Bansturbatrix Of The Week

Dr Vivienne Nathanson, who spouts the following garbage in a video titled "E-cigarettes safety questioned and face possible ban in UK" at the BBC (22 second in):

"At the moment, [e-cigarettes] are definitely a menace because there is some small amount of emerging evidence of some people, particularly children, using them as an access source to get a nicotine hit.

"We really need to know far more about their safety and efficacy before we can say that they are miracle."

Didn't we have a General Election eight months ago, with a new Prime Minister and everything?

From the BBC:

Plans for a minimum price for alcohol in England and Wales are to be announced by ministers. Shops and bars will be prevented from selling drinks for less than the tax they pay on them.

The minimum pricing would work out at 38p for a can of weak lager and £10.71 for a litre bottle of vodka. The aim is to prevent binge drinking, but campaigners say the proposed new rules do not go far enough...

The government is planning to ban the sale of alcohol below "cost price", which is defined as the tax drinkers pay - duty plus VAT...

How is that any different to the sort of shite that Labour came out with, year in year out? As a flourish, they are even proposing a measure that is nigh unenforceable on an administrative level, rather than something nice and simple like increasing alcohol duty (not that I'm recommending this, I'm just saying).

The BBC being the BBC, it has rent-a-quotes from the usual subjects, the BMA, Alcohol Concern, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and Drinkaware, and no doubt the major supermarkets are cheering to the rafters.
-----------
UPDATE: FormerTory in the comments links us to this vox pop:

Tom Logan, a trainee accountant from Peterborough, said: "So what you're saying is, they've fucked up the economy, forced the country to the point of bankruptcy and put my job and my home in jeopardy while at the same time paying themselves a hundred grand a year in expenses and are now telling me I shouldn't be allowed to buy a couple of cheap bottles of wine on a Friday night so I can forget my troubles for a few hours instead of hunting them down and roasting them on a spit like the shit-caked, trough-guzzling pigs that they are?

"Interesting."

Fascist Health Scare Du Jour

From The Metro:

Children who have not had MMR jabs should* be banned from schools, a leading health official said yesterday. The ‘radical’ move was the only way to increase immunisation rates, said Dr Sohail Bhatti, director of public health for east Lancashire.

‘It’s what happens in France,’ he said. ‘There, you can’t be admitted to school unless you show your vaccination certificate. That’s what we call big society. You have a responsibility to be a good citizen and part of that is not spreading potentially fatal diseases to other children.'

... In 2008, a similar proposal by the Labour government was dubbed ‘Stalinist’ by the British Medical Association.

Question: do children who haven't had the MMR jab 'spread potentially fatal diseases'? Is there the slightest shred of evidence for this? Like most of my classmates, back in the day, I've had measles and mumps and am still alive.

Question: would the excluded children be given the cash equivalent of the cost of the school place that is denied them to try their luck in the free market?

Question: isn't that last comment from the BMA a bit rich?

Declaration of interest: both my children had the MMR jab.

* He who says 'should' is usually completely in the wrong.

Doctor knows best!

From The Metro:

As well as supporting a minimum price for a unit of alcohol, medics called for a complete ban on drink advertising as well as scrapping supermarket loyalty points for alcohol purchases. They also voted for a "properly enforced ban on drunkenness on public transport" at the British Medical Association (BMA) conference in Brighton.

But calls for a UK-wide ban on drinking on public transport failed. The BMA already has a strong stance on alcohol, and supports a complete ban on advertising as well as minimum pricing. Today's vote on loyalty points and cracking down on drunken behaviour on trains and buses adds another dimension to BMA policy.

Note to self: add the British Medical Association to this list.

Monopolies don't like competition - shock

The British Medical Association, for whose benefit the NHS appears to be run, do not like the idea of some services being provided by the private sector and have set up a nice website accordingly.

Admittedly, private involvement in health provision has a bad reputation, because the Labour government is no good at negotiating (or is deliberately wastefl, who knows?) and so has ended up vastly overpaying for PFI hospirals, tamiflu, GPs salaries and so on over the years, which adds about a third to the cost of the NHS without adding one penny to actual spending on healthcare.

But the principle is, surely, simple: if the NHS work out that a certain treatment costs £X,000, then it can tell patients that they are free to take a voucher worth [£X,000 minus ten per cent] and go and get it done privately. Maybe the waiting list elsewhere is shorter, maybe the clinic more convenient, maybe it's nice to be treated as a paying customer than an troublesome member of the public; but no doubt some people will go elsewhere (even if they have to pay a bit out of their own pockets on top).

Bingo, we've saved the taxpayer 10 per cent of £X,000. If all of a sudden everybody wants to go private, we know that we ought to reduce £X,000 by more than ten per cent; if nobody takes up the offer we ought to reduce it by less than ten per cent, but simple trial and error will quickly get us to some sort of optimum. This is not some wacky idea,this is what happens in most European countries.

Anyways, if that website is the best the BMA can do for arguments against sub-contracting services, them I'm all in favour.

Ban it! Ban it!

From the BBC:

There should be a ban on all alcohol advertising, including sports and music sponsorship, doctors say.

The British Medical Association said the crackdown on marketing was needed along with an end to cut-price deals to stop the rising rates of consumption. The industry spends £800m a year on promoting drinks - just a quarter of which goes on direct advertising. Doctors said action was needed as alcohol was now one of the leading causes (1) of early death and disability.

(1) Dont'cha just love that catch-all phrase "one of the leading causes". Is it one of the two or three main causes? Nope. Is it maybe in the top ten? Nope. Top twenty, perhaps? Nope. Even if we accept the official statistics as true, every year it's about eighteen deaths per hundred thousand males and nine deaths per hundred thousand females.

Or to put it into context, there are about nine thousand alcohol-related deaths and one thousand deaths caused by falling down the stairs.

''Doctors fear GP privatisation''

Of course the BMA are against anything that might disturb the cosy relationship they have whereby GP's get handsome pay rises every year* in exchange for not doing much more work.

The gimmick is that GP's surgeries are privately-owned businesses anyway!

* If the figures are to be believed, average GP income has risen from £56,000 in 2001 to £110,000 in 2007.