“If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”
Sir Winston Churchill

As he had promised, Mel Smith became the first performer at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival to openly defy Scotland’s draconian smoking ban yesterday.

The defiance was short-lived.

The comedian, who is playing Winston Churchill in the play Allegiance, ostentatiously lit and puffed on a cigar onstage while In full Winston Churchill costume at a photocall in Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms. He ignored calls from his producer not to light up and vented his fury at the Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Act of 2005, which came into force in March.

He suggested that the audience could be warned before the show: “A third of a Romeo y Julieta will be smoked during this performance. If you find that offensive, f*** off.”

That is the good news in the global war against the New Prohibition movement. I wish that I could simply stop there and allow you to bask in the warm glow of victory.

That is not how things ended, unfortunately.

More details from sources at BBC News, the Sunday Times, and other sources below the fold.

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British actor, comedian and director Mel Smith, set to portray Sir Winston Churchill at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, has raised two fingers firmly against Scotland’s ban of smoking onstage in dramatic performances.

As reported last month, Scotland’s draconian anti-smoking legislation makes it the only nation in the Western world where creativity and art must take a back-seat to political correctness and junk science. Sir Winston Churchill, so associated with cigar smoking that a size and shape of cigar was named after him, cannot be portrayed onstage in Scotland with a cigar in his hand.

Personally, I’d like to know which way Smith’s hand was facing at the time he made that gesture, and whether he was signalling victory or the Vicky.

I’m betting on the latter.

More from Anna Millar in Scotland after the jump.

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From Karin Goodwin at The Sunday Times, Scotland:

He may have saved the country from Nazi occupation but even Winston Churchill is not exempt from the tentacles of political correctness.

Because of the ban on smoking in public places, Britain’s greatest wartime prime minister will be without his trademark cigar when he is portrayed on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe festival later this year.

Mel Smith, the comedian and actor who will play him in a production of Allegiance, a play about a little-known meeting between Churchill and Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary, could be forced to use a plastic replacement.

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From Rich Perelman at Cigarcyclopedia:

Tim Luckhurst’s editorial on the debate in Britain’s House of Commons that appeared in the London Times last Tuesday is important and worth repeating, so here goes:

“As MPs choose today between partial or total bans on smoking in public places they must ask themselves whether lying to promote a cause is ever legitimate.

“The question is urgent because the claim that secondary smoking kills is alchemy, not science, and honest anti-smoking lobbyists know it. The theory that cigarette smoke kills non-smokers was dreamt up 30 years ago by anti-smoking activists; only after inventing it did they attempt to prove it.

“Dozens of peer-reviewed scientific studies have followed. All point to a compelling consensus that there is no casual link between passive smoking and fatal illness. One of the most comprehensive studies was published in the British Medical Journal in 2003. It concluded: ‘The results do not support a causal relationship between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related mortality.’

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