Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for square pegs, round holes, and Simon peg.

Someday, maybe someday we'll have on Simon pegg.

I can't make that promise, but I'm working towards it. I'm your host

Andrew Heepin and I am recording this episode in Scotland. I don't know where I'll be by the time it drops, maybe Texas,

WONOS, Antarctica, 1962, there's no way for me to know.

And there's certainly no way for you to know, so good luck stocking me.

But at the moment, I'm in Scotland.

And at this time in the United Kingdom, the land is ruled by the iron fist of a British night named

Hirsch Starmer, a labor politician who looks like an English kind of doughy version of Clark

Kent.

I don't know a lot about him. He's new.

At the moment, his government is considering a public smoking ban.

Now smoking was banned in pubs several years ago I think in 2007, but this band would go a step further.

It would extend to small parks, areas outside of nightclubs and sport venues,

with a stated goal of eventually entirely phasing

out cigarettes. Starmer said, my starting point on this is to remind everybody that over 80,000 people lose their lives every year because of smoking.

That is a preventable death.

It's a huge button on the National Health Service, and of course it's a button on the taxpayer.

I have no idea if he sounds anything like that. I've never heard him speak.

I'm not even confident that was a British accent. I think that

might have. It started out of touch Birmingham and then it went Australian there.

I apologize to everybody listening for that, but we're getting away from my main point here, which is that of government

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