Fags for the memories
Photograph: David Cheskin/PAIt is very curious that smoking seems to be on the way to becoming one of this government's key ideological battlegrounds, writes Lindesay Irvine. Tony Blair apparently wants a free vote on public smoking, but this is a standard manoeuvre for a subject on which the cabinet simply cannot agree.
The latest salvo hits this afternoon, as the Commons health select committee accuses the government of widening the health gap between rich and poor by failing to introduce a total smoking ban in public places. Their report says that, because 47% of pubs in poorer London boroughs do not serve food and only 18% in wealthier ones are as yet ungastro-ed, a partial smoking ban will hit the lungs of the poor hardest.
This logic is contradicted by new research from University College economists, which says that a total smoking ban will push the mostly poor smokers back into their homes, where their sidestreams will hurt their children.
It's all very confusing: partly, I think, because what is at stake in this debate is not a health issue at all.
Some months ago, the artist David Hockney caused a brief storm in the news agenda on the Today programme ahead of his protest at Labour's conference fringe over proposals to outlaw smoking. There was an uncomfortable moment when he impassionedly accused Labour's Julie Morgan of being "absolutely dreary" and "too bossy".
I had my own Hockney moment this weekend, popping into a branch of the Caffe Nero chain for a swift latte. On another bitingly cold day in London, I was so grateful to be in a cafe where it's still (just) possible to smoke that I spontaneously thanked the woman behind the counter for the policy, looking forward to a coffee and ciggie enjoyed in relative comfort for once.
The svelte managing barista's response was to immediately tell me that she couldn't wait for the ban to be enforced. My coffee break relaxation instantly shot to pieces, I heard myself tell her that this amounted to the beginnings of totalitarianism. I got my coffee before things could get out of hand, soothing my nerves and taking a small revenge by smoking two cigarettes rather than one.
A year or two ago, I started telling people who engaged me in the "why do you smoke?" conversation that I did it as a political act, in solidarity with the underclass. It's a ridiculous thing to say, of course. But I am becoming more and more convinced - as a punitively taxed member of a pariah class - that smoking is indeed a political act of no little significance.
In Labour's historic third term, the exhaustion of Blairite ideas for social justice legislation has been replaced by an extraordinary effort to police people's pleasures: this covers not just smoking, of course, but also binge drinking, dope smoking, unhealthy eating and failing to put in the hours at the gym. The penalties for infractions of these imperatives have recently begun to move from high taxation towards a variety of the death penalty for the irresponsibly obese or cancerous.
And it does seem to me that all of these arguments are only superficially about health. If the case against smoking were really about public health, then surely there would be similar worries aired by cyclists and pedestrians over the quantity of sidestream exhaust fumes they inhale all day long. Lorry drivers working long hours in diesel-heavy truck cabins would be worried over, London Underground staff would mount protests.
An argument against the use of mobile phones could also be made, since users jeopardise other people's health as well as their own. (If you don't believe me, start making a note every time you're walking around your town and see a pedestrian or driver behaving with dangerous clumsiness: they are always on the phone, aren't they?)
But of course none of the above examples count, because they do not involve other people having fun, and it is the private decision of how you go about entertaining yourself, the central passion of British liberalism, which is actually being targeted.
Assuming you are not a member of the growing underclass so well documented in Polly Toynbee's Hard Work, we live in a world of alarmingly ubiquitous entertainment options. These days you can start watching a newish film release on a portable DVD player if the bus is late; there are videos and music everywhere the minute you step out of your front door, and with your home broadband connection all manner of pleasure centres can be stimulated around the clock.
Particularly with children, these are all understandable causes of anxiety. Incontinence, in the Greek sense, does not bode well for a pleasant civil society.
But the massive intrusion of government, well supported it must be said by the general population, into the private decision to find your fun in a fag cannot be justified on these grounds.
Life is not safe, and as the late Bill Hicks pointed out, non-smokers die every day. If you go to a pub and have a cigarette - a practice which vast numbers of non-smokers (as they would describe themselves) engage in, you are upping your own risk of cancer, and very marginally affecting that of others around you: just as you are if you get in a car and drive somewhere in heavy traffic or through a tunnel.
Underground car park attendants run similar health risks to bar staff without the mobilisation of new Labour's aggressive, almost Cromwellian, animus against "anti-social" smokers.
And smoking, as John Reid knew when he defended the right of poor people to smoke, is of course a class issue as well. Living in London, it is very noticeable that the ascendance of the middle class in inner London, taking over the cafes as well as the useful postcodes and charming ex-council housing of formerly working-class districts, goes hand in hand with the social embargo on smoking.
As a London resident, I find it positively obscene that wealthy middle class people, who can afford to go to lots of places the underclasses they rely on to do the city's dirty work cannot, are driving them out. In the same way that poor workers must now live farther and farther from central London, they also need to resort to dirtier, colder and uglier spots in order to soothe their frazzled nerves with a cigarette.
So, you can scoff all you like into your organic fruit tisane, but when I say that I'm charging up my next Mayfair Smooth in solidarity with the low paid, I mean it.
