Smoking: one more freedom and a lot more votes lost

Today’s (18 Feb 06) Financial Times has an article (subscription required) headed ‘Burning resentment at smoking ban in Labour’s heartlands’:

If Labour wished to alienate supporters in its traditional heartlands, it is difficult to imagine a more effective way than presiding over a ban on smoking in working men’s clubs.  Tony Blair might be well advised to stay away from Trimdon Labour Club [working men’s club near his constituency home]. The one-time bedrock of grassroots support in his Sedgefield constituency, its members were outraged by Tuesday night’s vote to ban smoking. They had hoped that membership clubs would be excluded from the ban.

The article quotes a raft of lifelong Labour voters and members of the Northumberland Club and Institute Union as saying that they won’t vote Labour at the next election.  The manager of the Trimdon Labour Club, one of those who helped to secure the nomination as parliamentary Labour candidate for the young Tony Blair, says the ban will be a running sore as the election approaches.  "The Conservatives can gain advantage here, he warns, by talking about freedom of the individual."  

The 2005 Labour Party manifesto (pdf file) said:

We will legislate to ensure that all enclosed public places and workplaces other than licensed premises will be smoke-free.The legislation will ensure that all restaurants will be smoke-free; all pubs and bars preparing and serving food will be smoke-free; and other pubs and bars will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. In membership clubs the members will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. However, whatever the general status, to protect employees, smoking in the bar area will be prohibited everywhere. [My emphasis]

We all relished the spectacle of the Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, most irritatingly patronising of all Blairite ministers, declaring in the morning ‘Today’ radio programme on the day of the Commons vote on the smoking ban that she regarded private clubs as more akin to private homes than to pubs, and that she would accordingly vote to exclude them from the ban, as promised in the manifesto and as proposed in her department’s Bill: and then in the afternoon radio programme ‘PM’ we heard Ms Hewitt saying the exact opposite — and voting against her own departmental Bill’s provision to exclude private clubs from the ban.  But it begins to look as if this prime example of control freakery and Nanny-statism on the part of a priggish New Labour administration may have more serious consequences for Labour than the mere reduction of the Secretary of State for Health to a laughing-stock.

I haven’t smoked a cigarette or pipe for decades and I detest the stench made by other people smoking around me.  But it seems to me fantastic that the question whether to ban smoking in all or just some pubs, and whether to apply the ban to private clubs (including not just the ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ of St James’s but also the working men’s clubs of the north of England) should be decided by MPs at Westminster instead of being settled where it should have been, by local authorities reflecting the differing views and interests of their local communities — and in the case of private clubs, by their own members, whether gentlemen or working men or even both, as promised by the manifesto on which all Labour MPs fought the last election.  What on earth is the point of having local licensing authorities if they aren’t allowed to take this kind of decision for themselves?  MPs of all parties pay lip service to the need to ’empower’ local communities by devolving decision-making to them wherever possible.  But when it comes to the point, they can’t keep their sticky fingers off every issue that comes up. 

And so much for the sanctity of the manifesto!

Up-date (19 Feb 2006):  In a comment on this post, Tony Hatfield
argued the case for a ban, and I replied with an alternative view. 
Since this exchange widens the discussion usefully, I am transferring
it as a postscript to the original entry.

Tony Hatfield wrote:  Surely this is a genuine health and
safety issue. It’s not just the stench of tobacco that’s
objectionable — I dislike all kinds of smells — but there can be little
doubt now that breathing in second-hand tobacco fumes is dangerous.  Now
there’s nothing to stop the members of the Trimdon WMC from erecting a
building where they can puff all day if they wish, but why should they
create a danger to those who have to serve the booze to them? The
members have no more right to injure their employees by filling their
premises with tobacco carcinogens than authorising the spraying of
asbestos products or installing radio-actice fruit machines!

t 

Brian writes: 
I entirely agree that the health implications of smoking are an issue,
including the risk to people who work in an environment where others
smoke.  But none of this affects the two arguments which point the other way:

(1) It’s not the business of the law to substitute the judgement of any
public authority as to the degree and acceptibility of a given risk
(unless it’s a risk to the entire community in question, which
obviously isn’t the case here) for that of adult
individuals, who are entitled to the privilege of choosing for
themselves whether to work (or drink) among smokers, and to accept such
risks as that might entail.  A blanket ban of the kind just enacted
robs us all of that right of choice.  If the law or local
regulations permitted certain kinds of pubs to allow smoking, and
others to ban it, barmen and other pub staff would be free to choose
whether to work in smokey pubs or smoke-free ones, just as customers
would be able to choose.  If the law permitted private clubs’ members
to choose whether or not to accept the risks of allowing smoking,
similarly the members and their employees would be free to weigh the
risks against the pleasures, and make their own choices.  No-one is
forced to work in a pub or club where people smoke, any more than
drinkers are forced to drink in such pubs.  It’s sensible to try to
ensure that there’s a real choice available, e.g. by obliging pubs to
make available a minimum given percentage of their total space to smoke-free
zones, or by providing incentives for some pubs to opt to be totally
smoke-free.  But in the end, the market will take care of that if there’s freedom of choice:  if
enough people choose not to accept the risk of working for a pub where
there’s smoking, or of drinking in such a pub, then their demand will
encourage the appearance of non-smoking pubs.  And if enough people
decide that the pleasure (or higher wages) of drinking (or working) in
a smokey pub outweighs the risk to their health, there’ll be enough
smoking pubs to meet that demand, too.  Why should ordinary people be
denied that freedom to choose?

(2)  Even if the case for a
total ban on smoking in pubs and private clubs were to be overwhelming
(and it seems to me feeble in the extreme, as argued in (1)), what
possible case could there be for instituting the ban indiscriminately
over the whole country, without the slightest regard for local
differences of taste, habit, leisure tradition, attitude to risk, and
above all differences of local public opinion?  Once the parliament at
Westminster has passed a total ban into law, there’s effectively
nothing the individual can do about it.  If it’s left to local
authorities, or (better still) even lower-level bodies accountable to
local public opinion, to decide whether to impose a ban, and if so
whether it should be total and rigid or partial and flexible, then the
decision can be preceded by meaningful local consultation (via local
newspapers, local Council debates, public meetings, etc.), and if the
resulting decision offends enough local people, they can apply pressure
on the decision-making body to introduce greater local flexibility so
as to preserve the right of choice.

Much of this argument
hinges, it seems to me, on the increasingly risk-averse attitudes of
politicians and the media.  It’s always safer to ban an activity which
may be popular with some people but which entails a degree of risk,
than to allow us the freedom to take the risk, in the knowledge that in
some cases harm to innocent people may result.  The logical conclusion
of this attitude to risk is to ban not only smoking in public enclosed
places but all smoking everywhere (what about the passive smoking risk to children in private homes?).  It means banning alcohol,
fair-grounds, bungee-jumping and trampolining, and children’s play-grounds. It means plastering the
countryside with protective walls and fences.  Eventually it means
banning the motor-car and flying.  My freedom means, among other things,
my freedom to take risks in order to enjoy benefits which I judge to
outweigh the risks, a judgement only I can make (provided only that my
decision doesn’t inflict unavoidable harm on others’ freedom to make
the same choices).  I strongly resent Patricia Hewitt and her
nanny-colleagues making those decisions for me.  Given the choice, I
would opt to drink in a smoke-free pub rather than drink among smokers;
and if I fancied a job as a barman, I’d opt to look for a job in a
smoke-free pub or its smoke-free bar.  But I don’t have the freedom to
choose differently, because the busy-bodies at Westminster have taken
it away from me, after persuading me (in the case of some of them) to
vote for them on the basis of an explicit promise not to do so.

Brian