Fussy non-smokers will rue the day…
With 40 pubs shutting down every week, the continued news of pub closures fills 99% of me with sadness, and 1% of me with an almost unbearable smugness. I am sad not simply because I enjoy going to the pub, but because as I explained in a previous post, pubs are a social and communal good. In our crowded cities, north European climate, and inhospitable and over-regulated streets, pubs represent a crucial source of public space. Why a tiny part of me is unbearably smug will become clear.
When the idea of a smoking ban was first broached I had yet to become addicted to the fine pleasure of tobacco, but nonetheless I was opposed to its implementation on grounds of civil liberties. Yet – as is becoming increasingly clear – I could just as easily have opposed it on the grounds of self-interest. Whenever the ban was discussed many people asserted their right to go to the pub of their choice without sitting in a smokey environment if they do not wish. In this post-fordist age, consumption is – more than ever – constructed as an individual act. People are no longer content with a black model-T. They want a car that is just right for them. By the same token if people go to the pub it is their right not to have their experience contaminated by somebody else’s unwanted habits.
Yet the thing is that going to the pub is, by its nature, an enormously collective form of consumption. Here in London you will pay about three times as much in the pub for your beer as you would in a supermarket. Now there are various reasons for that, but one of them is that you are paying – not unreasonably – to sit in a well maintained space smack-bang in the middle of where lots of cool shit is going on. Now obviously nobody could shoulder this burden alone. Instead pubs rely on lots of people effectively paying for that collective space to be maintained. Whether you like it or not, when you choose to enjoy a pub you are enterring into a relationship with other people using it.
And when you enter into a relationship with people you have to compromise. You might have to listen to loud music which you do not like but other people do. By the same time you cannot expect the environment to be smokeless just because you feel like drinking in pub x and want to drink in pub x without encountering any smoke. Non-smokers , concieving of their pub outings to be purely individual forms of consumption felt justified in relying on the law to ensure that their pub outings were exactly as they wished. Perhaps when their local shuts down – and pub-shutdowns increased by approximately 100% after the smoking ban – they will be pushed to conceive of pubs and pub-drinking differently.
Related posts:
- Why we SHOULD be concerned about the decline of Pubs
- It’s time to reclaim the streets – from the paranoid and hypersensitive
- On the philosophy of New Year
Reader Comments
There is a another argument against a total ban (and the associated closures).
While I’m broadly in favour of public health legislation (including in respect of MMR, for example)where the interests of the very many can be seen to outweigh in importance the predilections of the few (I know call me an old authoritarian),
I worry that on this occasion there are unintended negative consequences that are not being sufficiently taken into account.
Specifically, research from the US shows: “that smoking bans in public places can perversely increase the exposure of non-smokers to tobacco smoke by displacing smokers to private places where they contaminate non smokers, and in particular young children.”
Further the report goes on to suggest that, overall: “higher taxes are an efficient way to decrease exposure to tobacco smoke, especially in those most exposed”
See http://www.aeaweb.org/annual_mtg_papers/2007/0106_1015_0601.pdf for the full paper.
I’m not claiming that this is watertight evidence of a need for a more flexible approach to the smoking ban, just for example by charging venues that want to allow smoking for (informed adults) and then ringfencing that money for some of the new ‘air exchange’ technologies available in industry but not used in commercial premises.
However, I would like to see more rigorous evaluation of the real impact, positive and otherwise, of the ban before we all put our feet up and say ‘job done’.
Agree with your last point. The thing about the smoking tax is that, I am sure you know, it is seriously regressive. The poorest 20 per cent of households spend on average 3.4 per cent of their income on it.
I actually agree on the question of the MMR. Because we are talking about microbes here which spread through population, anybody who is not vaccinated is necessarily a threat to others (inclding vaccinated non-responders).
Smoking is a bit different in the sense that people are endangered when they choose to go to a place of entertainment at which others smoke. The issue is that before the smoking ban people did not have the choice to go to a non smoking pub. In capi talk, the market was failing. There are many pluralistic ways they could have got around it. Though i suspect that the motivation behind the smoking ban was as much to do with first hand smoke as second hand smoke.The health secretary opened the debate by saying how many people it would ‘help’ to quit. In other words it was about making it so difficult to be a mker that people stop.
Your argument about collective space could just as easily be made in the opposite direction – that smokers must compromise and refrain from indulging their habit in order to participate in the collective space. This isn’t about mere fussiness, second hand smoke is about serious chronic health damage and sometimes even acute unpleasantness – I’ve been in places that were so smoky that it stung the eyes. Smoking effectively excludes people from enjoying the use of the collective social spaces you talk about.
I’d be interested in hearing precisely what measures you think could have been taken to ensure that smoking and non-smoking pubs were reliably available to all. I don’t support the use of the ban to sneakily force smokers to stop, but there needed to be some way to ensure that the rest of us got a fair deal too.
Ben, although I can see your point, I don’t necessarily see that it is a particular landlord’s problem to ensure that you get a “fair deal”. At the end of the day, yes pubs are “public houses” (i.e. they are open to the public and sell alcohol) but they are still privately owned, either by a company or by an individual, and those owners should have the right to determine the ethos and atmosphere of the place, just as you should have the right to do that in your own home. There is nothing to stop a landlord making his pub non-smoking if he feels it will attract more customers, in the same way that a landlord may choose to have two separate rooms, a smoking and a non-smoking room. The smoking ban eliminates these freedoms, and that is the problem that I have with it.
I have already stated on a previous comment that I feel the nanny state of the current new labour government is hugely detrimental to the culture of Great Britain. We now live in an age of blame, an age where everyone has the right to be protected from any danger or possible incident, and if they for one second believe they have been left to cope alone, they have a case for negligence, whether it be against an employer, a shop manager or a parent. The whole country has become ludicrous, and the smoking ban is yet another example of an issue which has become prevalent and where the government has decided to act on behalf of the population instead of letting us make up our own minds. I am all for providing for those who have little and I am generally quite left-wing in my values, but I also believe in taking responsibility and learning how the world works yourself. Under this government, that is simply impossible. For starters, if you want to try and get past their veil of reality and experience the real world, there is a 12-page risk assessment to fill out!
As a preliminary critique of this argument I would like to point out that I believe you are making a rather dubious assumption that a smoking ban is leading to a decline in pubs.
I have put some vague stts in my final paragraph – but the rate at which pubs were shutting pretty much doubled after the smoking ban was put into place.
Reuben, Paddy is right. It’s more likely that pubs are closing as a result of ridiculous prices coupled with the fact that many people these days do not have jobs or are worried they may lose theirs.
While to Dan I would say there is something which would get in the way of a landlord banning smoking in their pub pre-smoking ban, the fact that many of their drinkers would go elsewhere in a market where smoking is permitted in almost all establishments.
First, I apologise in advance for not reading everything in detail. I am an avid (but not heavy) smoker. I enjoy it and have no intention of stopping. Yet, smoking is actually a pretty anti-social habit, if among people who don’t smoke, and I’ve always been cognizant of this. I think the test of whose freedom should be forfeited in a clash, ought to be the ease with which one party can mitigate the encroachment on their freedom by the other. By that test, non-smokers clearly ought to have priority.
This brings me back to a point I raised in another post about how social conventions /are/ relevant to the total amount of effective freedom in a society (i.e. the stuff which, though there’s no law forbidding it, you can realistically get away with). In a society in which less and less people find smoking agreeable, and in which it is accepted (though it may be exaggerated in some studies) beyond peradventure that smoking has adverse effects on our health, it’s just not at all morally clear that smokers should have complete freedom to smoke in public spaces.
Joe I will need to check the stats, but I am pretty sure that the accelaration in pub closures began pretty soon after the ban was implemented – i.e. prior to the recession.
Regarding your second point, surely if there was a substantial and serious desire amongst non-smokers to drink in smokefree environments, then landlords would be able to smokefree with the confidence that the loss of smoking customers would be made up for by an increase in non-smokers.
Needless to say such pubs may well lose their vibe, simply because the non-smoking population tends to be so boring relative to the smoking populatin. Seriously I started smoking at my second year at uni, but prior to that, tended to always hang out outside the college bar (which had already banned smoking), because that was where all the interesting conversation was.
Tom Fletcher,
I have my concerns about the overregulation of private life and public spaces, and I think that the Labour Gvt (and Labour in general) are much too gung ho about that sort of thing. The ’suing culture’ however, appears to me to be a different creature, though it grazes on the same pastures as the beast that is the nanny state.
The litigious culture, I’d say, is a judicial phenomenon rather than a government one. I say this because negligence as the ‘ordinary man’s action’ only really began in earnest in the ’60s and after, reached a peak in the late ’80s and now the courts are once again trying to control the unruly growth of the action of negligence. Simply put, I’m in some doubt that there is a truly virulent litigious culture in the UK.
If there is a problem, then I’d say it’s not caused by the government so much as a) the growth of high street law firms b) the growth in the number of lawyers looking for ‘easy’ business c) the courts being more willing than ever before to shift the costs of dangerous activities to institutions and away from individuals. In addition the Human Rights Act (broadly a good thing IMO), has meant that public bodies are more vulnerable than they ever have been, to private lawsuits which can ultimately be settled in Strasbourg. I think part of the nanny-ing by public bodies is a defence mechanism against lawsuits, rather than patriarchal philosophies.
The action of negligence, in spite of the inconvenience it causes, actually seems to me to be a great boon for ordinary people. It shifts the costs of dangerous activities to the ‘deep pockets’ that can more easily afford the cost of things going wrong or putting people in harm’s way, and makes social and economic activities bear their own costs. I’d also add that negligence and other civil actions tend to make society less risk averse, and shifts those risks more efficiently than rugged individualism would.
It’s easy to assume people are taking the piss when they sue over apparently trivial stuff. People tend to see it as a punishment for the errant party. I see it more as mitigatig the cost of accidents that can be traced to an avoidable cause. The courts, I think, have reasonably effective mechanisms for limiting trivial litigation. Though its excessive growth is undesirable, I think the action of negligence is a pretty neat thing.
“simply because the non-smoking population tends to be so boring relative to the smoking populatin.”
I find that surprisngly true!