From John Reid, the UK’s health minister, of all people. Check out this report from the Guardian:

“Mr Reid said that the middle classes were obsessed with giving instruction to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and that smoking was not one of the worst problems facing poorer people.

“I just do not think the worst problem on our sink estates by any means is smoking, but it is an obsession of the learned middle class,” he said. “What enjoyment does a 21-year-old single mother of three living in a council sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they have is to have a cigarette.”

He’s right on any number of counts, although, as we have discovered in billionaire Nurse Bloomberg’s New York City, it’s not just the “middle classes” who are obsessed with bossing about the plebs. The war on tobacco has long since ceased to have any connection with public health (everyone knows that it’s a dangerous pastime). What it’s mainly about these days is public penitence (the drama of the ‘reformed’ smoker), power (people like pushing other people around) and an expression of social superiority.

Two other gems from this report: the first was the criticism from the thugs over at Action on Smoking and Health that Reid was somehow being “patronizing”. To hear that claim from an organization dedicated to the proposition that adults are incapable of taking decisions for themselves is, quite frankly, quite remarkable. The second comes from the reliably pointless British Medical Association (it’s sort of like the AMA but, somehow, even worse) gibbering on about the ‘damage’ caused by passive smoking. I always thought that doctors were meant to dispense accurate information. The BMA clearly does not think that rule applies to its own pronouncements. It’s time to scrap it.