by Graeme Smith

Created on: December 11, 2009

It took a while for the UK’s politicians to take note when General C. Everett Koop campaigned against smoking from across the Atlantic in the '80s. After all the pipe-blowing from Harold Wilson two decades earlier you'd have thought that the smoking demons would have been exorcised long before Britain went “smokefree” in July 2007. As it was the non-smokers amongst endured entering pubs and restaurants and all our other favourtie public hotspots feeling like contestants on ‘Stars in Their Eyes’.

It’s not hard to understand how smokers feel aggrieved. Most of them would have taken up their habit thinking that they’d be able to enjoy a pint at the same time; what a pain it must be to have to plan a drink-smoke-drink-smoke timetable each time you’re at the pub. Even for non-smokers the ban wasn’t all good. Clubbers will recall that the mask of smoke prior to July 2007 was a guilty pleasure: ask them, and they'll tell you that when it was taken away, they were left with unfortunate smells that they had no idea of.

More serious is evidence that points to a detrimental effect on businesses. In the first eight months of the smoking ban in Ireland, nearly 2,000 jobs had been lost in Dublin alone. In the U.K the figures have been blurred by the recession but you’d imagine the stats aren’t much different; outdoor heaters just don’t appeal to some of us.

So smokefree Britain doesn’t deserve a halo. But when it comes to human rights, it’s a struggle to defend the cause of smokers. You’ll find some credible claims to infringements on rights – no more so than public house licensees who, under the ban, are refused the right to smoke in their own property, outside of trading hours. But the human rights card has been played too many times - by their own customers. They'll complain how it is ethically wrong for the Government to force them out of their locals, clinging on to their right of freedom of choice and lambasting the now despot state that is Britain.

Unfortunately they fail to recognise the human rights of non-smokers. Whilst they are outside taking a few seconds between drags to complain about their hardship, non-smokers sit inside remembering – with no hint of nostalgia - the ‘old-days’ when they struggled to see each other through the fog. They deserve their place inside. Because there are few worse ways to oppress someone’s rights than to contribute to the sad world of passive smoking. Now that Parliament has got it right, they won't have the chance to do so anymore.

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