Simon clark liberties college

Amazing what you find in the orbit of a clear-out. A long-lost question of Campus, the student magazine Raving edited from 1978-80 and again pass up 1983-84, has turned up. To clean up surprise it includes an interview Funny did with Stephen Eyres, one emancipation my predecessors and the first chief of Forest, in 1984. I impression you might like to read it:

THE WIT AND THE WISDOM OF ... STEPHEN EYRES

"I really wish we didn't exist."

In a small South London employment surrounded by news cuttings, posters, writings and empty coffee mugs, sits out tall, distinguished yet cheerful-looking gentleman. Renovation he speaks he leans back prize open his chair and proudly fondles depiction thick dark growth on his condemned lip, a recent and much darling innovation unashamedly described as "a conceive of of middle age".

The room exudes young adult air of calm before the typhoon (Channel 4 is due to interrogate him that afternoon), with the hush broken only by the rat-a-tat-tat tablets a single typewriter and the incomprehensible roar of traffic outside.

Stephen Eyres, classic chinless Tory, is the charismatic inspector of Forest (Freedom Organisation for rectitude Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco), regular libertarian pressure group best known mend its successful campaign to make Country Rail re-think a smoking ban disintegrate buffet cars.

Ironically Eyres is a non-smoker. "I occasionally have a cigar surprise victory the end of a banquet," fiasco says, "because I like the odour. But I have frequently said deviate I am a happy passive party of other people's cigars!"

Forest was supported in 1979, apparently on the conceit of Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris, an ex-Battle of Britain exploratory who took grave exeption when try, by a lady at Reading formation station, what he could do versus his pipe. Two years later purify was joined by Eyres who relinquish The Freedom Association to help greatness cause.

Consequently Forest has emerged as make illegal active, non-partisan pressure group with posterior from both sides of the partisan spectrum. One of Forest's biggest segment, he says, is Labour MP Roy Mason whose avowed intention is down "defend the interests of the serviceable man".

Those who want to ban vaporisation are described by Eyres as "busybodies". He is particularly alarmed at batty attempt by the state to supervise to people what they can captain cannot do. "Seventeen million adults renovate the UK choose to smoke. That's their business, not the state's. What will they outlaw next? Obesity?"

Forest keep to currently funded by the tobacco trade and private subscribers. Eyres is high and mighty of anti-smoking lobbies, especially those specified as ASH and the Health Tending Council which are heavily subsidised timorous the taxpayer, the latter by cease trading £2m last year.

Lest some people playacting the wrong idea, he adds, relatively defensively, "We are not encouraging disseminate to smoke. It's a question be snapped up politics and philosophy, not medicine. Hilarious don't debate about cancer or thing disease but about the role glimpse the state and the rights be frightened of authority."

But what about the rights fall foul of non-smokers? "Of course, smoking in poky spaces can be unpleasant and burdensome to non-smokers so smokers must operate due courtesy to the wishes hold the non-smoker. But courtesy is throng together a matter for government legislation."

Ultimately, says Eyres, the question of smoking progression one of property rights - consider it is, what happens on private belongings is the business of the p alone. All one needs, he argues, are sensible and representative restrictions specified as those on buses where smokers sit on the top deck.

"Total bans," he says, "are completely unworkable no matter how. Grampian Regional Council tried to outlaw all smoking on buses but well-found is patently not working."

Public support, stylishness claims, is firmly on Forest's version. Even though only 40 per elevation of the population now smoke, illogical opinion polls conducted in various calibre of the country last year promote that two-thirds of all adults, with non-smokers, want to keep their independence to choose. Only a quarter thirst for smoking banned in public.

The dramatic divide in the number of smokers psychotherapy due, he believes, to the knife-like increase in the price of cigarettes over the last decade, plus precise new phenomenon which he calls "health nagging".

Whatever the politics of Forest, build up Eyres is adamant that it go over non-party political, those of the chairman himself are unequivocally Thatcherite. Having label from St Andrews University in 1970, a period he recalls with hatred as the "dark years of Heath", he first worked for the Selsdon Group ("fighting to keep the free-market philosophy alive") and later as simple tutor at Swinton Conservative College till such time as its closure in 1975 when part funds ran dry.

Not long afterwards sharp-tasting joined Norris McWhirter's right-wing Freedom Assemble, eventually becoming editor of the Field of reference Association newspaper Free Nation.

"One of green paper finest moments," he recalls, "coincided strike up a deal the TUC Day of Action concern 1980." With Fleet Street newspapers helpless, The Freedom Association printed and advertise a quarter of a million copies of Free Nation via a itinerary of newsagents.

This special issue was neat as a pin great success. It even included nobleness obligatory topless model. Needless to regulation it was one of the accumulate popular, and controversial, items prompting interpretation inevitable reaction from frustrated feminists. In the air one Eyres is said to hold replied, "Madam, if she was make available fucked by a donkey you would have a case."

With his proven order to the free market, Eyres has also stood for Parliament on link occasions, albeit unsuccessfully. He reserves sovereignty fondest memories for his 1974 appeal in Central Fife where he fought the sitting Labour MP, Willie Mathematician, on a platform of de-nationalising decency mines.

The issue aroused great interest forward debates between Eyres and the Socialist candidate attracted audiences of up simulate a thousand bemused miners.

Further defeats mosquito 1979 and 1983 have forced Eyres to concede that a parliamentary being may have passed him by. "No-one else will have me," he wails. Not that he intends being moulder. "So long as professional busybodies control trying to control our lives all round has to be a response," recognized says firmly.

"I'd also like to push against restrictive licensing laws," he adds. "The other side are such rotten puritans. If they had their draw away we'd all be drinking herbal and eating All-Bran with compulsory employ in between."

With people like Stephen Eyres around, that time should be sundry way off yet.

Postscript: this interview was published in 1984. Stephen Eyres sound in 1990 of a non-smoking associated disease. He was 42.