Passport control

I am due to make two trips abroad next month. One is a holiday. The other is business related.

Unfortunately my passport expires on May 31, 2023, and until very recently I had made no attempt to renew it despite being warned, six months ago, that passports have to be renewed several months before their expiry date.

I hadn’t forgotten. I just put it to one side, secure in the knowledge that instead of waiting the estimated ten weeks for a standard application to be processed, I could go the fast track route that delivers, for a fee, a passport within seven days.

And so it was that on March 20 I finally picked up an application form from our local Post Office, with instructions on how to book a fast track appointment at the nearest Passport Office.

Easy-peasy, except for one thing.

I hadn’t anticipated the news, announced the following day, that all Passport Office workers were going on strike for five weeks from Monday April 3.

That meant they would only return to work a few days before I was due to speak at a conference in Italy. Meanwhile, according to reports, ‘One million passport applications could be stuck in a bottleneck’.

Fearing the worst, I immediately booked the first available appointment at the Passport Office in Peterborough - 8.00am on Thursday March 30, two working days before the strike began.

Concerned that my application might still be caught in the system, I sought reassurance. Don’t worry, I was told, you’ll get your passport on time.

And they were right. My shiny new passport has indeed arrived and I couldn’t be happier (even if it did cost me £155).

Thank you, Passport Office staff. I love you all!

Khan review – Government response on Tuesday

The Government's long-awaited response to 'The Khan review: making smoking obsolete' will finally be announced on Tuesday.

However it won't be the Secretary of State for Health Steve Barclay who responds to the report (which was commissioned by one of his predecessors, Sajid Javid) but a junior minister, Neil O’Brien.

The minister for primary care and public health will give the Government's response at Policy Exchange, the right wing think tank he led before he became an MP.

It follows a recent Westminster Hall debate during which O'Brien reassured impatient tobacco control campaigners by saying:

"While I can’t divulge the specifics of the proposals at this time, I can assure you that they are grounded in the best evidence of reducing tobacco use and its associated harms.”

'Achieving Smokefree 2030: Cutting Smoking and Stopping Kids Vaping' will be chaired by Dr Sean Phillips, head of health and social care at Policy Exchange.

Writing in November I noted that when O'Brien was director of Policy Exchange, the think tank published a report, ‘Cough Up: Balancing tobacco income and costs in society’.

Published in March 2010, it is summarised on the Policy Exchange website as follows:

Smoking is the single, largest preventable cause of serious ill health and kills tens of thousands of people in England every year. It is a popular myth that smoking is a net contributor to the economy – our research finds that every single cigarette smoked costs the country 6.5 pence. In order to balance income and costs, tobacco duty should be progressively increased until the full societal cost of smoking is met through taxation.

In an email to supporters, O’Brien also wrote:

Whilst tax on tobacco contributes £10 billion annually to the Treasury coffers, the true costs to society from smoking are far higher, at £13.74 billion, think thank Policy Exchange’s latest report finds. This cost is made up of the cost of treating smokers on the NHS (£2.7 billion) but also the loss in productivity from smoking breaks (£2.9 billion) and increased absenteeism (£2.5 billion); the cost of cleaning up cigarette butts (£342 million); the cost of fires (£507 million), and also the loss in economic output from the deaths of smokers (£4.1 billion) and passive smokers (£713 million). 



The report, Cough Up, calculates that of this £13.74 billion, cigarettes – which comprise 93.3% of the tobacco market - cost us £12.82 billion a year. Currently, a pack of cigarettes costs just £6.13. But this would need to be increased to at least £7.42 for cigarettes to be revenue neutral to society and their true cost reflected by their price.

None of this fills me with confidence that O'Brien or his boss Steve Barclay (who voted AGAINST separate smoking rooms in pubs and clubs, and FOR plain packaging of tobacco) will stand up to the prohibitionists who want to forcibly make smoking history by 2030, but we'll see.

Word has it that the Treasury has been pushing back against proposals for a tobacco levy and raising tobacco duty by a further 30 per cent, but my fear is that the Government will want a headline-grabbing policy to appease tobacco control campaigners, and raising the age of sale to 21 might be the sacrificial lamb they are willing to offer.

There are two ways to listen to O'Brien's speech on Tuesday – online or in person. I've registered to attend in person but no word (yet) on whether my application has been approved.

Readers may recall that my application to attend the launch of the Khan review last year was rejected so I've also registered to watch the speech online, just in case.

Watch this space.

Welcome to Fife

Just back from a short break in Scotland where we visited Glasgow and St Andrews.

En route to the north east of Fife we visited the Royal Burgh of Culross. I’d never been to Culross before but it pops up regularly on my Twitter feed courtesy of the Welcome to Fife account which I follow.

I was well acquainted therefore with pictures of Culross Palace, the grand merchant’s house built in the late 16th and early 17th century by Sir George Bruce, but I knew very little about it, or its location which is described as ‘one of the best preserved examples of a 16th-century town in Scotland’.

Now owned by the National Trust of Scotland, Culross Palace stands out because of its vibrant colour - old gold, you might call it - although according to the NTS guide we spoke to no-one knows for sure if that was its original colour.

What I didn’t know, because I have never watched it, is that Culross, and Culross Palace, feature in the historical drama Outlander.

The town, which overlooks the Firth of Forth, has also been used as a location in other films and TV series including Kidnapped (with Michael Caine) and The 39 Steps (2008 version).

As it happens we weren’t planning to visit St Andrews this week but having cancelled a short break to the town in February after I caught Covid (again), a lettings agency contacted us at the last moment to say a studio apartment was available for a couple of nights and would we like to book it.

It was on the top floor of a large Victorian house in the centre of town. Last year we stayed in a one-bedroom apartment in a converted block at the back of the same property.

Builders were still converting the main house into apartments so it was interesting to see the results of their labours.

Long and narrow, the studio apartment (christened The Retreat) had a large bed at one end, a kitchen area in the middle, and a comfortable seating area at the other end. It felt snug and cosy but there was plenty of light and space too.

The only potential downside was that we were directly opposite the student union which had a covered outdoor area where students were drinking late into the night. Fortunately, on this occasion, their chatter and occasional eruptions of laughter didn’t keep us awake although, to be fair, my wife did have ear plugs.

The weather was forecast to be wet with light winds but, predictably, the forecast was wrong and it was mostly dry and fine.

We toured the local fishing villages including Pittenweem (which I was less familiar with) but the icing on the (chocolate) cake was a visit to Cambo Gardens and tea shop near Kingsbarns.

Aside from a 2.5 acre walled garden, a short walk took us to the nearby beach and a neighbouring golf course that features a particularly hazardous hole bordered, on one side, by the sea, and on the other by a small forest of trees.

It was only 110 yards from tee to green but to reach it requires an extremely straight drive to avoid going out of bounds on either side of the very narrow fairway. I can’t imagine how many balls have been lost to the sea.

We had dinner at Haar (a restaurant I’ve mentioned before because it’s on the site of the first pub I ever got served in, aged 15) but our last meal before we left St Andrews was a quick snack at The Cheesy Toast Shack overlooking the East Sands. Delicious.

Eight hours and 400 miles later we were back home in Cambridgeshire. A short but necessary break ahead of what could be a busy week, but more on that later.

Below: The Retreat, Culross Palace, and Pittenweem harbour

Another case of death by vape

Last year I noted that the murder weapon in a TV crime drama was an e-cigarette.

After watching season 3, episode 1, of McDonald & Dodds, I asked, “Is that a first for British television?“

The answer is apparently no because last night I watched an episode of Midsomer Murders and, once again, the murder weapon was a poisoned vape.

This time the victim died by inhaling acetonitrile, which was described as a slow-acting cyanide, that had been added to the device by (SPOILER ALERT) the sister of the victim’s wife.

I thought we were watching an episode from the most recent series but it was actually an episode called ‘Happy Families’ first broadcast in October 2021.

Now that e-cigarettes have been identified by crime writers as a way to bump off characters, how long before it happens in real life?!

PS. Perfect fictional murder weapon? Has to be the frozen leg of lamb that the murderer then cooked and ate to get rid of the evidence.

An Englishman in New York (after the smoking ban)

March 31, 2008 – Five years on from the smoking ban, welcome to New York, says Ken Macmillan. No smoking, no drinking, no dancing, no fun.

I used to like living in New York. There was diversity, excitement, opportunity, tolerance and freedom. However, in the 18 years I've been a New Yorker, I've watched the city change into a city of over-policing, prohibition, persecution and sterilisation that neither makes sense nor appeals to me anymore.

I have survived and tolerated so much in this city - crime, evil landlords, high rents, a crash in the local economy, 9/11 - but the smoking ban, introduced in 2003, was the final straw.

It was during Mayor Giuliani's term, in 1995, that the first move was made to prohibit smoking. Ludicrously, smoking was banned in restaurants large enough to comfortably accommodate smokers and non-smokers, while smoking was only permitted in small establishments and bar areas.

During his tenure Giuliani also aggressively pursued a war on art, street vendors, noise, topless-bars, petty-drugs, nightclubs, drinking outside and dancing in small venues. Giuliani was trying to clean up New York. Mayor Bloomberg cast the final volley, with little resistance.

Bloomberg had started a war on smokers by doubling tobacco taxes. We were at war in the Middle East, in constant fear of terrorism, the economy was frightening, and now you could no longer have a drink and a smoke in a bar. It seemed to me that everyone had lost their sense of reason. Welcome to New York: No Drinking. No Dancing. No Smoking. No Fun.

I had never heard anyone complain about smoking in bars and restaurants in New York. There was plenty of choice. Bars, restaurants, clubs and cafés either permitted smoking or didn't. They catered to the demands of their customers and the preference of the owner.

I was disappointed at how readily New Yorkers bent over for Bloomberg, but in their defence the media had been saturated with anti-smoking propaganda for years prior to the ban, and smokers were a minority. The Mayor was rich and very influential. Bloomberg promised that 1,000 lives would be saved every year. Much as with WMD and Saddam's link to 9/11, everyone now believed that ‘secondhand’ smoke killed.

Some bar and restaurant owners tried to absorb the fines but the law was such that the fine would double each time, and after the third violation the licence to operate would be revoked. No-one could afford to lose their business.

Aside from the fact that I no longer had anywhere to go to smoke, friends of mine who owned or worked in premises that had permitted smoking prior to the ban claimed an average loss of 20 per cent, contrary to figures released by the Bloomberg administration. The ban hurt the owner's profits and the staff who lived off their tips. Many old venues closed down. I would walk past bars that were empty at Happy Hour.

I dine out much less than I used to and don't stay long, reluctantly stepping outside for a smoke, although now I am usually accompanied by much less self-conscious smoking accomplices. I usually decline a drink or dinner, if I am to be made to feel uncomfortable for being a smoker, or if it is too cold or wet to enjoy a cigarette on the street.

Many restaurants and bars permit smoking ‘after hours’, when Bloomberg's ‘Gestapo’ are known to be done for the night, and the premises are clear of any potential ‘informers’ who might dial 311 (the City's complaint hotline). A saucer appears for use as an ashtray and the staff and the faces of customers light-up as cigarettes are smoked with illicit pleasure inside.

I used to frequent an incredible French restaurant in the East Village, smoking at the bar with a colourful crowd of jazz musicians, writers, singers, designers, and photographers. Much like the bar in Cheers, everyone knew my name. It was my ‘local’. And not long after the smoking ban, regardless of our efforts to keep coming back, the crowd at the bar eventually ceased to exist.

I still drop in from time to time, stepping out for a smoke (with the staff), but the sparse clientele is not half as interesting as the crowd of regulars who once filled the bar with energy and intelligent conversation. The ban segregated us and broke up social groups that had existed for decades. There are some characters that I haven't seen since.

Remarkably the ban doesn't seem to have reduced the numbers of smokers as crowds gather now outside bars and clubs, creating a new complaint in dense downtown residential neighbourhoods.

I've always enjoyed smoking, particularly with a coffee, drink or dinner, and stubbornly refuse to quit, not just because a self-righteous mayor dictates it, but because I'm an adult who is aware of the risks to my own health, and the lack of risk to those around me.

Ironically, prior to any implementation of a ban, I had noticed a trend to quit smoking. Now however, as with most things that are banned, I see that smoking has again become cool and sexy, an act of anti-establishment defiance, an attractive vice. A few years after the initial Gestapo-like crackdown on bars and restaurants, I now regularly hear word of underground ‘smoke-easies’ where smoking is secretly permitted.

I have found ways to survive the ban here, as have my friends and colleagues. Although not as free as before, we gather in particular places where we can still enjoy drinks, food, conversation and smokes, in defiance of the ban, although winters here are hard.

Unfairly, the affluent and well connected, are still at liberty to enjoy a smoke in certain bars, clubs, parties and restaurants, it is the common man who is struck hardest, no longer able to go to his local for a drink and a smoke.

I still struggle to believe how or why they banned smoking in a city like New York that is, and always has been a stressful, dirty, noisy, smoky place to live and work.

When I walk out onto my street in the Lower East Side, strewn with refuse, dog and human faeces, broken bottles, the air full of deafening sirens and exhaust fumes from trucks, buses and bikers, past closed down graffiti-covered store fronts, past the homeless, alcoholics, mentally ill, crack-heads, heroin-addicts, and bums begging for small change, it is beyond me that I cannot have a smoke in a bar.

This article was first published on Forest's Free Society website in 2008.

Twenty years ago today, New York banned smoking in indoor public places

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the New York smoking ban.

The legislation that prohibited smoking in almost every bar and restaurant in NYC was signed by Mayor Mike Bloomberg on December 30, 2002, and took effect on Sunday March 30, 2003.

There were some exemptions, including cigar bars, but it was nevertheless a major development in the war on smoking.

In the UK however media interest was relatively muted. 'New York considers smoking ban' reported the BBC in August 2002, but on the day the law was enacted the BBC News website chose to ignore it.

A report in the Telegraph amounted to just 167 words, but that was 167 more than most newspapers in Britain.

Even in New York the coverage was subdued. According to Guardian columnist Zoe Williams:

The city of New York, at midnight on Sunday, banned smoking from all its bars and restaurants. Though there was a fair amount of clamour beforehand (many New Yorkers pointed out how stressed they were, what with the war and whatnot), the New York Times yesterday was absolutely silent on the matter.

Funnily enough, a very similar thing happened in England when the smoking ban came into effect on Sunday July 1, 2007.

In anticipation of a busy day, media wise, I went in to the Forest office in London and the phone didn't ring once. Or, if it did, it was only because a couple of interviews were cancelled in favour of something more newsworthy.

The response (or lack of it) took us by surprise because it was in such stark contrast to the media storm that greeted the vote by MPs almost 17 months earlier.

The apathy when the New York ban was introduced was different.

In the early 2000s talk of a comprehensive public smoking ban in England was restricted to just two cities, London and Liverpool.

In 2002 however a Greater London Authority committee examined the evidence, and interviewed witnesses (including Forest).

After a six-month investigation they concluded that the threat of passive smoking didn't justify a public smoking ban and the idea was kicked into touch.

Meanwhile a private bill that would have given local authorities in Liverpool and London the right to enforce unilateral smoking bans lost momentum and petered out.

In fact, from a UK perspective, the game-changer was not New York in 2003 but Ireland in 2004 because it was the ban in Ireland that directly influenced the Scottish Executive and led to a ban in Scotland, followed by similar laws in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

The New York ban did however introduce Forest to Joe Jackson. The English musician had been living in New York for two decades, I think, when the ban was introduced, and his was one of the louder voices who argued against it even after it was in force.

In April 2004, for example, the New York Post reported that:

Joe Jackson is speakin’ out against Mayor Bloomberg’s smoking ban.

The singer has written a song bashing the ban that was enacted a year ago, and he’ll perform it for the first time in the Big Apple this month.

The song, “In 20-0-3,” takes a satirical look at the ban, which Jackson says is “escalating social tension.”

“I didn’t really write it with an agenda,” Jackson told The Post. “But having written it, I thought maybe it can make a difference.”

The tune describes a soldier returning home from Iraq, after losing his right arm in battle.

“You can do what you want, you can march off to war,” Jackson sings. “But in 20-0-3 you can’t smoke in a bar.”

Jackson told The Post that the law is based on “political correctness and junk science.”

“I would challenge Bloomberg to show us the evidence of these 1,000 people who are supposedly dying from secondhand smoke every year.”

Jackson is donating all proceeds from the song to several groups who are fighting the smoking ban.

One of those groups was Forest and Joe subsequently became an important part of the campaign that tried to stop a comprehensive smoking ban being introduced in England.

Writing for the Daily Telegraph in November 2003 (Stubbing out? Not if I can help it), he described his experience of New York following the ban and urged the UK government not to follow suit:

Britain can lead the world on this issue, with a smoking policy more considerate toward non-smokers than, say, that of Eastern Europe, but more realistic than the extreme prohibitionism of California and New York. Politicians, take note: you can win headlines and popularity with less, not more, restrictive legislation; by being more, not less, reasonable.

In February 2004 Joe told the Independent, They are using 'junk science' to bully us.

Later that year he wrote a well-received essay, published by Forest, entitled 'The Smoking Issue', a copy of which was presented to John Reid after Joe shared a platform with the Labour health secretary at a fringe meeting at the 2004 Labour conference in Brighton.

An updated version, Smoke, Lies and the Nanny State was published in 2007.

As we all know our campaign ended in failure but, back in New York, things were to get even worse for smokers. In 2011 the ban was extended to parks, beaches and public squares, and in 2018 it was extended to public housing.

There was even a threat to ban smoking “while walking”.

That hasn't happened yet but who knows what what madness will afflict the next generation of politicians?

To the best of my knowledge cigar bars are still exempt from the New York smoking ban but for how much longer?

Even in 2005, when I visited New York for the first time, there were only eight cigar bars in the entire city. I described one, very briefly, here:

The bar was air-conditioned but it wasn't plush. In fact it was quite scruffy and differed from an ordinary bar in just one respect – you could smoke a cigar indoors without the threat of prosecution.

Apart from two other customers and the barman it was also completely empty.

To be honest, there wasn't much more to say, but perhaps I went there with the wrong attitude.

Truth is, I've never understood why it should be legal to smoke a cigar in a designated bar but not a cigarette.

If he reads this Joe might like to add a comment on the current situation in New York (I believe he now divides his time between Berlin and New York) but I'll leave you with this observation, part of an article he wrote for Spiked in July 2010 when we were still fighting for an amendment to the smoking ban in England:

Ultimately, the problem here goes way beyond ‘to smoke or not to smoke’. There is a worrying general trend towards more and more intrusive legislation, justified by more and more dishonest and misleading junk science and fearmongering.

Typical of this are recent claims that the continuation of a long-term decline in heart attacks is ‘caused’ by smoking bans, and the invention of a new threat, ‘thirdhand smoke’, on the basis of no scientific evidence whatsoever.

What is needed is not just the repeal of the smoking ban and other illiberal laws, but a return to healthy scepticism about the claims made about various risks, fairness and tolerance towards others with different habits, and a large dose of common sense.

In 2003 New York chose to reject fairness and common sense and healthy scepticism. Worse, after stepping down as mayor Mike Bloomberg stepped up his anti-smoking crusade.

In the last decade Bloomberg Philanthropies is said to have invested $1.1 billion in the fight against tobacco use.

Significantly New York City's Smoke Free Air Act now 'prohibits smoking and the use of electronic cigarettes [my emphasis] in most workplaces and public spaces' - a warning to vaping advocates who think that, by supporting the war on tobacco, reduced risk vapour products will be treated more favourably.

The reality is that one ban invariably leads to another, and another. It’s simply a matter of time, and the clock is always ticking.

Ask New Yorkers.

PS. I can't write about the New York smoking ban without mentioning Audrey Silk, 'voice of the smoker USA', who I finally got to meet in 2017.

This 2011 feature in the New York Times – Now in Brooklyn, Homegrown Tobacco: Local, Rebellious and Tax Free – is a great introduction to a fearless campaigner.

See also: An Englishman in New York (after the smoking ban)

What’s done is Dunne

Hats off to John Dunne!

Launching VApril 2023 in the Palace of Westminster today, the director general of the UK Vaping Industry Association managed to get a prized selfie with former PM Boris Johnson:

The irony is that, for as long as I can remember, the otherwise amiable Dunne has been one of Boris's fiercest critics, rarely disguising his antipathy to the great Brexit bruiser.

Luckily Boris is famous for not holding grudges. Allegedly.

WATCH: Prohibition and the infantilisation of Britain

The video of our panel discussion at the IEA last week is now available on YouTube.

Someone has commented that at 1hr 20 mins it’s too long so they won’t watch it, and I have some sympathy with that.

The point is, it hasn’t been edited so what you get is the full discussion, including the Q&As, and the reason it's been uploaded is for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend and may wish to watch/listen to the whole thing.

I do understand though that it may not appeal to the TikTok generation.

PS. Apologies for some sound issues with one panellist’s microphone. It wasn’t apparent in the room otherwise it would have been corrected at the time.