Is smoking in pubs to be consigned to the ashtray
of history?
Photograph: Chris Young/PA
As he did so often, Spike Milligan put it rather well. "Smoking", the one-time tobacco fan wrote, "is a lunatic habit". He pointed out that paying money for something, setting fire to it and doing damage to yourself in the process was perhaps not the most logical thing to do.
But although the government has had a bit to say about the impact of smoking in public places, it has declined to bow to pressure from the British Medical Association and anti-smoking organisations to introduce a total public ban.
Instead - the day after World No Tobacco Day - the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, indicated that she would stick with proposals for a ban in most enclosed public places in England and Wales by 2008. Exemptions will be made for pubs and clubs that do not serve prepared food.
Perhaps they'll also be made for pubs painted red, blue or maroon, with pianos as opposed to without, down cul de sacs rather than on main roads, or with the word "lion" forming some part of their name. Who knows?
If it's going to be done, it has - surely - to be done properly. In Sweden, smoking was banned in all bars and restaurants this week – no room for any confusion there. The rationale was simple: the government wanted to reduce the risks of passive smoking. It's pretty hard to argue with, even for a smoker.
In the British workplace, attitudes have changed enormously. The kind of conditions in the first office I worked in, where full ashtrays littered the desks (typing while smoking was the norm) and non-smokers were surrounded by the kind of haze that would have shamed a speakeasy, wouldn't be tolerated now.
It remains to be seen whether that kind of shift in thinking takes hold about public places. The signs are that it is beginning to - but smoky pubs, bars and restaurants won't, at least under the current thinking, be going away any time soon.
There's the possibility that some pubs might scrap prepared food rather than see their smoking customers go elsewhere. In any case, many don't even serve it and would therefore be unaffected by the government's proposals.
Some independent owners and operators have decided to phase in a smoking ban – JD Wetherspoon, for example, is already making moves towards bringing in a number of totally smoke-free pubs by 2006.
But for now, I'll be the one nursing a pint and a cigarette until somebody tells me otherwise. Or, of course, until I summon up the willpower to kick Spike's "lunatic habit".
