Banning smoking in beer gardens won't save a single life or the NHS a penny

It is often superficially popular for governments to ban things that majorities in opinion polling dislike. Especially where there is a moral panic about the activity.

I arrive back in England with a new round of government fussbucketry firmly under way. We already knew that our new and exciting Labour government intended to adopt an Australian approach to e-cigarettes and the, now abandoned, New Zealand policy of a ‘generational ban’ on smoking. Between them these policies amount to the stupidest piece of public health legislation since the mandation of masks. And at least in the latter case we were in the middle of an actual pandemic so there’s something of an excuse.

There is no excuse for adopting a public health policy that creates an unenforceable cigarette ban alongside banning most of the e-cigarette market because a handful of kids try the things (and the council doesn’t like the litter). We have a policy where pretty much anyone under 40 buying cigarettes is going to get ID’d and where 20 year old Steve is going to legally buy cigarettes which he will (illegally) share with his 19 year old girlfriend Clare. And if Clare doesn’t have a boyfriend right now that’s not a problem because she can get a pack of rolling tobacco and some papers (the government is also banning these) from the same bloke she buys weed from.

Clare’s mum is pissed off though because the lemon sherbet flavoured disposable e-cigarettes she likes are also going to be banned. Mum is going to go back to smoking cigarettes which is great news for Clare because mum can also buy fags for her. Meanwhile the thousands of adult smokers who bought disposable vapes from the Co-op (where they used to buy their fags before they tried vaping) will no longer have the option. These adults, who’ve done nothing wrong (unless you call quitting smoking wrong), might go to the vape shop and obtain the non-disposable paraphernalia with which they’ll vape the handful of ‘adult’ flavours that government permits. But plenty of them will simply buy 20 Marlboro and smoke.

Smoking (and vaping) is primarily a working class habit. Middle class mums and the nannying fussbuckets who feed off these mums’ moral panics will delight at these proposals because, well, smoking is a horrid common habit and they don’t want their kids to do that sort of thing. Same goes for vaping because the fussbuckets have filled their heads with mostly fictitious American anti-vaping panic and the school says all the children are vaping. The truth is, of course, that fewer than one in five British kids have even tried vaping and about one in fifty is a current vaper. At least according to anti-smoking charity, Action on Smoking & Health (ASH).

This hasn’t stopped the latest anti-smoking wheeze from the government - banning smoking in beer gardens, outside nightclubs and in the street near pubs that lack gardens. Of course the rationale for this is that smoking is a uniquely terrible thing that is responsible, pretty much single-handedly, for the crisis in our NHS. I’m not sure how the ban is going to achieve anything much except to annoy existing smokers and vapers (anyone who thinks that the ban won’t extend to users of e-cigarettes is daft) but the nannies, fussbuckets and purveyors of moral panic will, of course, claim otherwise and government will point out that the public supports the idea. But then nearly half of the British public want people who live in apartments to be banned from smoking in their home.

It is often superficially popular for governments to ban things that majorities in opinion polling dislike. Especially where there is a moral panic about the activity. We see this across the sphere of so-called public health where upper middle class moral panics get turned into ‘science’ - this has applied to gambling (especially online sports betting, one of the more benign forms of betting), to vaping, and to eating the sort of foods - ultra-processed foods in the jargon - preferred by ordinary families. The only reason for banning smoking in beer gardens is because a lot of people find smoking (and people who smoke) unpleasant and distasteful. It won’t save a single life, won’t reduce demand on the NHS by a farthing, and will result in some pubs closing.

Sticking with smoking for now, we should remember that nobody who smokes does so without being acutely aware of the associated health risks. And while it is a noble aim to want to eliminate tobacco use, we should perhaps consider that after over 100 years of a heroin ban, there are still many thousands who use this much more dangerous drug. While banning gambling is a cause close to the heart of puritans, we know that countries like China, India and Indonesia (not to mention the USA) have a huge problem with corrupt and often violent illegal gambling.

Smoking is bad for you but smokers persist because they reckon that those little packets of joyful stress relief are worth the health downside. Nicotine has a lot of positive effects:

“When chronically taken, nicotine may result in: (1) positive reinforcement, (2) negative reinforcement, (3) reduction of body weight, (4) enhancement of performance, and protection against; (5) Parkinson's disease (6) Tourette's disease (7) Alzheimer's disease, (8) ulcerative colitis and (9) sleep apnea. The reliability of these effects varies greatly but justifies the search for more therapeutic applications for this interesting compound.”

If the government really wants to reduce the harmful health impacts of smoking then, rather than ban people from smoking outside the pub or nightclub, they should focus on shifting nicotine users onto less harmful means of obtaining the drug like vaping, snus and heat-not-burn cigarettes. Plus recognising that the anti-vaping campaigns are simply a moral panic and that it is a huge public health victory if 14 year olds take up vaping instead of smoking.

We were taking a plane from Calgary Airport this week. Like so many of these public spaces, Calgary Airport comes with stern signs reminding everyone that smoking and vaping are banned throughout the airport estate. I got an inward smile and a moment of joy seeing, on a rainy Tuesday, seeing two women definitely having a smoke on the pavement. Nobody is harmed, except them, by whose women but everywhere governments believe it is their stern moral duty to stop them. But is it really any of the government’s business?