It was to the perceived detriment of a jittery few that Kier Starmer confirmed his government’s desire to ban outdoor smoking for pubs, bars and restaurants last Thursday as part of a broader plan to create a smoke-free generation. I mention the perceived detriment of a jittery few because, until consulting the gurgled maelstrom of online news, it hadn’t occurred to this dotty, straight-laced Joseph that anybody could possibly summon one worthy critique of such legislation. To this humble scrivener, the right of sitting MPs to prevent ghastly, nose-wrinkling fumes in beer gardens and cancerous waftings on bistro rooftops seemed breezily self-evident in our most shouty age. How ill-footed me and my docile viewpoint would soon be made to look.!
Through smote the terrifying brigade of libertarians, rolling my nanny-state smugness into one of their smokable sticks. In they came twenty by twenty, packets of dissenters worming through my sash window, their incredulity oranging my untouched sniffers. According to them, a smoking ban is an affront to English civil liberties, a further Cromwellian encroachment of Starmer and his Marxified politburo and a stigmatising of…wait for it…an already wronged minority. The howling didn’t stop there either; commercial experts were trucked in to tell us that warning off smokers from their premises would result in harmful deficits for the hospitality industry.
Government lobbyists who wanted this ban imposed couldn’t even bifurcate the “nays” by ordinary demographic slicers. The old, safe, feather-spitting pensionry were united alongside woeful, young students holibobbing about Camden who in turn were united alongside currency-swappers, staff-sackers, and rent-hikers grown portly in content middle age. All were one against Starmerian interventionism which, in a baffling attempt to slow the 80,000 yearly deaths from smoking-related malpractice, was requisitioning freedom once more.
Smellable in the above section is a satirical unease at the way this announcement has been boastingly traduced by those whose style it seems to cramp, whose bonnet it seems to enbee, whose habits it seems to forsake. As the detractors to this as yet only floated legislation were hooping J.S.Mill into their desperate spatter, they were forgetting that cigarettes are - but for kebab meat and Sally Rooney novels - the very worst perishable objects one could contemplate infusing. There are proverbially long lists informing us of their primary, secondary, and tertiary effects and it is not elitist or prim to suggest that these lit hyphens of death should be governmentally stubbed out. So let us examine the arguments against smoking bans which come most readily to mind, and send them twirling into wet plant pots everywhere.
Between needful drags, they’ll begin by outlining the social utility of cigarette smoking. Their heads tilt and their eyes mellow with soft remembrance as they recall a trip to the smoking area where they found a friend for life. Head-wobblers, pigeon-kickers, husband-divorcers and the ferociously unemployed intermingle in refurbished back alleys and nightclub huts. I don’t doubt that unbreakable friendships have been hollered out above double yellow lines and urinating personai-non-grata, but this small positive is a glinting carbuncle in a pooed tube of indefensibility. Have they failed to realise that communication in a quiet area whilst wanged off one’s compass on drink was possible before and remains so now? Are they seriously going to pretend that every smoker (shaky Jean in the residential home and sneaky Jaiden on the school playground to name but a few exceptions) are only in it for the ‘social benefits’ rather than subservience or rebelliousness?
After another induction of brain-waning smoke, they cosset themselves with kingly indignation. Though some neurologists would refute this, they claim that smoking is a perfectly normal avocation among many and should therefore be brought into consideration like any other activity. Unfortunately, since their use is directly attributable to the deaths of millions, cigarettes cannot be accommodated for with the same smiling grace that governments use when facing other strange pastimes.
Thirdly comes a shallow and short lived attempt to quote from the philosophical canon. The right to volitionally harm oneself is supposedly one which others should tolerate. Even the otherwise saintly radio host James O’Brien has succumbed to this line, saying on his LBC show recently that “our freedom to enjoy things that are bad for us because we like them…is the most crucial freedom of all.” He eventually saw sense in his allotted 90 minute airtime, but here we see the most persuasive argument against the bans successfully cutting through the net. This theory of unboundable personal liberty supposes that every person is sequestered neatly in their own cryogenic tomb, when we know that even the most misanthropic are in fact gregarious, impactful nodes all sloshing about in towns and cities. A great many things we do; driving electrified motor cars, bowling a hard cricket ball down the 22 yards to an opponent’s crease, holstering a firearm, or foghorning half-baked ideas and inept platitudes from a megaphone, all have veritable consequences for those in our immediate and wider human hutches.
Advocates for drug legalisation engage in similar casuistry when saying that “I should be allowed to self-stupefy in peace.” No man is an island however. Why does a drug-user’s grinning freedom to snort cocaine trump their parents’ and friends’ right to live with and know a sane and reasonable person? Why does, therefore, a cigarette smoker’s right to brazenly spark up trump others’ rights to own functional lungs and occupy a space free of foul carcinogens? In these fanciful absolutists we locate a very bizarre childishness. Like the copiously-armed in America and the horrid inciters of the Southport riots only a month ago, they are convinced that their freedoms have few repercussions. They see imprisonment after the call for arson and the control of their home bazooka barracks as totalitarian madness. They are of course wrong.
The argument that pubs and restaurants would lose revenue as a result of an outside ban was used by the same addicts and financially compromised campaigners when bans on indoor smoking were considered and implemented in the hazy century just gone. These establishments will cope just fine with cleaner areas and punters less encumbered with ash.
I did have to allow myself a jubilant chuckle when the debauched masteads of The Telegraph and The Spectator put their names above articles condemning Starmer and adducing positives (yes positives) of this addling self-immolation. These chancers, opportunists and jocose falsifiers of observable reality were, after all, key to the realisation of the Brexit project. And what could be more immolating than a formerly brilliant country ratifying economic sanctions on itself?
My arguments are not born of ignorance folks. At university I too was frogmarched into Big Tobacco’s lair and soon had myself a ten-a-day habit. Quick estimates conducted a moment ago tell me that I have probably spent between £1200 and £1500 of my meagre stipend on the rotters! Like those shrouded in their own expensive miasma, I have leant against club doors, fabricating filial credentials to a gullible bouncer, wordlessly enthralling a blonde with McQueenian flair, sucking from the teet of a nicotine dispenser, as ‘DnB’ numbed the masses into an over-sated delirium. Make no mistake, the arguments against an outside smoking ban are non-starters peddled by addicts who, for all their freedom-loving hucksterism, cannot countenance an hour without their glowing master’s sustenance. If we accept that smoking is foreshortening lives and infirming healthy citizens, then it makes sense to face it with unshakable vehemence. Those of us cheering the ban are not extensions of a domineering superstate, nor are we dull do-gooders, we are realists untethering people from the most expensive and biologically venomous burden ever to dominate the billboards.
I do not think forcing people will really help them overcome addiction by night; obligatory talks with doctors/psychologist will, or obligatory viewing of addiction material. This ban that already happen probably pleases only the non-smokers who are disgusted by the smoke