[Closed] off to see Mark Thomas tonight, need your help!

You know when you're walking/riding along and you can smell the waft of food on a bbq nearby? There should be a law to allow me to take food off it if I can smell it.

Whoops, now with working links...

People not allowed to walk more than 2 abreast on pavements. Must move to the side if stopping to chat/gawk/be distracted by bright colours

Corn Exchange, Newbury 08/05/2009 OCD sufferers should be employed as cleaners in the NHS, to get rid of MRSA.

Anecdotes/gossip in the health service suggests that mild-to-moderate OCD sufferers have been keeping operating theatres super-clean for many years already. 🙂 However OCD is a changing and wily illness and it is not always quite as simple as channeling all the obsessions and compulsions into a clean hospital.

I would like all alcohol and cigarette tax over and above the level of normal VAT put directly into health promotion, cessation/alcoholism services and good old fashioned healthcare. I am struggling a bit with my 'million to billion' ratio but it looks as though the revenue in tax and excise on booze and fags is not that far off the total running costs of the whole NHS.

So much of this is spent on other things that you can't help but wonder how difficult the governmants' books would be to balance if we all quit smoking and drinking overnight.

Caravans only allowed on the road between the hours of midnight and 5AM.

Anybody actually know how much the govt make in taxes from smoking/ drinking? Is it more than they then pay out via the NHS for smoking/ drink related treatment?

Introduce a 99p coin.

Gutted that I couldn't get to his show up here. Have a good one.

MicArms - Member

Anybody actually know how much the govt make in taxes from smoking/ drinking? Is it more than they then pay out via the NHS for smoking/ drink related treatment?

A quick tootle round google says the government makes around the £10b mark for fags and about the same for booze. Obviously the figure vary slightly according to who you ask. Expenditure on public health stuff in 2007 (as opposed to people's private/BUPA etc) was about 82 billion. I cannot imagine that a) alcohol and smoking related illnesses count for a quarter of the health service's business. b)that the government put £20b of alcohol and tobacco excise duty into health.

so yes, probably many times more. Again, the statistics will be nice and vague and the industries concerned will try and say the government is unfairly taxing their wares and produce damning statistics to support this, whereas the government will try and bamboozle the reader with meaningless figures about how thay put so many percent more than last year. Very difficult to find out what money comes from where though, and given how little it probably is it would be foolish of the government to let us know exacly how little....

"We the undersigned propose that comedians make up their own material, as we've paid good money to see them be funny, not the audience"

Anybody actually know how much the govt make in taxes from smoking/ drinking? Is it more than they then pay out via the NHS for smoking/ drink related treatment?

They make more than it costs to treat the results of it on the NHS. I reckon the level of tax is finely calculated to bring in a positive return whilst allowing Governments to claim they are doing their bit to reduce smoking and drinking by making it more expensive.

Northwind, Brilliant!! I'll stick all the entries down though..

Artix might be a crap name, but Mark Thomas is performing in Bromsgrove ... who'd a thought that would ever happen.

Policies - bring back the death penalty....for those convicted of bike theft.

How about the right to a citizens arrest and compulsory hand amputation for people who pick chilled items up in supermarkets and on deciding they don't really want them, instead of putting them back where they took them, insist on ruining them by putting them in the freezer, or on an non refrigerated store.

And compulsory holiday flights to the north pole and a fortnight in an ice hotel, naked for those imbeciles who have to hold open the glass fronted freezers often for several minutes at a time, to decide what they want to buy, rather than, er looking through the glass, or removing one time for inspection and shutting the door.

...oh and of course scrapping all vat on bikes and bike parts? Oh and train and bus fares?
(it would be easy to dodge and hard to police cycling clothes or bags/packs as every man and his dog would start producing 'cycling specific' gear to undercut their competitors...)