The anti-smoking ban campaign group, Save our Pubs and Clubs are holding a competition to find the pub with the best smoking area. I can think of a few, but the ones I like best are, I believe, a little in breach of the law so perhaps, in their interests I will hold my peace.

Pubs that have managed to carry on creating a hospitable environment for smokers are, in a certain sense, accomodating to the ban, but they are also resisting it. This is because the ban was not really about passive smoking but, rather about making smoking a more uncomfortable experience so as to push people into stopping.

One thing you will find these days is that politicians of all stripes will profess their desire to support pubs. Doing so is good politics. It’s a nod to British tradition, and to (understandable) nostalgia for a more communitarian epoch. But we are entitled to ask what kinds of pubs they wish to support. Judged by their policy, the political class seem to approve of pubs only insofar as they don’t let anyone smoke, don’t get too noisy and don’t encourage too much drinking. In other words, pubs transmogrified into beer serving starbucks outlets are what they are willing to support. And this is hardly the kind of environnent that will induce people to pay a premium over the prices in ASDA – and so its no surprise that for all the verbal publoving from our politicians, the industry is still in decline. If we want to save our pubs and clubs then we cannot simulltaneously dragoon them into being part of the public health set up.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

There is disquiet amongst the staff at Carstairs Hospital – a secure mental facility – over plans to ban inpatients from smoking anywhere, even outdoors.

Carstairs State Hospital houses a wide group of patients. As the tabloids like to remind us, it houses murderers and rapists. Yet also incarcerated within it’s gates are people who have been convicted of no crime. As its website states, patients can be sent there under the mental health act, and can be admitted from NHS hospitals as well as prisons and courts.

Locking up unconvicted individuals is, in itself, morally problematic. Yet most would accept that in very  extreme cases such measures might be justified to prevent those who are very mentally unwell  doing serious damage to themselves or others. It is, however, absolutely indefensible for liberties to be gratuitously taken away from mental patients. It is unacceptable to remove from mental patients those freedoms that enjoyed by ordinary citizens, when doing so cannot be justified on grounds of safety, security or treatment.

Front line Staff at the facility –  those who will actually be responsible for enforcing a cold turkey regime on the patients – are particularly anxious about the smoking ban.  One is quoted in the Daily Record as saying :

“It’s all very well for people who have little or no contact with patients to make decisions in a boardroom as they sip coffee and eat biscuits. But they are putting those of us on the frontline at greater risk of harm.”

I cannot imagine that many smokers would be surprised by these sentiments. If somebody locked me up and told me that I couldn’t have a cigarette for the forseeable future, I cannot imagine that my reaction would be particularly pacific.

But the fundamental issue here is one of civil liberties. Mental patients are citizens too. And at the very least, they ought to enjoy the dignity of making decisions about whether or not they smoke.

Image: flickr/Valentin.Ottone

As you may or may not have noticed, smoking is an issue fairly close to the hearts of some among The Third Estate’s bloggers. And as today brings news of proposals for even stricter restrictions on smoking in public places, you could be forgiven for expecting another angry denunciation of government policy on the issue. But, just this once, that’s not what you’re going to get. Now, admittedly as a (near-)non-smoker, I’m probably a bit less likely to view the right to smoke as a fundamental human freedom in any case, but take a close look at what the Department of Health is actually suggesting:

This next push offers a radical vision for a smokefree future. It sets out several key commitments:

• Stopping young people being recruited as smokers by cracking down on cheap illicit cigarettes. Immediate investment in extra overseas officers will stop 200 million cigarettes entering the UK every year.
• Every smoker will be able to get help from the NHS to suit them if they want to give up – new types of support will be available at times and in places that suit smokers.
• The Government will carefully consider the case for plain packaging.
• Stopping the sale of tobacco from vending machines – a significant source of tobacco for young people.

So, let’s consider these proposals one by one. A crackdown on cigarette smuggling? More tax money for the Treasury’s all-too-empty coffers as more cigarettes are bought legitimately? Sounds OK to me. Some smokers – well, OK, most smokers who are aware of the issue – are undeniably quite pissed off that taxes on tobacco bring in considerably more money than the NHS spends on treating smoking-related diseases, but I don’t see that they have much reason to complain, particularly if they argue against restrictions on smoking on the grounds of personal liberty (as is commonplace on this blog). No one’s coercing smokers into buying tobacco products, so raising taxes on them isn’t authoritarian. Sure, most smokers are to some extent addicted (so perhaps they can’t exactly be said to be choosing to buy tobacco), but if they want to spend less money then they have the option of free smoking cessation help from the NHS – help which, according to the second bullet point above, is becoming better-funded and more widely available under the new proposals. There’s no compulsion involved.

Banning branded packaging – if indeed the government decides to do this – doesn’t seem much of an affront to liberty either. I fail to see how distinctive designs on different brands of tobacco products enhance the freedoms of those who are buying those products and as such likewise fail to see how banning said designs restricts their freedom. It certainly restricts the freedoms of the tobacco companies to influence consumers through marketing and branding, but surprisingly enough I don’t really give a shit about that.

Stopping the sale of tobacco from vending machines is, again, not something I can really bring myself to care about. Unless you think the UK’s ban on alcohol in vending machines is a gross violation of our fundamental liberties (or that there’s some fundamental difference in how alcohol and tobacco should be treated as controlled substances), I really don’t see that there’s a great deal to make a fuss about.

As for the final point, there seems little reason why a campaign to dissuade people from exposing children to secondhand smoke should be seen as controversial, and a prohibition on smoking in the entrances to buildings is barely an extension of the previous smoking ban. The principle – that non-smokers shouldn’t be exposed to high levels of secondhand smoke – is exactly the same. Walking through a large group of smokers clustered round a doorway is pretty comparable to walking past a group of smokers indoors, and obviously unavoidable if you want to go into the building outside which said smokers are standing. Whether the previous smoking ban was right or wrong is a question on which I’m agnostic, but this is hardly a tougher restriction.

In short, smokers’ rights advocates might do well to rein in their outrage. Whether the government is right to care so much about the harms of smoking is certainly debatable, but if it is trivial then attacking these proposals as part of a war on personal liberty seems a little lacking in perspective.

Rod Liddle: “It’s fucking outrageous that you can’t smoke in Auschwitz. I had to sneak round the back of the gas chambers for a crafty snout. Also, I wasn’t convinced by the newish Auschwitz Burger Bar and Grill.”

Captain Jean-Luc Picard:

OK I will admit it. The study I cited a few days ago – investigating the social costs of “passive non-smoking” – was not entirely factual. In fact you could go as far as to say that it did not exist and there is in fact no Professor Wyfman. What has however been recently released is a study into the trade in illicit tobacco, and particularly its effects on kids. It was found that 30% of young people had bought illicit tobacco, and alleged that ‘tab houses’ – informal premises at which illicit tobacco is sold – are creating the next generation of smokers. Unlike bona fide shops, it is impossible to impose an age limit on who illicit suppliers sell to.

If the analysis is correct, then this represents a spectacular policy failure by the New Labour government. The reason that so many Tab Houses exist is simple and obvious. Quite simply the taxes on smoking are obscene. Raising £7 billion pounds a year – most of which is paid by the poorest members of society – this particular sin tax creates a huge incentive for suppliers to enter the black market, which in turn makes tobacco easily available to kids of all ages.

It is high time the tobacco tax was repealed or at least substantially reduced. The 7 billion that it raises far exceeds the cost of smoking to the NHS. In fact, as some critiques of recent studies have illustrated, the actual financial burden of smoking on the NHS might be close to zero or indeed negative. Put simply, this is because everybody dies of something. People who die of lung cancer potentially save the NHS a huge amount of money by not getting older and dying of dementia. Yet even taking at face value some of the (well critiqued) highest estimates, the public purse still makes a substantial net gain from the smoking minority.

And this is wrong in so many ways. It is wrong because the tax on smokers is extremely regressive, with the poorest 20% of households spending 3.4 per cent of their income just paying the smoking tax. And it is wrong because tax should be a means of providing public services and redistributing income, not policing personal lifestyle choices. If the government want to punish people for smoking – and that’s what this is – they should have the bollocks and the democratic decency to put a law to that effect before parliament. Needless to say they would lose. And so they tack this piece of coercive social engineering onto a budget bill – a bill ostensibly concerned with raising money to fund the state.

And finally, even if, unlike me, you believe that it is the place of government to police people’s personal lifestyle choices, then the smoking tax is a completely ineffective way of doing so. Demand for tobacco is price inelastic – increases in price have very little effect on demand – which means that the smoking tax effectively fines people for their habits while doing nothing to change it.

Action on Smoking and Health have become something of a fixture in the discussion of public health. A group which seeks to ‘eliminate’ the harm cause by tobacco, they seem to have a talent for getting heard and getting listened to.

So I was more than a little concerned to find that as the budget approaches, ASH are pushing for another above-inflation increase in the smoking tax. First off, two points need to be made:

1) Most of us know that the smoking tax is regressive, but fewer realise quite how hard it hits the poorest people in society. In 2007 the poorest 20 per cent of households spent a whopping 3.4% of their income just paying tobacco tax.
2) Smokers more than pay for the cost to the NHS. By most estimates smoking costs the NHS £1.5 billion. Smoking tax raises £7 billion.

Nonetheless, ASH want to raise the tax further. Are these people going around with their eyes closed? Are they not aware that the poor are now bearing the brunt of the biggest crisis for decades? Have they not noticed that nearly 2,000,000 people are now trying to get by without work?

Interestingly they do, in their 2008 submission to the chancellor of the Exchequer, acknowledge that the smoking tax is ‘strongly regressive’. They say however that this dilemma can ‘be resolved by making the greatest possible efforts to motivate and assist smokers to quit.’ Put another way, their approach is this:

We want a comprehensive effort to push smokers into quitting. Those smokers who co-operate, and who adjust their lifestyle in the way we think they should will be fine. Those who persist in smoking can go to hell.

They note that public opinion favours a rise in tobacco tax. This is hardly surprising: the vast majority of people do not smoke, but nonetheless benefit from the tax smokers pay. It is hardly remarkable that a majority can be brought round to the idea of milking a minority.

Most shockingly, they seem to see this distortion of government finances as something to be happy about. Increasing the smoking tax, they say, ‘raises revenue for the Treasury – reducing the need for taxes on jobs and investment.’ In other words it is a bloody good thing that corporation tax and income tax – both of which fall primarily on the better off – can be reduced at the expense of a relatively worse off minority.