Smoking Ban in Pub Gardens — Elite War on Tastes of the Working Classes Is in Full Swing

Keir Starmer told the nation this week that we should expect things to get worse in the early days of his reign. True to his word, he’s announced that he intends to stub out one of life’s great pleasures and lay further waste to the pub trade while he’s at it. Not only is the country going to pot, soon you won’t even be able to escape it all with a pint and a cigarette in a sunny pub garden.

Naturally, Starmer has decided that the insanely illiberal ‘generational smoking ban’ he has inherited from the Tories doesn’t go far enough. Alongside banning young people from ever being able to smoke, as part of a revived Tobacco and Vapes Bill, Labour intends to turn the screws on existing smokers as well, by banning them from smoking in pub gardens, outside nightclubs, on restaurant terraces and outside football matches.

The government is trying to maintain the pretence that this is about saving people from second-hand smoke. But given an outdoor cigarette is only really dangerous to those around you if you are all standing in a puddle of petrol, it isn’t very convincing. A spokesperson for the Department of Health has already given the game away, telling the Sun: ‘We’re considering a range of measures to finally make Britain smoke-free.’

This isn’t about protecting non-smokers from the occasional al-fresco smoke curl, it’s about pushing smokers around. Another joyless stop on the road to prohibition. The anti-smoking lobby can hardly pretend that this isn’t the direction of travel anymore, given they’ve succeeded in getting two successive PMs to back the total prohibition of cigarette sales, albeit one that will be phased in over time, by age.

Under the ‘generational ban’, the smoking age will increase by one year, every year, until cigs are snuffed out for good. The Tories’ promise to existing smokers was that they’d be able to carry on more or less as they did before, while the younger generations are ‘protected’. But that simply isn’t good enough for Labour, it seems. That 13 per cent of the population who choose to smoke, knowing full well the risks, must be demonised and shunned at every opportunity.

There’s also a good chance that the generational ban will lose the ‘generational’ bit before long. The existing plan – whereby shops in the near future will be obliged to serve 47-year-olds but turn away 46-year-olds – is insanely impractical, not to mention discriminatory, when you think about it for longer than five seconds. Rather than junk this absurd policy, as New Zealand has, we’ll no doubt end up with an all-age ban soon enough.

If you think this is about the health service or the economy or second-hand smoke then I have a lorry-full of black-market fags to sell you. No one has ever developed lung cancer because they occasionally sat in a beer garden within a few feet of a lit Super King. Plus, studies have shown over decades that non-smokers cost the state more, in healthcare and social security, given smokers tend to die earlier.

As for the economy, the one sure-fire consequence of this policy will be the closure of thousands more pubs – a sector that was decimated by the 2007 indoor smoking ban, brought to its knees by lockdown and forever struggling to compete with supermarket prices. You’d be forgiven for thinking sounding the death knell on the British boozer is all part of the plan, given the nanny state’s similarly obsessive disdain for the demon drink.

No, this is about the most joyless, snobbish, meddling people in society imposing their values on the rest of us. This is about people who prize longevity above all else insisting that those of us who prefer to have a good time toe their miserable line. This is about our imperious ruling classes deciding that the tastes of the working classes are simply so ghastly that they cannot possibly be allowed to indulge them in peace.

A smokers’ revolt is long overdue.

Source: Spiked