The Comical Welsh Assembly

I cannot help but feel that people who stand for election to bodies such as the Welsh Assembly must have some sort of character defect. Have I got a similar defect?

You see, many years ago, I was a member of my local municipal golf club. After a few years, I was asked to stand for election as Club Secretary. The position is more than a sinecure since the Secretary of the Club liaises with other bodies. For example, it was the Secretary who had to attend court to renew the Club’s alcohol licence from time to time, or to get a licence for a new fruit machine. There were meetings for this and meetings for that. The Secretary had to be sensible enough and knowledgeable enough to see how proposals would affect the Club in broader ways than first appeared to be the case. There was no money in the job – just a free annual subscription.

So why did I accept the invitation? Flattered to be asked, I suppose – and ignorance of what was involved. But I did enjoy the job. I did not find it onerous. It was interesting, and I did manage to reform some practices which were way, way out of date. But I suppose that there was also a certain ‘honour’ involved. In a sense, when a member addressed you as “Mr Secretary”, it was not dissimilar to Alan Sugar, boss of Apple Computers, demanding to be addressed as “Suralan” (“Sir Alan”, for American readers). It would have been even better had one been addressed as “Honourable Mr Secretary”. I gave it my best shot for several years but stood down when other family matters intervened.

Later, I moved clubs. After a few years, I was asked to stand for the position of Treasurer (due to my banking background). I suppose that the same feelings of being ‘honoured’ applied. Again, I did a good job for the club, moving the accounting system for the 19th Century to the 20th. I changed the budgeting report to the Council from a ‘profit and loss’ statement (totally unsuitable) to an ‘income and expenditure’ report, along with numerous other improvements.

But note that in neither case did I seek those positions. That is the difference between someone who accepts an invitation to stand and someone who wants to be ‘honoured’.That is the difficulty I face in understanding why people wish to become Local Councillors or MPs or Members of the Board of Public Health England (viz my last post). I suppose that they get paid, but you would think that such people would already be in well-paid employment. If so, how can they afford the time? Or are they mostly retired and doing the job to amuse themselves? If such a person said, “I have become involved in this because I have a passionate belief in the health of the nation”, I would accuse them of being out of their mind. And yet, that seems to be the excuse. I suspect that they want to be ‘honoured’, be important and amuse themselves. Does that not make sense?

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So we might ask how some individuals come to be members of the Welsh Assembly? Especially, those who seek to become so. I can’t help but think that many are members of the local Labour Party, shout a lot, and are flattered to be asked to stand as a candidate. But I think that there are those who have character flaws – those who see the Assembly as something similar to a football match. The Assembly is ‘Premier League’, and the objective of your team is TO WIN AT ALL COSTS! So if you get a Health Minister who is anti-cigs because his gut feeling says to him that ecigs are ‘like the wild west and need to be controlled and preferably medicalised’, then you, as a member of the team, must back up, with all your might, his attempt to score a goal. The ‘glory’ is in the winning.

What does that do to the apparent objective of ‘health equality’? In the case of ecigs, it has the reverse affect. Scoring a goal by banning ecigs in pubs is anti-health. Ecigs are not for me, but they could be in certain circumstances, if I was of a mind to bother.

The craziness of the Welsh Assembly is manifest. It is so determined to equate vaping with smoking that it wants to ban vaping in homes where someone engages in paid work (or unpaid?) even though no one else is present. If you are discussing some deal on the phone, even a mobile phone, then vaping as you do so would be illegal. But is not that also the illogic of smoking bans in private properties such as pubs? Has it not been so since 2007? The captivation of private properties merely by using the word-phrase “public places” suggests that there is no such thing as a “private” place. How can there be since a place becomes ‘public’ as soon as a stranger enters? What is worse is that the stranger does not actually have to be in that place. That is the crazy demand of the Welsh Assembly conflation of ecigs and tobacco cigs. It also applies to the same conflation by the EU and the WHO. What other justification is there for Chapter 20 in the EU Tobacco Directive? In that case, ‘private’ individuals become ‘public’ individuals. That is equivalent to saying that “THE STATE” owns you, body and soul, because you exist. You are not a ‘private’ individual; you are a ‘public’ individual. Your mind is not a ‘private place’; it is a ‘public place’, if only because another person can speak it you.

And that is why the Welsh Assembly is such a basket case, and why the smoking bans in the UK are ‘unconstitutional’, even though we have no written constitution. The only ‘public places’ are those owned by the public as a whole, such as parks, libraries and roads.

I never cease to understand why the pub trade rolled over. Perhaps the answer is in the word ‘Pub’. The word ‘Pub’ is short for ‘Public House’. The phrase ‘public house’ is akin to ‘mi case es tu casa’. It is not an open invitation to anyone and everyone. It only applies if ‘mi’ accepts ‘tu’ as a person worthy of being accepted. I doubt that Hitler would have told Churchill that ‘mi casa es tu casa’, and vice versa.

The horror of the smoking ban is that it stole property. That is becoming more and more evident in smoking bans in public housing in the USA.  What is comical about it is the totally un-enforceability of it.

But The Zealots are not in the least bothered about enforcement. They just want LAWS, LAWS AND LAWS. That is what they exist for, and that is ALL that they exist for – to get laws created. ASH ET AL have no other purpose. Only MPs can deflect that purpose and stop the corruption of our way of life, which has served us so well for hundreds of years. What is needed is for those MPs who normally acquiesce, to start demanding positive proof. Epidemiology is, by its nature, ‘second hand’. It does not provide direct evidence; in a court, its evidence would be described as ‘circumstantial’. There is no certainty unless proof positive is acquired. Thus, the ‘miasmas’ of swamps, which were unreal, became mosquitoes, which were real.

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The Comical Welsh Assembly is as intellectually corrupt as can possibly be.