How much should we – and how much can we – control the bad habits of other people?
The last few weeks have provoked much head-scratching in my home on two such dilemmas, both of which are very different. A newsagent in the dry village of Bournville, on the south side of Birmingham, has been permitted by the council to sell alcohol, to a good deal of local controversy; and it has become law that drivers who smoke at the wheel with anyone under 18 years of age in the car should be stopped by the police.
Of the anti-alcohol ruling which Bournville formerly enforced, I have personal knowledge – it doesn’t necessarily achieve much. My late husband Gavin Lyall, a Quaker who grew up in Bournville, suffered from cirrhosis of the liver; though that was not what he died of in the end, as he didn’t touch a drop for the last 13 years of his life.
He smoked, too, and on the question of stopping the smoking driver I’ve always had my doubts. If the driver needs to smoke in the car, he or she obviously also smokes at home, so the benefit would be small; and, if smoking is what keeps Daddy calm, the child may be at greater risk of an immediate crash than of an illness in the far future.
I think the time chasing this up would be better spent on running down fathers who arrange for their daughters to be raped – which is what they are doing if they make them marry against their will, as a recent TV item on forced marriage made clear. Some things cannot be successfully banned, even if they should be.
What do you think? Have your say below
