The politics of smoking

It can only be a matter of time before smoking in Britain is confined to consenting adults in private. The workplace ban in Ireland has been acclaimed as a great success by politicians and public health authorities alike and similar initiatives are being introduced in Scotland, Wales, Liverpool and elsewhere. Our local hospital is planning to go smoke-free on New Year's Day 2005 and patients who now wheel their drips and drains to huddle in squalid stairwell smokers' ghettos will be banished to the streets. Our receptionists, already consigned to the bin-shed, will no doubt shortly also be forced out into the rain. The logic of New Labour public health policy points towards the erection in public places of a modernised version of the mediaeval stocks in which smokers could experience the full force of popular moral disapproval of their stigmatised behaviour.

The government has skilfully manoeuvred …