One of the things that’s become obvious over here, incidentally, is that pubs’ initial enthusiasm for being nice to smokers wanes quickly. Pubs that do have awnings to stop smokers getting soaked don’t bother to put them out when it rains, and the ones with external heaters don’t switch ‘em on when it’s bloody freezing.

Separation of smoking and no-smoking: The Old White Lion in East Finchley has two wings, one smoking, one not, and the bar in the middle (no smoking at the bar). Absolutely no problem for non-smokers.

Of course come June they’re all going to be forced down one route, and then it’ll be like wot I saw in Glasgow last August: pathetic clumps of tables awkwardly perched on the pavement, for the smokers. Ah well, at least the Spaniard’s Inn has a huge outdoor area, so summer will still be nice…

They’re not just suffering because of the smoking ban, mind you, although takings do seem to be down very dramatically since it came in. Online’s squeezing them dramatically, and they’re taxed more than other forms of gambling: in addition to gambling taxes, Bingo operators pay VAT. Casinos and bookies are zero rated for VAT, apparently.

31,000
Number of people killed per year by obesity, according to the Health Development Agency and quoted by John Reid in various press releases, October 2003.

1,104
Number of people killed per year by obesity, according to the Department of Health. March 2005.

Oh, absolutely. Zealots, and of course it’s always campaigning on the basis of “well obviously people like us are smart enough to make the right choices, but what about the plebs?” That’s apparent in some of the ASH policy papers on things like lurid photo labelling, where there’s an interesting combination of apparent concern and utter contempt.

Naturally ASH scotland hasn’t stopped with the smoking ban. They now want limits on where you can buy smokes and the times of day you can buy them, because their mission isn’t to protect the innocents, but to protect *everybody* from the evils of smoking. That some people are quite happy to play russian roulette with their immune system just doesn’t compute: it’s simply not accepted as a valid point of view, even if the smoker gets their fix in a way that it can’t affect anybody other than themselves.

I find that most people immediately start to see my point.

There’s a very nasty puritan streak in some people that goes beyond their own health and into *your* health, whether it’s tutting at a pregnant woman having a quick puff or demanding a blanket ban on anything poor people eat.

> standing up for smokers’ rights is seen by a lot of people as morally equivalent to arguing the case for, say, child abuse.

I find it’s very easy. I say I’m against the ban, even though I hate cigarette smoke and the ban will make the world a nicer place for me, because it’s the thin end of the wedge. Then pick one or two of the numerous illustrations that our government keep providing to us — forcing chocolate manufacturers to stop making king-size bars, banning two-for-one deals on foods deemed by bureaucrats to contain too much fat, vetting pub menus for salt content as a condition of licensing, forbidding overweight people to adopt orphans. I find that most people immediately start to see my point.

The bingo thing’s interesting. Folk are staying at home to smoke, but at least they can afford to. I wonder if there’s some other branch of gambling (Gala online?) seeing a boost. Or, have we just cut a swathe through one of the few vestiges of community still extant? The smoking’s still happening, but the socialising isn’t.

There was one – at Queen Street Station – but any time I went past it it was half-empty, possibly because it was full of smug bastards. Heh.

The argument I’ve heard is that non-smokers go to the smoking pubs because we smokers are bad-tempered sods who just ruin the night for everyone if we can’t indulge. There’s probably some truth in that.

My personal view is that pub owners should have been given a choice: either ban it completely OR allow smoking, but install air-filtration systems

Yeah, that was my view too.

It’s been a disaster for the bingo halls, btw.

We’re continually sold an unproblematised free market ideology, to the extent that an otherwise avaricious public tacitly accept low wages and poor job security in the name of economic ‘realism’ – yet, no one has ever asked why “the market” failed to produce a solution. If the majority of the public wanted non-smoking pubs, why were no canny entrepreneurs opening any?

My personal view is that pub owners should have been given a choice: either ban it completely OR allow smoking, but install air-filtration systems and only employ staff who’re prepared to work in a smoking environment (jobs in smoking pubs would enter the small category of jobs that unemployed people are allowed to turn down without it affecting their benefit).

My local (think “Early Doors”) is struggling as it is – I reckon it’ll close when the ban comes in down here.