December 26, 2008

Coalition mayor smokes in bar, breaks own party’s law

Filed under: General,Health by Branko Collin @ 7:09 pm

Last Tuesday the mayor of Deurne in Noord Brabant was questioned by the city council about his smoking in a public bar. Since July of this year smoking has been banned in bars in the Netherlands. The ban has met with a lot of resistance, and many smokers openly defy the law. As far as I am aware this is the first time that a public official was caught red-handed breaking the anti-smoking law. A salient detail is that mayor Gerard Daandels of Deurne is a member of CDA, the Christian party that is in the vanguard of the Jihad against fun: it was CDA minister Klink that proposed the smoking ban.

Daandels response: “You can hold me responsible for everything in matters of enforcement, but not for this unenforceable measure. […] I went to three bars where people were smoking. If a hundred people are smoking, you no longer give an example by not smoking.”

The Department of Public Health commented: “Even mayors are bound by the law.”

Link: Brabants Dagblad. Via Jong Nieuws. Depiction of the Deurne coat of arms by Wikipedia user Tibor, distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

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