Hell is too cold for these joyless gimps

I was on Radio 4 for a whole hour on Friday discussing smoking and the nanny state with ASH's Deborah Arnott on the show AntiSocial. You can listen back here or download the AntiSocial podcast. 

It's always nice to get a decent amount of time to talk about any issue, although it is a little frustrating when you have to spend most of your time correcting the other person's lies. Amongst other things, Arnott claimed that an outdoor smoking ban won't hurt pubs, that there were more pubs after the 2007 smoking ban than before and that smoking imposes a net economic cost on nonsmokers. Tiresome stuff.

David Mitchell wrote an excellent article about the proposed ban at the weekend...

 

The indoor smoking ban was bad enough. I know it’s been successful at reducing smoking and, on balance, I wouldn’t go back on it now. Nevertheless it is my belief that that is not the sort of law governments should make. Smoking is a stupid thing to do but, in a free society, we should be allowed to do stupid things unless they impinge on the freedom of others. But the advocates of the ban tried to claim that it was not an assault on liberty, by citing the health impact of passive smoking.

Are they really going to make the same claim when it’s being done outdoors? That smoking in pub gardens significantly shortens the lives of significant numbers of non-smokers? More than driving non-electric vehicles or smelting steel or lighting bonfires on 5 November, activities the government is not proposing to ban?

Feeble though that argument would be, it is troubling to me that it is not how Keir Starmer proposes to justify the ban. His reasoning is more radical. He thinks it should happen in order “to reduce the burden on the NHS and reduce the burden on the taxpayer”. So he proposes to place legal restrictions on unhealthy behaviour in order to cut down what it costs the state to provide medical care. “That’s why I spoke before the election about moving to a preventative model when it comes to health,” he explained.

This is chilling. I assumed the “preventative model” meant things like offering regular checkups, screening for cancers and encouraging healthy lifestyles, not placing legal barriers in the way of unhealthy ones. That sets quite the precedent: the state will stop you doing things that are bad for you in order to mitigate its hospital spending. With that principle established, what liberty might not be curtailed: fatty foods, contact sports, sexual promiscuity, motorbikes, stressful jobs? All this stuff could place a burden on the NHS and the taxpayer. In Starmer’s vision, is a welfare state only affordable if the populace is compelled to be prudent?

 

Indeed. As I said in The Critic, an outdoor ban would be extraordinarily spiteful and vindictive and yet somehow the justification for it is even worse.

 

Madeline Grant also wrote a great article about this for the Telegraph... 

 

There is a real absence of “live and let live”. Grumbling over a slither of cigarette smoke several yards away in a beer garden, demanding that already hard-pressed publicans lose custom or even their livelihoods to suit your whims isn’t kindness, but the height of entitlement. It recalls those people who choose to live in Soho yet spend their time bombarding the council with noise complaints, or those who move to the countryside only to bemoan the sound of church bells. Part of being an adult is the capacity to endure mild inconvenience, to witness habits you dislike, without screeching for them to be banned. We’re being turned into children – and worse still, applauding the Government for it.

 

As Madeline said on Twitter, "Hell is too cold for these joyless gimps".

 

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