The Horrors of Non-Smoking

Ben Wildsmith

When smoking was banned in pubs, back in 2007, TV news was full of triumphant non-smokers.

Had it not been for the ‘disgusting habit’, we were assured, they would have been thronging into licensed premises for years. Only the threat of smoke clinging to their clothes and hair had previously deterred these would-be Bacchanalian revellers from unleashing their joie de vivre on the social scene.

It would be boomtime for landlords now that the oppressed masses of pink-lunged fake-coughers felt able to venture into their establishments to sample a pickled egg and watch the racing.

The subsequent tsunami of pub closures cast doubt on the truthfulness of these interviewees who, it turned out, weren’t the big-spending party animals they had made out.

In the few spare hours they had after the gym, Botox sessions, arranging a buy-to-let mortgage, and complaining to the council, they might use the local pub as an ad hoc creche for a couple of hours, while nicotine-withdrawing pensioners cowered in corners, but that was about it.

On such decisions, cultures pass into history.

Censorious

I don’t smoke any more so don’t have a personal stake in this issue. Neither, however, did quitting cause me to become a censorious, uptight policeman of other people’s preferences.

Labour’s suggestion this week that smoking be banned outside pubs and in their gardens was predictably cheered on by the Welsh Government.

‘What’s that, there’s something we’ve forgotten to stop people from doing? Action stations, fire up the Baroness!’

You might think that herding smokers outside regardless of the weather had tipped the scales away sufficiently from those who persist with their legal habit. Unexpectedly, it created a new social milieu.

Even non-smokers knew that the laughter filtering in from the doorway on a freezing January night would never be replicated by the Turkey-teethed normies in the warm.

Out there were the devil-may-care outlaws who had seen a million rotting lungs on their fag packets but continued to face down mortality with a chuckle.

Minty-fresh

An accommodation had been reached between the two groups. Smokers took the hit on weather for most of the year, and on the few sunny days we get, they’d be joined by the minty-fresh brigade and their delightful children.

The children! We’ll be hearing a lot about them in the debate around this issue. The scenario is that when weather allows, a responsible pub-going parent takes their child into the garden only to be confronted by a gang of carcinogen toting menaces who prize their druggie pleasure over the health of an innocent youngster.

Well, here is a lesson in life, isn’t it? The options are varied. You could find an area of the garden without smokers, you could go somewhere else, you could explain your position and ask if the smokers would give you more space, you could suggest to the landlord that he create a non-smoking area outside so that everybody is catered for.

Dispute resolution is an admirable skill for your child to witness during his time in the adult environs of a public house.

If none of that works, then roar off in your diesel-belching 4×4 to demand your fellow patrons be criminalised, but maybe give it a whirl, no?

Of course not, because we have decided that manners and consideration can only be encouraged by legislation. If something is objectionable it should be illegal, to save us the bother of objecting.

I don’t need to be reminded of the horrors of smoking. I nursed my best friend through three months of hell before he passed away from lung cancer and it’s one of those memories that I can only peek at from behind the curtain of dissociation.

Don’t smoke, seriously don’t.

Wheezers

People do, though, and it ruins their evening if they can’t. I don’t want that gaggle of dark-humoured wheezers banished from the little social space they have left.

This government has abandoned every tenet of socialism – wealth redistribution, public investment, ethical foreign policy – yet persists with a statist attitude to our behaviour that would be recognisable in China.

We are on our own when it comes to housing, employment, finance, and increasing chunks of our healthcare.

An intervention like this is justifiable when the state takes responsibility for the wider wellbeing of society. Divorced from that, it’s overreaching and intrusive.

Labour needs to learn that they can’t be Maggie when they are shutting our libraries, then Mao when it suits them.