MembersNEWNew in the Members’ Room: James Panton gives talks defending freedom in London and in Edinburgh ; Suzy Dean has a blog on youth engagement; Josie Appleton will be debating booze bans at Sussex University; Michele Ledda's petition against banning of a poem from the school curriculum has more than 100 signatures; Dolan Cummings writes on how anti-smokers are stubbing out liberty; Josie Appleton is discussing cities at a conference in Moscow; Manick Govinda has produced a new London exhibition. New on the Vetting Blog: Tenants turfed out for refusing to fill in forms; CRB checking tooth fairy; Children’s authors under suspicion; Flats halted because balconies have ‘view of school’. Read on… |
The Last Gasp
Thought for the Day on smoking, by Giles Fraser, 2 September 2004 Smoking allowed, but not compulsory. |
The Manifesto Club supports:Historians campaigning against 'memory laws'... 'Enlightenment is humanity's emergence from self-imposed immaturity. Dare to know! Have courage to use your own understanding!' Immanuel Kant 'What characterises man is his extreme abundance of imagination; therefore, that man is a fantastic animal and that universal history is the gigantic, continuous and insistent effort to go, little by little, putting some order into the crazy fantasy.' José Ortega y Gasset |
Our first Club Night, The Last Gasp, was on Tuesday 26 June, in the week before smoking is banned in clubs, bars, cafes and other public places across England. For the first part of the evening we will had a bar-room debate, to ask what the smoking ban means for freedom; then we talked and drank freely into the night. The discussion was kick-started by barrister Barbara Hewson, who is involved in the first legal challenge to the smoking ban, and Dolan Cummings, co-founder of the Manifesto Club and editorial director at the Institute of Ideas. 