Scotland to pay people £12.50 a week to stop smoking

I was taken aback this morning whilst eating my Coco Pops when BBC Breakfast ran a piece about smoking in Scotland. For those who didn't see it, they are paying people £12.50 a week to give up smoking.

Yes, that's right, the Scottish Socialist Semi-Republic, or SSSR as it is cheerfully known, is to actually pay people to give up smoking because...um...er...hang on, because...um. It costs money?

Oh yeah, that's the argument by the Scots and indeed by the BBC, who failed in every way to simply ask them why it costs money. The claim put forward by the medical chap was that it costs the Scottish NHS £400 million a year or some such rubbish, it's something that fucks me right off.

At no point, ever, does anyone point out the tax that is pumped into this fucking country by smokers. If you want a fact it is actually £8.2 billion a year. There is no way on earth that smokers drain the NHS to the tune of that figure, in fact it's about £5 billion. The people who say that some sort of premium should be paid by smokers because of the 'drain' are fucking pricks. Look it up, do some fucking research and then shut the fuck up.

The numbers are plain and simple, yet are never, ever mentioned. Ever. Smokers do pay a premium, it's called the £4.45 of tax on every £5.85 pack of fags. The interesting thing here is the tax, I shall explain.

People moan about the tax on fags, fair enough, but the percentage of the price that is made of tax hasn't changed for twenty years ormore, but at the same time the number of people smoking has halved from 99 billion sticks a year in 1990 to 47 billion in 2007. Hand rolling has also dropped, although duty free consumption is estimated to have gone up.

So consumption down, price up, tax percentage stable. The point being that despite people giving up as the government claims to want, it's tax revenue is going down...unless they force the price up. They are now getting the same amount of revenue from a smaller and smaller pool of people, relatively speaking.

And now they want to pay people to stop smoking. This is just fucking stupid. The guy being interviewed was, surprise sur-fucking-prise, recently unemployed and therefore on welfare. So he has no money for fags and I would suggest the benefit of not buying fags he can't afford and being boosted to the tune of twelve notes a week has him dancing round the fucking kitchen fucking cunting table.

But it continues, oh yeah, it gets better! What do we all know as a basic fact about Scotland? They are the fattest fuckers in the world. Indeed it costs the Scottish NHS hundreds of millions a year. But what's this? It's that £12.50 in the form of, incredibly, a voucher card. To only be spent on fucking food.

Yup. You fucking heard me. They are giving people money every week to stop smoking, because it 'costs' the NHS and instead buy food, with world record breaking levels of obesity. Is it that the Scots love their grub so bloody much that they will give up anything for a kebab? Maybe we should offer them £50 a week in burgers if they get off their fucking arses and go to fucking work.

They have no control of what they spend it on, except it has to be food. Pies are food. Chips are food. Frozen 'bab is food, sort of. There is nothing stopping these fat, unemployed, chain smoking fucks spending £12.50 of my fucking money on fifteen pies a week. Each. A four strong tar soaked family in Dundee can now buy a whole sixty fucking pies a week. Result! Back of the fucking net that one.

You would have thought, would you not, that they would have limited it to fruit and veg in order to kill two birds with one taxpayer funded stone.

It baffles me the war on smoking, it really does. I am one of those kinda smokers, I light up at the pub a couple of times a week and if I'm pissed I'll decimate a pack of twenty. But I'm not that bothered about it. Yet I have no issue with others smoking because they pay their tax, they make their choices and they know the risks.

It doesn't cost the state anything, in fact they gain from it and for many it is the little joyful habit they have; they don't really go out or drink or windsurf, but they smoke.

One bit might of jumped out at you, 'Scottish NHS'. Because under devolution the Scots have control over their own NHS, hence the absurdity of a resulting two tier system. So who is paying the £12.50? It isn't clear to be honest, I can't find it anyway. The point being that if the Scottish NHS are looking to get smokers off of their budget and it is the UK welfare state paying the £12.50, then the Scottish taxpayer is only paying a proportion of the £12.50. The rest being paid by everyone else.

It's a win win of state control. Paying morons to give up something they can't afford to do anyway and bribing them with food despite being chronically obese. There is a strange obsession with getting people to stop smoking, yet they won't cain the price up to £20 a pack, or ban it, or smash the industry with tax, they just inch it up and collect the readies.

I thought the UK was a fucking joke at the moment, but Scotland has gone off the deep end. Paying fat fucks tiny taxed food to stop them smoking highly taxed fags to solve a resources drain, you couldn't make it up. Except they have.