of her odious bile. The point, I think, she is trying to make is one The Yorkshire Post has made already, albeit with more thought and care. One of the many privileges of living in this country is our array of freedoms; the choices we can make.

I say this as as a non-smoker: if people want to smoke in an open public space, with nobody else around them who might unwillingly and unintentionally inhale their fumes, then they should be free to do so and if I or any other non-smoker wants to go out to the park, pub or cafe, we should be able to do so without having to fight through a fug of harmful fumes. Surely we’re all grown up enough to figure out how we go about that?

The right thing to do in this country is to continue down our decades-long path of education, understanding and social rejection of a habit that kills; a habit that costs the NHS billions; a habit we have, as a collective, managed to all but stigmatise - culturally - to the point of extinction by will-of-the-people.

Now, where are those Cuban cigars I bought on holiday last year?

James

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