The UK moves towards banning outdoor smoking

When the ban on indoor smoking was introduced in 2007, I warned – in the Guardian, Britain’s flagship liberal newspaper – that it marked the death of liberal England. And so it has proved. “Whatever your views on smoking (and no one denies that the habit, like the officially approved New Labour ones of drinking, overworking and starting illegal wars, carries a health risk), ask yourself this simple question: Do you really want to live in a country where lighting a cigarette, cigar or pipe in a pub or café, as English men and women have done for decades, is deemed a criminal offence?,” I wrote.



The supporters of the 2007 ban assured us that people would still be able to smoke outside, but I knew this too would come under threat. “Don’t kid yourself Sunday’s ban will be the end of the matter,” I predicted. “The anti-smoking zealots won’t rest until smoking is banned everywhere, even in the privacy of our own homes.”



The smoking bans of the mid-to-late 2000s were about much more than smoking. They were a test case to see how far the authorities could go down the road of destroying personal choice and freedom and introducing a controlled society in which genuine individualism was stifled and everyone would be expected to conform to new, politically correct state-approved ‘norms’. Right thought, right opinions, right behaviour. ‘You smoke slim panatellas? What are you? Some relic from the early 1970s? I bet you also have some pretty old-fashioned views on other things, which need some re-education’.



‘Re-education’, of course, means censoring the past. Note that in the new ‘Cruella’ film, the title character has been deprived of her trademark cigarette holder. “This is not allowed in 2021,” actress Emma Stone told the New York Times. Even James Bond, a chain-smoker in the original books and earlier films, is not allowed to smoke any more.