The endless slippery slope

Anti-smoking fanatics' thirst for lebensraum

The voracious prohibitionists at Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) are making another territorial demand. After commissioning their favourite pollster YouGov to conduct a survey, they have found that 14% of Brits are ‘exposed’ to secondhand smoke at work.

Smoking was banned indoors in 2007 so we are talking about outdoor ‘exposure’. In any case, 14% doesn’t seem very high. 13% of Britons smoke. Are ASH including smokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke from other smokers in smoking shelters? Or have they excluded smokers from the survey on the basis that what smokers think doesn’t matter, which would certainly be consistent with their broader ideology.

Speaking of policy demands, it goes without saying that ASH didn’t spend money on this survey out of sheer curiosity.

The data shows that although 14% of all Brits report being exposed to second-hand smoke at work there are inequalities with some professions being significant outliers. Transport workers and those in hospitality top the list with those in media, education and pharmaceutical industries being the least exposed. This shows that current smokefree laws are insufficient to protect staff.

That’s not what these mendacious fanatics were saying when they were campaigning for the smoking ban in 2006.

Deborah Arnott, the director of the health lobby group ASH, said: “Comprehensive smoke-free legislation is the only sensible option. It is the fairest solution for employers. It is the easiest solution to implement and enforce. It is the only solution that protects all employees from health damage caused by second-hand smoke.”

ASH got their comprehensive ban, in full, with no exemptions, but what would become of this little pressure group and its government grants if it packed up its tent and went home?

So now it is fighting for some sort of outdoor smoking ban to ‘protect’ workers from ever getting a whiff of a cigarette.

The charity is calling on the Government to urgently pass the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, currently making its way through Parliament, which contains additional powers to extend smokefree places.

These are some of the many Henry VIII powers in the Bill that allow the health secretary to do whatever he or she wants with tobacco and e-cigarettes in the future without parliamentary scrutiny. There is no explicit mention of outdoor smoking bans in the Bill and the government seems to have backtracked on plans to introduce them, but anything goes in the future. This is the last piece of anti-smoking legislation in Britain. There will be no need for any more.

MPs are voting for a pig in a poke, as I have said from the start, and it is a constitutional disgrace. The Hansard Society has been critical of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill from the outset for this very reason:

Governments will often cite existing delegated powers as a precedent for taking further powers (whilst conveniently forgetting any restrictions imposed on the exercise of the earlier iteration of the power!) The result is new, and slightly broader delegated powers, justified on the basis of existing delegated powers. And so, the gamut of ministerial power creeps ever forward.

As we approach a general election, which may result in a change in the governing party, in this as in other bills MPs would be wise to think about what might happen if the powers they grant are held by Ministers belonging to a party with a different political philosophy. All too often, when considering legislation, insufficient thought is given by MPs, particularly on the governing side, to the fact that once powers are granted in legislation, they may sit on the statute book for years, to be used by Ministers in future governments in ways that were not anticipated or intended by Ministers when the power was introduced.

But what about all those poor workers breathing in secondhand smoke? We must assume that almost none of them are being ‘exposed’ to passive smoke indoors and it turns out that YouGov have had to cast its net wide to find many people being ‘exposed’ outdoors.

Full question: In which, if any, of the following places have you come into contact with other people's cigarette smoke in the past three months?

• In my home

• In other people's home

• At work

• At college/ university

• When I go out to socialise

• When I'm waiting for public transport

• In parks

• None of these

• Don't know

[Multiple answers permitted]

The past three months?!? Who hasn’t come into contact with cigarette smoke somewhere in the past three months? According to YouGov, the answer is 80% of us! (14% have done so at work and 20% have done so anywhere.)

This finding supports my longstanding suspicion that the misanthropes who do YouGov surveys rarely leave the house, which is all the better for the rest of us. But even if the figure were higher, brief and occasional exposure to cigarettes outdoors is not a public health issue.

In a characteristic act of dishonesty, the scoundrels at ASH imply that the risks of such ‘exposure’ are identical to the risks that are associated, albeit with some highly dubious epidemiology, with decades of indoor exposure.

There is no safe level of second-hand smoke exposure and it has been estimated that non-smokers who are exposed face a 25%-35% increased risk of heart disease and a 24% increased risk of lung cancer.

I don’t know about you, but I greatly resent having to pay taxes so that these people can lie to the nation. The only consolation is that no media outlet has picked up on their press release. Perhaps bullshit fatigue has kicked in at last.

Elsewhere from me this week:

The case for Letby’s innocence looks weaker than ever (Spectator)

Reducing the drink-drive limit will sound good and achieve nothing (The Critic)