Across the pond

Due to my pre-occupation with moving house I have neglected to blog recently about Britain’s ban on smoking which took effect on the first of July. Not only the laws that have been passed by national government but the activities of all the descendants of Cromwell’s Roundheads, who wanted to ban dancing, drinking and any form of indulgence which human beings used to induce merriment. Who want to stop peoplen letting their hair down and enjoying themselves, without bossy persons telling them that they cannot do what they want to do, because it is morally wrong, or that it causes harm to other people, or that it will harm them. So in the current fashion, although suicide is no longer a criminal offence, smokers are being told that they do not have the freedom to choose their own death sentance.  Local councils are jumping on to the fashionable band wagon to introduce their own laws, fining people for stubbing out cigarettes on the pavement and trying to stop people from eating and smoking in the open air.

Even the most fervent scientific advocate of the anti-smoking laws  would not dare to argue that anyone is at any risk at all from passive smoking in the open air. Yet the anti-smoking fashion has been so totally adopted by the influential classes, that there is no consistent protest, except from the tobacco lobby, funded by the manufacturers. Which I do not want to join up with.

There are still millions of British people, mostly the poor and the uneducated, who get get some pleasure from smoking.  They are being prevented from doing it anywhere, except in their own homes. Not in pubs, not in clubs, not even in the open air if councils get their way. And the zealots want to bring in laws to stop them smoking in their own homes, on the grounds that they are putting their own children at risk via passive smoking.

For young people this might seem a sound argument. Brought up, as they have been, on the ground breaking research by Richard Doll on the adverse effects of smoking. For my generation, on the other hand, the current fashion is a classic example of bad science. It is a plain fact that pretty well everyone in Britain during the war was subject to passive smoking, in all sorts of unventilated environments; the smoke filled pubs, the smoke filled air raid shelters, the smoke filled working class homes. (When all the men smoked but only a few of the women. Today it is the reverse. The macho males who used to figure in the Marlboro ads, have all become addicted to going to the gym, it is their oppressed women folk who are stil smoking.)

But surprise, surprise the children of that generation mostly survived. Even though most of the males, myself included, actually inhaled the evil weed themselves, unlike today’s middle class males, many of whom only inhale tiny fragments of the smoke of others, and only then when they are in very small confined spaces.

The illogicality of the present targeting of nicotine is clear when you compare it to alcohol, which kills and damages a far greater number of people who are not addicted themselves. This is because alcohol releases the agressions and so every day we read in the national and the local newspapers, of people who have been killed or nastily battered by partners, or friends, hyped up by drink. By contrast smoking makes people more content temporarily and less likely to trash the house and its occupants.

I hope Britain will produce a 21st century Richard Doll to prove it, and help governments and councils to get their priorities right. Not to urge the banning of alcohol, but to encourage politicians to be guided by proven facts, rather than the fashions of the  times.

The prohibition legislation against alcohol in the US was one of the worst laws executed by this modern democracy. It was pushed through by a Puritan minority. But it did far more harm than good. It drove moderate smokers into the arms of the mafia. It encouraged the growth of crime, by criminalising something which should never have been criminalised.

So it is with smoking.

This blog was acutally provoked by a small incident in my own personal life. An invitation to dinner, by a friend who happened to be,  like me, a lifelong smoker. As the telephone conversation developed it transpired that this was an invitation to join her at a restaurant. So we had to decide which one. So I said it should be to one where you could smoke.

This produced shouts from my wife and eldest daughter, who told me that there were no restaurants left in the neighbourhood where you could smoke. The debate raged so fiercely that I agreed to call our friend back, after we had resolved this family altercation.

Once we were talking to each other, I was able to make my point. Whereas all restaurants in the land cannot allow smoking indoors, there is a wide choice of restaurants in our neighbourhood, where you can still smoke at tables in the open air, which are entirely suitable for a July evening. But my daughter thinks that smoking had been banned in the open air as well, so that you could not eat anywhere in a restaurant and smoke, even if the tables were in the open air, where the danger from passive smoking was totally non-existent.

None of us was quite sure, whether a law had been passed to this effect, either by the national government, or by Camden Council. So the decision was deferred until we discover the facts.

But I decided to post this blog now. Because the issues of principle are quite clear.

And the vexed issue of smoking is important to my other concerns. If the government of Gordon Brown is going to be different from that of Tony Blair, it will be because Brown likes to think out things for himself, rather than to follow the views of the spin doctors, who urge him to tack to the fashions of the times.

Is Brown going to cowtow to the views of middle England, urged on by The Sun and the Daily Mail? Or is he going to listen to the voices of reason and the results of good science?