Nanny's got her eye on new mothers!

Travelling through Ulverston in Cumbria a few weeks ago, I noticed a number of giant signs proclaiming the presence of "Ulverston Breastfeeding Festival" and immediately thought there was something sinister about it. It wasn't that I have any problem with breastfeeding (I don't), but rather my Nanny State warning alarms were sounding - that this one week long festival wasn't the idea of some local mums who wanted to discuss breastfeeding tips but rather it was... a "public health" initiative.

Surprise surprise, when I get home and look the festival up on the internet, it is linked to a breastfeeding manifesto coalition which, I'm sure you really don't need me to tell you, is "in partnership with" (aka coordinated by) the EU, the WHO and all the usual unpleasant suspects, complete with pathetic "celebrity supporters" ie useful idiots.

This is a cross party issue that we feel simply cannot be ignored – it is about public health and breaking down inequalities - together we can lead to lasting change, for future generations. If you are an MP, MSP, AMs or Peer and would like to add your support please email us.

Right, as soon as you see, "cross party issue that we feel simply cannot be ignored," we're reminded of the fact democracy is dead and that the supranational busybodies who "know what's best" are going to push their will through whether the public likes it or not.

The manifesto itself has all the usual guilt tripping of how breastfeeding is "good for the environment," complete with the doublespeak of claims to "protect your baby," and utterly unsubtle implications that you are killing your baby if you choose formula milk.

Many mothers are unable to breastfeed for a variety of reasons and this campaign is set out to demonise those mothers who choose formula milk. In New York, hospitals are being forced to "control" formula milk, have it hidden and labelled as a drug, and there's been outrage. In the UK however, there has been no such uproar, even though we are getting worse - a number of hospitals have now banned formula milk, just as in America, yet where's the outcry? There are already talks about decreasing the availability of for formula milk, and no doubt the WHO and chums will pull the strings for this to be the case.

There was an excellent article in the print version of The Spectator a month or so ago, by a woman who chose to switch from breastfeeding to formula milk after a month. She described how she was harassed by the NHS, being sent numerous letters about how she's harming her baby by not breastfeeding, having several unannounced visits from NHS nurses demanding to see her breastfeeding equipment and seeing that it hadn't been used much, chastising with the usual, "DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING TO YOUR BABY?" - the demonisation is now also in full force.

What worries me is that a lot of feminists are also buying into this "you must breastfeed" chorus. This is presumably from the earth mother/hippy/left wing perspective to which most feminists adhere. Their political convictions are blinding them to the huge step back for women this all is. Middle class feminists can happily take time off to play African drum music to their babies while nursing them at their breasts, and can wax lyrical about the joys of being close to nature/"as nature intended"/free of capitalist interference etc but they don't recognise the realities. Apart from the fact that not all mothers can breastfeed, and the NHS has totally unrealistic targets claiming that 99% can (which is uses to justify its bullying) breastfeeding pretty much means you have to be attached to your child 100% of the time. While this may be fine for hippy earth mothers who have nothing better to do than bleat on about "spiritual bonding" anyway, this isn't realistic for the majority of lower income working mothers, and anyway since when was feminism about giving up one's entire life for a "think of the children" mantra.


The stigmatisation and crackdown on mothers' choice is building, and as usual the British public are too dim to see it.

EDIT: With regards to the stigmatisation, I forgot to include this link, where not breastfeeding is equated to AIDS

Formula is a little bit like AIDS. Nobody actually dies from AIDS; what happens is AIDS destroys your immune system and then you just die of anything and that's what happens with formula. It provides no antibodies. Every 30 seconds a baby dies from infections due to a lack of breastfeeding and the use of bottles, artificial milks, and other risky products. Every 30 seconds.

D-MYST - un-educating children and brainwashing hate

It's hard to forget a group as plainly awful as D-Myst, who I have previously done a Freedom of Information request on. Paula Keaveney, a Liberal Democrat ex councillor has also done a Freedom of Information request on them, looking into how much their ridiculous campaign to make films containing smoking 18 rated. They also aim to get smoking banned from being shown on television pre-watershed, and cite 'The Simpsons' as an example of television trying to recruit child smokers. Yeah, right.  Also, their claim that moving smoking to after watershed will stop children from seeing smoking is plainly nonsense. Under 18s don't go to bed at 9 o'clock, so if this was ever pushed through it would obviously just open the floodgates for, "Allowing smoking on television post-watershed is not good enough because x research shows children have a high level of exposure to television after 9pm," etc.

They claimed that 52% of young smokers in Liverpool took up the habit entirely due to seeing people smoking in films. This "science", which is here pretty much boils down to, "A higher percentage of children in the UK than the USA smoke, and films containing smoking are given more lenient ratings in the UK therefore clearly this means children are taking up smoking because of seeing more smoking in films." Plain rubbish, and embarrassing that so much taxpayers' money goes into funding crap that passes as "science".

Anyway, this was all a while ago, and in 2009 they went to campaign to the BBFC to try to get films with smoking in (including just by extras in the background) rated '18', and the BBFC were having nothing to do with it thank god.

I can report, however, that they still appear to be going strong (as my FOI request revealed), and as well as lobbying for smoking to only appear on television post-watershed, they seem to have adopted a new tactic of making out that smokers are hideous, "stink", are ugly etc, and of course continuing exaggerating and scaremongering by implying people can die from just smoking a single cigarette. This doesn't seem to be a tactic unique to Liverpool's tobacco control industry prats, and recently my young cousin of 7 who lives near Kettering kindly told me I'm going to die before I'm 18 if I don't put my cigarette out, to which I replied I'm 22.


Dying from sucking an unlit cigarette?


D-MYST are currently running a competition to win Alton Towers tickets by entering anti-smoking drawings.
A six year old child sends this picture into taxpayer funded "educational" group, D-MYST

Now as D-Myst are supposed to "educate" children on tobacco, one would expect them not to publish the picture, as it's absolutely ludicrous and no 10 year old has ever died from smoking, but instead it is published with the comment

We like your drawing Hannah! Thanks for sending it in!

This ties in nicely with a number of videos from the "Cut Films" campaign, which is closely linked to D-MYST and run by the usual suspects, but is of course operating under a different name (along with "Smoke and Mirrors", another laughable Liverpool PCT sockpuppet), which imply outright that a single cigarette can kill you. This particular video has the caption "This film is going to explain to you how easy it is to get hurt by having a cigarette. It will explain that just by being stressed it can make you go and get a cigarette to calm you down and what the consequences could be," and shows a boy dying from sucking on an unlit cigarette. The only heartening bit of it is that the child "actors" in it couldn't keep a straight face as it's such obvious nonsense yet the evil tobacco control witches will no doubt lap it up.

But of course for these people the ends justify the means and they have absolutely no interest in science or facts, just twisting and inventing to brainwash children. I have little faith in Britain's science establishments at the moment and can only see things getting worse. For the many layers of Common Purpose and faceless bureaucrats, reporting the "correct information" is paramount, and the "wrong" results are silenced and squashed. This is the un-Enlightenment. They don't care what effect this has on the future of science in general, and we are also seeing it in the "Climate Change" racket. Swivel-eyed, government financed control freaks are destroying science and indoctrinating children into anti-science.


Smokers Stink/are ugly/are a "joke"

Anti-smoking fascists were slightly slow at pushing this angle initially but now encouraging hate speech against smokers is in full force it seems for D-MYST and the other "Youth Action" (read: brainwashing) tobacco control groups.

Incidentally, this video produced for Cut Films is unintentionally the best advert for smoking I've seen in a long time -

The D-MYST competition has had ridiculous submissions like this, and children are even being taught that Audrey Hepburn was ugly and unattractive.

While they are calling celebrity smokers hideous, perhaps they would like to show us what a paragon of beauty looks like.

Andrea Crossfield, head of Tobacco Free Futures Liverpool

Arguing that plain packs "don't work" legitimises the busybodies

Arguments about plain packs "not working" and disputes about intellectual property of cigarette companies can be smugly shooed away by the authoritarians, as money (and partly due to said money, the public's trust) is in their hands. The intellectual property arguments certainly don't win hearts or minds, as they reinforce the idea that tobacco companies are faceless vultures desperate to maintain profits without actually engaging with the realities of the powers we are handing over to faceless, undemocratic supranational agencies. Arguing that there's no evidence that plain packs/hidden tobacco displays/smoking bans in public places will lead to fewer people taking up smoking or more people quitting smoking is playing into their hands as it accepts that this is necessarily a good thing, again without communicating the real danger - that we're stepping closer and closer to having our lives micro-managed and our personal choices removed. This line of attack is an own goal, because the authoritarians are, have and will produce reports "proving" anything - statistics will say anything when tortured enough, and the minute they produce these reports, the anti-authoritarians are defeated in the mind of the public. We must not defend liberty with such details and minutiae, we must stand up against the ideology of these authoritarians.

The idea that "tobacco is the only legally available consumer product which kills people when used entirely as intended," has been peddled continually to placate the general public to the idea of ever more stringent tobacco control. There is certainly a mindset that because using tobacco can lead to ill health effects, that fewer people using it can only be a good thing and this idea, fuelled by constant propaganda about "clean air", smoke "smelling bad", and graphic images of mouth cancer etc has resulted in a majority of people apparently reporting that they support the smoking ban, which has opened the floodgates to the public health fascists preparing to regulate many more aspects of our lives.

Alcohol and obesity are already now "being tackled" by the authoritarians. Thanks to "public health", authoritarians have almost completely killed the idea of liberties and individual responsibility. We are told that obesity, smoking rates and alcohol are the problems of societies rather than individuals. The authoritarian left appeals to socialists by highlighting the fact that many poor people are obese, thus packaging authoritarian policies as "breaking down inequalities", whilst the authoritarian right are also involved, pontificating that "eight million professionals are routinely drinking too much alcohol and endangering their health, even though they do not binge drink or get drunk." The latter claim is based on people drinking more than the government's recommended intake of alcohol each week, which is ridiculously arbitrary. Such arbitrary guidelines are subject to ever more draconian reductions, as "experts" are now claiming that cutting alcohol intake to barely quarter a pint of lager a day will "save 4,900 lives a year." It is hardly hyperbole to speculate that many people are now addicted to escalating nannying and prohibition. We are now constantly bombarded by the media with information on what will supposedly "save lives", but is denying ourselves any pleasure and living a model "healthy life" really living? Especially when any alternative lifestyle choice is increasingly being demonised and legislated against?

I am in favour of people having honest, balanced information about the health risks of obesity, smoking, alcohol (and the list is ever growing - women who bottle-feed seem to next in nanny's sight to be demonised and have their right to choose removed) but we must not continue to allow, and encourage, nannying tyrants to further tighten the screws on our freedom by giving them taxpayers' money to invent ever more ludicrous "reports" and draw up ever more authoritarian policies. With things like plain packaging, we must fight the entire culture rather than the particulars, or we are handing them absolute victory.