All these smoking bans have left me fuming - Telegraph
In my late twenties, if work was getting me down, I would resort to a pharmacological intervention. I don’t mean taking “happy pills”: instead, I would book a day off, buy myself a copy of The Daily Telegraph and a packet of cigarettes, and take refuge in The Rose of Denmark.
The Rose was a comfortable but slightly down-at-heel pub in Bow: gezellig, in the beautiful Dutch word. There I would drink a pint of cold beer, read the paper, and smoke a few fags. I was quite aware that smoking was a damaging activity. There’s nothing particularly beneficial about beer, either – but the combination of nicotine, alcohol and the sense engendered by a quiet East End pub that nothing much changes, so it’s not worth worrying about the future, would combine to restore my equanimity in short order.
How far away those harmless pleasures seem now. While I’m sure the British Medical Association is happy that I now go swimming when I’m stressed, rather than smoke, it’s only because The Rose of Denmark – along with every other pub in Bow that I remember – is gone, done in by the determination of the last government to make smoking in pubs a crime. No matter that nearly everyone in the Rose was a smoker. No matter that it was a private establishment, and that no one who lived in terror of passive smoking was forced to go inside it. No matter. It’s gone.
Few political acts have made me so angry, since few others seemed so obviously driven by malice: how dare working-class people take respite from daily life by smoking in pubs! If it was, as claimed, the hypothetical risk of passive smoking that kept the anti-smoking obsessives from pubs, tell me – why didn’t they flock to the likes of the Rose of Denmark once its interior had been made suitably pristine for their fussy little lungs? No: the anti-smoking lobby saw poor people enjoying themselves in a manner deemed not sufficiently healthy, and banned it.
And now, the campaigners are back: some people, they’ve noticed, have been smoking in their own cars. And other people might be in the car with them! So we need a new law, and a new set of criminals to prosecute – because, honestly, there’s nothing more important for either the political class or the medical establishment to be thinking about just now, right?
“Every year in England,” said Dr Vivienne Nathanson, the BMA’s director of professional activities, “there are over 80,000 deaths that are caused by smoking. This figure increases to a shocking six million worldwide.” Let’s leave aside Dr Nathanson’s bizarre job description (demanding that new crimes be added to the statute book is a “professional activity” for a physician?) as well as her wide-eyed wonder at the fact that, since more people live outside the UK than within it, then more people die abroad, too.
Instead, we could play the game in the way that she undoubtedly would like, and ask her: yes, but how many of those smoking-related deaths are due to smoking in cars? But we shouldn’t. Because if we do, she’ll demand taxpayers’ money to fund a bit of pseudo-scientific guff that will “prove” her point entirely. At this point, liberal-Left politicians will decide that “the evidence” for a change in the law is so overwhelming that essentially, only those morally equivalent to child-murderers could possibly be opposed to it.
You might wonder how – were the ban to be introduced – it could be policed. Well, Oxford City Council has the answer to that. It plans to force CCTV into every taxi in the city, in order to record every conversation between driver and passenger. (I pity the official who had to review my conversations: it’s bad enough that the poor cabbie has to listen to me wittering on, without council officers having to listen in as well.)
Why not take it one step further, and insist on CCTV in every vehicle? Indeed, why stop there? (I doubt the BMA will.) Why not put cameras into every house, so that functionaries from the BMA’s Professional Activities Division can monitor our every move? You could even make it two-way, so that Dr Nathanson’s acolytes can bark out instructions every time some foolish little person tries to have a cigarette, or pours a second glass of wine.
Dr Nathanson added that “the current UK Government prefers voluntary measures, or 'nudging’, to bring about public health change, but this stance has been shown to fail time and time again”. In other words: “stupid people won’t do what I tell them”. Good. But don’t worry, Dr Nathanson. Even if I owned a car, your cardiovascular health would never be put at risk – because I’d never let you in it. I don’t think I could bear to be passively exposed to your joyless moral superiority.
All these smoking bans have left me fuming
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