There aren’t that many places left where a smoker can smoke, but outside a pub is one of them. Fewer people than before congregate in a pub garden for a companionable cigarette, according to one friend who keeps a close eye on the pub scene. But for those who do, it’s a chance for the fun people to hang about together — often huddled round an outdoor heater.
Now we learn that the Government plans to ban this simple pleasure. Ditto at football stadiums, outside night clubs, on restaurant terraces and in small parks. To the obvious question, where will you actually be able to smoke, the answer is in large parks or your own home. So, if you want to stand in the middle of Hyde Park or possibly the Cairngorms to light a fag, that may be OK, at least for a while.
But I wouldn’t bet on the freedom to smoke in your home lasting. Not once busy, bossy Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, who is one of the players behind this latest clampdown, realises that some homes are occupied by small children who must at all costs be protected from their parents’ fags. It’s all part of the Government’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill which promises not only to implement Rishi Sunak’s illiberal and unConservative ban on a progressively larger tranche of the population being free to buy cigarettes, but tries to make life more miserable for those who can.
The obvious casualties of this are pubs whose very existence is threatened by the alarming rise in teetotalism on the part of the young and prohibitive taxes on drink, and now can’t even offer their outdoor gardens for smokers. As my pub-frequenting friend observes, this group is diminishing in number but it’s still a valuable cohort which helps keep pubs going.
You don’t pollute the entire universe when you smoke in public; no one else is harmed by it
The Department for Business has already warned ministers about the damage this will do to the hospitality trade, but that’s cutting no ice. And so this Bill is of a piece with this Government’s discernible direction of travel, which is in practice to stymie growth. Some of this takes the form of disastrous new employment laws which allow workers to demand flexible working from the off and some from the increased taxation on the way this autumn. Now this Bill promises to cudgel nascent recovery in pubs over the head.
May I say that my interest in this is almost wholly disinterested? I am a rubbish smoker. I do try occasionally to smoke but I never manage it properly. I intend to try those nice slim cigars you get in tins, for I like the smell of cigars; it’s the basis of evocative fragrances like Tom Ford’s Tobacco Oud.
But the reason I will join the smokers on the barricades, debilitated as they are with graveyard coughs, is on the grounds of the freedom of the citizen to take his own pleasures, even if they are self-destructive pleasures.
I draw the line at drugs, on the basis that they are genuinely dangerous. Even cannabis is a public risk since in its modern forms it can trigger psychotic outbreaks in schizophrenics. Heroin or crack cannot, unlike fags, be taken in moderation. As a society we probably wouldn’t legalise tobacco smoking if it were being introduced now — James I took a dim view of pipes when they first appeared — but it is a familiar vice, unlike vaping.
And unlike vaping it can have a certain chic; George Orwell is simply impossible to envisage without his cigarette, nor Evelyn Waugh without his cigar. Ditto David Hockney and his rollups. And of course it is Hockney who has waged, single-handedly, the most dogged campaign against the new Puritanism, making the excellent point that, just as smoking has declined, prescriptions for antidepressants have gone up. “I smoke for my mental health”, he says. He is 87 and still painting.
Even if you don’t care for smoking, this ban is symptomatic of a worrying trend. I remember the arguments about banning indoor smoking and they were premised on the principle that while smokers can wreck their own lungs, they had no right to impose their beastly habit on other people. It was on the grounds of the harm from passive smoking that the ban was introduced.
But this ban on outdoor smoking can’t be justified on that basis. You don’t pollute the entire universe when you light a cigarette outdoors. Your smoking in a pub garden does not prevent others breathing fresh air. One friend of mine claims he is disturbed when he’s eating outdoors by smokers nearby, but I feel he’s being triggered merely by the spectacle of smoking. When God made fresh air, he made plenty of it — enough not to be tainted by smokers in outdoor places. Nope. This is pure nannyism on the part of Chris Whitty et al. And if they come for the smokers, can the drinkers be far behind?
This Government has an authoritarian streak. It’s time to stub it out.
