More than three out of four licensees would support the introduction of a separate, well-ventilated smoking room in pubs.
Three years after the ban came into effect, a Morning Advertiser poll of 156 licensees found 64% believed it has been terrible or bad for business, with 76% saying a separate smoking room should be allowed.I think that's enough evidence, don't you? The people who said they'd go to pubs if they were less smoky just didn't turn up. And these are the pubs that are left, never mind all those that closed because of the effect of the ban.
Jeremy Clarkson has been criticised for claiming he drove at 186mph on a public road, by a father whose son died when a speeding car crashed into his vehicle.
The BBC's Top Gear presenter, from Oxfordshire, told a festival audience in Wales he reached the speed while driving a Bugatti Veyron in London.
When asked about driving the supercar, Clarkson, who lives in Chipping Norton, said: "I got a great speeding ticket. I think it was 186 in the Limehouse Link.
A 'big budget' pornographic movie was shot in a NHS hospital when it hired out one of its wards to a film company, it emerged today.
The movie, which generated 'substantial income' for the hospital, was filmed in a fully-equipped - albeit closed - ward in the central London hospital, a Tory MP has revealed.
Speaking in the House of Commons on Monday, Penny Mordaunt, MP for Portsmouth North, said: 'When I was director of Kensington and Chelsea Council, I discovered that one of our local hospitals was hiring out one of its closed - but fully-equipped wards - to a film company to use as a film set.
'To add insult to injury, the movie was a pornographic one. Although I cannot claim to have seen the final picture - as I understand, these things are no longer claimable on parliamentary expenses - it was a big-budget affair and generated substantial income for the hospital.
But apart from cheering up a few of the in-patients, it cannot be said to be contributing to the objectives of the primary care trust (PCT).'
He will say that just locking people up without actively seeking to change them is "what you would expect of Victorian England" and notes that reoffending rates among the 60,000 prisoners given short sentences has reached 60% and rising.
"This does not surprise me. It is virtually impossible to do anything productive with offenders on short sentences. And many of them end up losing their jobs, their homes and their families during their short time inside," Clarke will say.The reason why it's as high as 60% is because we have a criminal justice system that filters out most of the easy cases. A lot of people never re-offend having been caught once. It's over half of all people. Some others get the message during community service orders. By the time it gets to jailing people, they've had 3 or 4 chances, so odds are that they're living a criminal lifestyle.
Trimdon Labour Club, where Tony Blair celebrated his three General Election victories, will shut next month, although the owners of the building will continue as a pub....
The smoking ban and the decline in the pulling power of live football as people install satellite TV in their own homes are other factors.
We're a (relatively) small country, and we play lots of other sportsThe population of England is around 50,000,000. The population of Germany is around 80,000,000. Even without the fact that it's bigger, consider all the sports where we do as well as Germany (or better). Germany are nowhere to be seen in rugby or cricket.
