Adam Smith Institute

The anti-smoking group ASH is claiming that “Treating smokers costs the NHS in England £2.7bn a year, compared with £1.7bn a decade ago”. As such, they have policy suggestions to nudge, embarrass and generally slap smokers about the face until they wield to the unquestionable god-given will of those that would rather you didn’t.

However, that £2.7bn is not the whole picture, as smokers pay in excess of £9bn per year in taxes. Thus, instead of deriding the cigarette lover for using NHS resources, we should all gather round and thank them wholeheartedly for ploughing £6.3bn per year for the running of the state. So next time you are walking down the street and you hear the wheezing cough of a 40-a-day man, doff your metaphorical hat and thank him for helping the sick of this country.

In fact, in recognition the great work that smokers do, I suggest that we have a national smoking day in which we celebrate these great state benefactors. Perhaps our rulers will be kind enough to open up the doors of the once populated pubs of this country, allowing smokers to partake of that quaint pastime of smoking a cigarette while drinking a pint.

If not, I fear rebellion. The smokers of this country could demand a tax rebate of around £700 every year, and why not? If such a situation arises, may I suggest the government takes the much criticized ID Card scheme and transforms them into smokers loyalty cards to be accredited at newsagents and supermarkets with every purchase. At the end of the year these points could be turned into cash.

Alternatively, the government and ASH could simply leave the good smokers of this country alone.
 

The NHS is aiming to recruit a major new supplier of body parts and blood. Namely: our children. Schools Secretary Ed Balls is looking to indoctrinate educate school children in the benefits of organ and blood donation. Current benefits include cups of tea and loss of life, and an over bearing sense of self-worth with which you can bore your friends to death with.

Due to current shortages in the market of donors, the government can find no effective way of harvesting the 8,000 organs that are currently needed. This is despite there already being 15.7 million people registered.

What is most alarming about the incorporation of this into the curriculum is the subtle way that the government's attempt to nationalize our bodies is exposed by the 'lax' comments of John Dunford, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders who said donation was a "crucial issue" that "must be addressed in schools" followed by: "I think it's good to encourage young people to become donors. I hope they'll encourage their parents to do the same."

And there we have it: the inescapable establishment of the Spies (the youth organization from 1984). Children are to become the mouthpieces of the state, to further pressure adults to act in the ways and forms the government requires. If the government had an iota of intelligence, they allow the financial compensation for people donating either body parts or body content (undertaken in only a minority of incidents). But alas they don’t. It seems that the government brain cell has been donated. I pity the recipient.

I spent another depressing evening this week among the deckchair-shufflers as RMS National Health Service sails gracefully towards the iceberg of our ageing population.

It was billed as a chance to meet some of the regulators, like Baroness (Barbara) Young, who's heading up the new Care Quality Commission, and fellow Scot Bill Moyes of Monitor, the NHS Trust regulator.

We were under the Chatham House rule, so I can't tell you what was said. But since nothing was said, that's no problem. I've rarely heard so many platitudes in a single evening. However, I'm sure the good Baroness wouldn't mind me reporting that she began her talk by explaining that she wanted the Care Quality Commission to be 'The People's Regulator'. I missed quite a bit of what followed because I had to leave to throw up.

The CQC, as we must learn to call it, has been given the task of bringing all health and social care, public and private, under the same regulatory umbrella. It replaces quangos that were set up under this government, which is rather an astonishing (and expensive) u- turn. Not so much the 'Not Invented Here' syndrome as the 'Nutty Invention Here' syndrome. The watchdog's 'Initial Manifesto' says it will be 'open, transparent and accountable...tough and fair...guided by care users...' Er, I feel sick again.

I'm afraid that Lady B has an impossible job in seeking to regulate the whole of health and social care. Just as the National Health Service has an impossible job in trying to deliver it. The NHS is too big to manage, and it's too big to control.

We don't need a Shoe Quality Commission to regulate the quality of our shoes. Customer choice and competition do the job perfectly well – and systematically, remorselessly and constantly, through every decision that every buyer of shoes makes. Bad shoemakers get driven out because people who buy bad shoes demand their money back and tell all their friends not to buy that brand. It's probably just as well. A Shoe Quality Commission would probably end up compiling a 7,000-page Shoe Quality Manual detailing rules for everything from the length of the laces to the thickness of each nail. It wouldn't do customers any good at all. Far better if we scrapped the state healthcare monopoly and used the real decisions of millions of healthcare customers to drive up quality. That would be far more effective than leaving it to a bunch of quango-crats on index-linked pensions.