I was disgusted to see on television the first of what I assume to be a series of anti-smoking ads.

As an American, these ads are all too familiar to me. They are the first salvo in the campaign to remove our personal freedoms.

The "nannies" behind this are dedicated to foisting their belief system on you. They do not care about your children or pub employees or the burden on the NHS.

They do care about making you live your life the way they want you to.

Do you believe, if smoking in pubs is outlawed, the nannies will stop there? In the States, they are now trying to make it illegal for people to smoke in their own cars or even homes.

The methods they use are simple but effective: Lies and guilt. This new ad, depicting young children with cigarette smoke drifting out of their mouths, graphically combines these two methods into one.

The big lie concerns Second Hand Smoke (SHS), the basis of the nannies' argument. SHS came out of a 1993 Environmental Protection Agency report which claimed 3,000 deaths per year in the US were due to SHS. The nannies were so keen on this study that the results were issued before it was completed.

Then, to match the figures already quoted for the report, two-thirds of the data had to be ignored. Then the margin of error was doubled and doubled again.

In 1998, Federal judge William Osteen declared the study void after extensively commenting on the shoddy way it was conducted. But the nannies repeated "3,000 deaths per year" so often that people began to accept it as truth. Inspired by their success, they upped it to 50,000, then 60,000.

I can understand Americans falling for this as they are so gullible but I hoped people across the pond were sophisticated enough to dismiss it for what it is.

Since moving to Britain a year ago, I have been enjoying a life free from the interference of busybodies.

I hope Britain finds the wherewithal to stand up against this new tyranny and not bow meekly to it as the US is doing.

-Michael Harling, Horsham