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Was the Smoking Ban Right?

 

Polly Toynbee FOR, Madsen Pirie AGAINST

 

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For

When retired politicians look back gloomily on forty years of thankless struggle over long-forgotten policies and an eternity of pounding pavements to engage constituents who can hardly be bothered to vote, they are often overcome with a sense of futility. What was all the sound and fury for? 

 

The House of Lords is filled with the shadows of once great ministers whose names we struggle to remember as they shuffle along those august corridors. All politicians’ careers end badly, said Enoch Powell.

 

But there are exceptions. A handful of politicians in each generation can point to something achieved due to their personal efforts, pushing it forward. These stand-alone single issues fall into two categories: one gives people new freedoms from state interference – gay rights and abortion are 1960s examples. The other set of issues saves thousands of lives by imposing more state regulation on personal behaviour – Barbara Castle’s 70mph speed limit followed by seats belts and breathalysers. The smoking ban brought in a year ago is the latest good example.

Oddly, both kinds of issue have been strongly opposed by the right. Moral conservatives opposed any liberalising of personal morality laws, while the libertarian right shouted ‘nanny state’ at any interference in people’s right to kill themselves any way they choose (except, irrationally, by hard drugs).

 

When Patricia Hewitt looks back at her long life in politics, the smoking ban will be the one memorial to otherwise forgotten years. Long after her passing it will continue to save lives and improve everyone’s quality of life. Walk into any pub, bar or restaurant now and air is clear and welcoming. You no longer emerge with clothes and hair stinking of old tobacco smoke. Public places are pleasant. It seems extraordinary that trains, planes and buses were thick with smoke, as were cinemas and even theatres, with ashtrays on the seat in front. As most people don’t smoke, it seems amazing that they ever tolerated the filth and stink of other people’s habits.

 

I have smoked most of my life from the age of 16, struggling over and over again to give it up. I only succeeded ten years ago, encouraged by increasing social embarrassment. I couldn’t smoke at home where no-one else did, and certainly not in anyone else’s home, or in the office, except standing and shivering outside. Virtually no-one I knew still smoked and the withering puzzlement at such lack of will-power eventually won the day.

 

I feel a natural affinity with smokers – the social outcasts huddling in doorways on cold days, resolutely resisting the pressure to give up. But when asked, most smokers want to give. Most are not at all defiant. They are desperate addicts, ashamed of themselves, inconveniencing themselves and well aware of the risks to their health. It’s not death they should fear, but the grim spectacle of wards full of amputees whose veins have clogged, or the breathless emphysema wards.

 

Banning indoor smoking in public places was a big political risk. Would smokers rebel? The libertarian right warned of an uprising even by non-smokers at this nanny state dictatorship. The fear was that people would disobey and make the same monkey of the law we have seen with the fox hunting. But one year on, it is a law the country has taken to heart. No-one would dare light up in the wrong place – not for fear of the plod, but fear of the public. It has been an unexpectedly popular law.

 

After just one year, results look good. Professor Robert West of Cancer Research UK, monitoring its effects, says success in giving up smoking is soaring: half those who attend courses at NHS smoking cessation clinics used to succeed in quitting, but in the last year that figure has risen by an extra 23%. The incentive to give up is stronger – 70% of smokers want to quit and the ban helps them. In the general smoking population, 43% have tried to stop in the last year, some several times, a big increase. The phenomenal cost to the NHS of smoking (last measured ten years ago was £1.5bn in hospital admissions alone) will take years to fall. But the health and well-being of the nation will benefit – and every public building, every place of entertainment, drinking and eating has been transformed. The ban was won on a free vote in the Commons: no-one will ever seek to reverse it now.

 

Polly Toynbee

Against

 

As the anniversary of the smoking ban approaches, was the government right in its decision to ban smoking in enclosed public places?

 

The decision to ban smoking in what are called public places (but most of which are privately owned) was utterly misconceived.  It arose from disapproval of smoking but has had, damaging consequences upon those not involved.

 

Most anti arguments centre around 'passive' smoking, because the ban was supposed to protect non-smokers from the effects of second-hand smoke.  In fact those harmful effects were considerably over-stated; there are many common sources which pose much higher health risks-diesel fumes for example.

 

If this was genuinely the main consideration, it would have been relatively easy to specify the use of extractors and air purifiers.  It was not enough to deter the antis, however, which suggests that smokers themselves were the real target.  The measure was aimed at the roughly one in four who continue to smoke, and was designed to stop them.  The claim was made that most smokers want to give up anyway, and would appreciate the 'help,' though I have yet to meet one who takes that view.  For that matter, I have never met a cigar smoker who wanted to give up, yet cigars too were banned.

 

The anti-smoking group would not even allow separate rooms for smokers; they insisted on a total ban.  They presumably expected smokers to give in and stop smoking.  What smokers have done, of course, is to smoke more at home, and in the homes of friends.  A survey in Scotland, which has had the ban since 2006, found higher levels of toxins in the blood of children of smokers, caused by an increase in smoking at home by their parents.  Those supporting the ban obviously did not foresee or intend this consequence.

 

Pubs and restaurants would enjoy a boom in trade as those previously deterred by smoke would now flood to them in record numbers, we were told.  It has not happened.  The smokers go there much less, and have not been replaced by non-smokers.  Sky News reported in March that 1409 pubs closed last year, compared with 216 in 2006 and 102 in 2005.  The report says that the current rate of closure is nearly four a day, with urban pubs hardest hit because many of them lack the space to provide outdoor smoking areas.  Restaurants have also been hit.  They survive on the numbers of diners they can attract, and even a small percentage drop in demand can push them over the margins into non-viability.  Many of them cannot afford to lose the smokers and remain profitable.

 

Arguing this is justified by the health improvements the ban will bring as smokers give up is not one that impresses me.  There are many things people could stop doing to improve their health which is their choice.  We might think it advisable to warn them of the risks attendant upon certain activities, but the choice of whether to continue with them should be a personal one.

 

I am also un-impressed by the argument that we have a right to stop people smoking because of the costs they impose on the NHS.  We do not give people a choice of whether to join the NHS; they are forced into it.  To use that as the excuse to remove more of their freedoms is a pernicious argument. 

 

Furthermore, it commits the fallacy of the runaway train.  If the costs to the NHS justify the ban, the same case can be made against other harmful activities.  Certain sports carry health risks – mountaineering, for example.  Does our compulsory NHS give us the right to ban them?  And even if the costs smokers might impose on us were counted, what about the benefits?  If they die earlier, we save more on pensions, and higher NHS costs incurred by the growing elderly population.

 

The smoking ban arose from an unfortunate desire some people have to make others live as they would have them live, rather than as they themselves would want to live.  The same desire has characterised destructive political ideologies and religious zealotry, and does not belong in a free society.  The smoking ban has significantly eroded that freedom.

 

Dr Madsen Pirie
President of the Adam Smith Institute