What article 13 will mean .
https://youtu.be/NcnFQnQE9Ws
Yepp. State controls are and have been slowly creeping in.
Banning advertising for certain foods because people can't limit themselves from cramming down burgers, restricting gambling because a minority of people can't resist gambling their houses away, speed limiters for cars because we cannot just cannot trust people to not drive lime Lewis Hamilton, a sugar tax to reduce the sugar we consume because we are too stupid to read labels (oh nothing to do with raising more tax by the way...oh no!), Gove's plan to make wood burning stoves illegal.....
I found this on the internet:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-nanny-state-2017
It says we are second only to Finland for nanny statism (if that is indeed a word)!
For a right leaning fella, you're getting more liberal by the day
. Ok. From the flip side, cigarettes were all the rage in the 50's. It took a huge campaign to turn that around and I dare say the tobacco industry accused the world of nannyism.... If these turn out to be positives, is that wrong? In my personal opinion, who is actually getting rich off the crap they're feeding us? Government or million pound industry, and if the latter, shouldn't government just be regulating that rather than the consumer? I get the small minority argument, but sugar/obesity related illness is ONE of the biggest killers. Sometimes regulation is a necessary evil.
Ah the necessary evil argument arises!

I've always been very wary of that particular one. Usually when it is used it is to introduce something that bans or forbids. Its a necessary evil to no platform Peter Tatchell because he might upset a few people at our University for example.
I do however take your point well made. As you have heard me drone on over the years (shockingly been on this board and its predecessors since 2002...17 years gulp) I run a construction company. So I can use the example of Asbestos, which is banned, as an example of a good ban because it kills. Why is it a good ban? Because it is almost impossible to see or detect. Why? Because there was no labeling of it in materials (now legally you have to retro label it). Why? Because no one knew what it did to you until relatively recently. Why? Because to remove it you need to really know what you are doing and put in controls, ie be an expert and be licensed. Why? Because if it does enter your lungs there is medically little that can be done anyway.
I would agree with you that smoking also passes a number of those criteria. However many that they are trying to ban do not.
My issue is, take gambling for example, that you DO know what the result will be as you see your bank account empty and you are selling your wife's jewellery, there is so much information on it and its financial and mental effects you cannot miss it.
Anyway you called me a right leaning fella! Thanks I like that!
But I don't get why not being happy that things are being banned is "liberal"

?? Hating state intervention is what we righties have tattooed on our left gonads, if indeed I liked tattoos which I don't (sorry Pol!!!!

) and wanted one on my left gonad.....which I definitely don't!