Battle of the out of doors smoking ban: Whose facet are you on?

Kevin Maguire – YES, this will help smokers kick the habit

Imagine a corporation started selling a new lethal product killing 80,000 of us prematurely every year.

The clamour for a ban and prosecutions would be deafening so spare me excuses of the tobacco lobby, addicted users of their cancer sticks and apologists shouting about civil liberties.

Smoking annually culling more people than booze, illegal drugs, obesity and lack of exercise combined is why a responsible Government has a moral duty to help tobacco’s victims.

Nor can the £21-billion cost to the NHS, days lost at work and, above all else, the heartache be ignored.

And why should the 13% minority still lighting up be allowed to breathe their potentially fatal fumes on the 87% majority? What about our human rights, particularly the right to live?

I’d love a pint of Landlord in a pub garden without sitting in their fag ends or dodging stinking ash trays.

Outlawing puffing away in public spaces where people are pretty close to each other is intended to save most of us from the harmful damage of passive smoking.

But it would also help nicotine addicts kick a fatal, expensive habit. Restricting where they fill their lungs with noxious gases would inevitably persuade some to give it up. Most smokers want to stop anyway so let’s give them another helping hand.

How it’s still permitted, or anybody thinks they can do it in kids’ play areas, beats me. The end of pubs was falsely heralded when smoking inside was ended in 2007 yet no credible evidence exists to pin boozers shutting on cleaner air at the bar.

Vapes must be addressed too but, with a ban on those under-15 ever legally buying cigs, I’ll raise a glass to nicer and safer gardens.

Knee-jerk reactionaries screeching this is all ‘nanny state’ should ask themselves why the wealthy, the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world, employ nannies.

We could all do with a bit of help.

Darren Lewis – NO, this is overreach by the ‘nanny state’

No grand plan to address the knife crime epidemic taking lives and destroying families.

Or to deal with the rise in shoplifting or unashamed, open drug use. Or to reassure the public that police will attend burglaries and muggings.

Instead a ban on smoking in outdoor spaces – in pub gardens, outdoor restaurants, and outside hospitals and sports grounds.

As a non-smoker myself, I’m well placed to remain objective on a set of measures that should be way down on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s priority list.

Because overreach doesn’t begin to sum them up. They scream Nanny state when they don’t need to. Why give your opponents an unnecessary stick to beat you with like this?

The thinking behind it from Number 10 is that tobacco use is the UK’s single biggest preventable killer, taking two-thirds of long-term users’ lives and causing 80,000 deaths every year.

Smokers, though, know this. So if they want to step outside of pubs, restaurants, hospitals, schools and other such buildings to take an action they know to be detrimental to their health, that’s on them, not you.

The pub industry is on its knees as it is. The wider hospitality industry has taken a huge hit, (no) thanks to Brexit.

The UK is the better for the ban on smoking indoors as those spaces became far more appealing to families and people like me who don’t want to emerge as if we’ve been rolling around in an ashtray.

Around 6.4 million people smoked in 2022 according to the most recently available data from the Office for National Statistics. That’s the lowest number since records began in 2011.

It means people are getting the message anyway. Do they need to lose jobs, businesses and livelihoods for the point to be made?

Hopefully the government is only taking the temperature on this. Because a large proportion of the country will agree – regardless of their politics – that there are more important things to be attending to.