Inside out

Further to yesterday’s post …

One of the peers who put her name to amendment 258 at the report stage of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill was Baroness Northover.

Explaining why she supported a ban on smoking in licensed pavement areas, the Lib Dem peer told the House:

The public health case for this policy is extremely clear; there is no risk-free level of exposure to second-hand smoke.

Smoke-free pavement licensing would also help to protect hospitality workers. The smoking ban of 2007 protected workers from indoor exposure to tobacco smoke. The noble Earl [deputy leader of the Lords, Earl Howe], I remember well - helped to put this in place. It is time we took action to protect them from outdoor exposure as well.

"The outside," she blethered, "has now, in effect, become the new inside."

I'm sorry, but the risk to non-smokers from exposure to 'second-hand smoke' in pubs and clubs was always very small, whatever the anti-smoking lobby might say.

You’d have to be exposed day after day for many many years, and even then the evidence of risk is inconclusive.

Outside, however, the risk from exposure to tobacco smoke is somewhere between insignificant and non-existent.

But if there is evidence of significant risk, let's see it.

As far as I'm aware, there’s none. So how can the public health case for banning smoking outside pubs be “extremely clear”?

Despite this, politicians stand up in parliament and make claims that not only go uncontested, no-one bats an eyelid.

That's the real scandal.

As for there being “no risk-free level of exposure to second-hand smoke”, if that is the basis on which we’re going to legislate in future, I can’t think of anything we’ll be allowed to do without being subject to regulation to avoid even minimal risk.

This, btw, is what I wrote about Baroness Northover in 2020 when she supported a similar amendment to the Business and Planning Bill:

In contrast to her sniping about Forest, Baroness Northover was so effusive in her praise for taxpayer-funded ASH ("that outstanding campaigning organisation") that she admitted it was ASH not her that drafted the amendment she put her name to.

Fancy that!

See: Lib Dem peer bidding to extend smoking ban to outside areas thanks ASH for its "assistance" (July 2020) and Lesson in hypocrisy (March 2022)

PS. A quick reminder that ASH yesterday acknowledged, in its Daily News bulletin, that ‘The amendment was not pushed to a vote and will not be included in the bill’.

Good news, for now, but with Labour supporting the amendment this issue is not going to go away.

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

The lie that smoking outside harms others begins. They will just keep repeating it often until it becomes truth and scares people to death. This is tyranny. Truth matters. ASH and its cronies are liars who are promoting a public hate campaign against people who smoke to incite fear and loathing. It would be illegal against any other minority.

The solution is obvious. Get smokers off the streets and back inside their own places where they can mingle with others who share their interest and those not groomed to hate them, and keep us safe from the hatred, bile and poison of the smokerphobic anti smokers.

We need laws to protect us from hatred not laws to incite further hatred against us.