Some years ago, when the smoking ban was quite new and when the Eurostar still left from Waterloo, I walked to the end of the platform beyond the covering roof to smoke a cigarette before boarding the train. I had hardly taken a couple of puffs before a uniformed lady strode up to tell me, politely but firmly, that I couldn't smoke there. "But I'm in the open air," I said, "the ban doesn't apply in the open air." "This is railway property," she said, "put it out." Thinking that any further protest might even result in being forbidden to travel, I obeyed. Reluctantly of course, being old enough to remember when there were more smoking than non-smoking carriages on trains and on the Tube, and you could smoke on the upper deck of London buses. But that's the way it goes: "sic transit", if not "gloria mundi", then the liberty that used to be regarded as the birthright of free-born Britons.
Now, if the London Health Commission has its way, the net will be drawn more tightly still. This body, set up by the Mayor, Boris Johnson, proposes that smoking be banned in "open spaces". Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square and the Royal Parks are identified as suitable areas for a ban.
The proposal is justified by the usual claptrap. Professor Dame Sally Davies, the Government's Chief Medical Officer for England, says it would help deter young people from smoking by making it less likely that they would see adults lighting up. You know, the way young people are deterred from experimenting with cannabis, cocaine and heroin because they are spared the sight of a pensioner smoking a joint, snorting a line, or injecting a vein.
You might as reasonably make it illegal to drink a pint of beer outside a pub, just in case some youngster thinks alcoholism must be fun. It seems highly unlikely that the sight of an old buffer like me smoking a Toscano cigar while resting on a park bench is going to appear an attractive role model to a young person, but evidently the Professor Dame thinks otherwise. Perhaps I should be flattered, but if she is really concerned about role models it would make more sense to call for the confiscation and destruction of all DVDs of Casablanca.
We are told there are 1.2 million smokers in London. This is probably an underestimate because some think it prudent to say they don't smoke when asked if they do, especially when filling in forms. But even if London's smokers number only – only! – 1.2 million, that's an awful lot of people to be further inconvenienced and irritated by any extension of the smoking ban. Naturally ASH, the taxpayer-funded anti-smoking lobby, is delighted by the proposal. "Smoking," they say, "is the major cause of preventable premature death in the capital."
Perhaps it is. None of us claims that smoking is a healthy habit. But, as I pause to re-light my Toscano, I reflect that it's been an enjoyable one for almost 60 years now. For this is the point. No doubt there are many smokers who, for one reason or another, want to stop, just as there are many drinkers who want to give up – and, I hope, many eaters of junk food who think that it might be a good idea to change their diet. But lots of us have no wish to do so. For us, smoking is a pleasure. You may regard this as foolish, but, equally, I may regard some of your pleasures as foolish. Live and let live, even die and let die.
Lots of young people will smoke, just as they experiment with illegal drugs. Some may even do so as an act of defiance; if authority disapproves of smoking, it must be worth trying. Some will, happily, continue to do so. Others will stop, perhaps when they become parents, perhaps because it is now a very expensive habit. It is their choice, or should be in a free country .
Smokers have accepted the existing ban, however reluctantly. We accept that it has made other people's life more agreeable, even though we continue to believe that the reasonable compromise of designated smoking rooms in pubs, clubs and restaurants should have been acceptable. But there is no justification for the London Health Commission's new proposal: it is malicious. Boris Johnson should bin it. His aides say he is "instinctively libertarian and not temporarily inclined to ban things". I hope they meant to say "temperamentally" rather than "temporarily". If he accepts it and legislates accordingly, we will know he's a phoney who only poses as a friend of freedom. As for the suggestion that banning smoking in Trafalgar Square, an open space filled from dawn to dusk with the diesel fumes of buses, would do anything for people's health – baloney.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568612/s/3f8100fc/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Chealth0C1116470A20CBan0Eoutdoor0Esmoking0EExcuse0Eme0Ewhile0EI0Efume0Bhtml/story01.htm