Late last month, Nick Hogan was sentenced to six months in prison.
He was jailed for being either unwilling or unable to pay the combined fines and court costs resulting from his decision, as a pub landlord, to allow people the choice of whether or not to smoke on his premises.
To be absolutely clear, Hogan was not jailed because he allowed people to smoke in his pub; he was jailed because he refused, for whatever reason, to pay the fines and costs imposed on him as a result.
Despite there being no direct link between his decision and the sentence, can the incarceration of an apparently otherwise law-abiding small businessman for six months really have been the intended outcome of our rulers when they passed the 2006 Health Act? I suspect that the possibility did in fact occur to some and was happily accepted as a small price to pay for taking such a massive step forward in normalising their social engineering project. After all, if they could get away with such an enormous, unfair and unreasonable act, what on earth would they not be able to impose on us in the future?
Despite my admiration for Mr Hogan’s stand, refusing to pay fines imposed by a court (however unpleasant the legislation involved) isn’t something a democracy can encourage. In a democracy we have other means of getting things changed when we don’t like them don’t we? By, for example, voting for the opposition at the next general election.
Yes of course, that will be the opposition whose local candidate recently sent me an email stating that the Conservatives had no plans to revisit the 2006 Health Act were they to form the next Government. I can hear Roger Daltry in my ear as if he were sitting next to me.
In the latest Government statistics (2004), the average sentence for assaulting a police officer was 2.9 months. Work it out yourselves, it won’t take too much effort.
If, after digesting the imbalance, you want to make a donation to pay Mr Hogan’s fines and get him released, you can by going here.
Tags: bans, Conservatives, crime, smoking
