Ban on smoking in cars the next 'logical step'?

Tuesday September 6, 2011

Brian Monteith warns that smokers are to be further stigmatised as a softening up exercise before the smoking ban is extended to include all private vehicles

The recent broadening of attacks on our personal lifestyle choices (see The new battlegrounds: food and drink, 16th August) does not mean that plans to make smokers pariahs have been sidelined. On the contrary, they are set to be advanced even further. In both England and Wales the respective jurisdictions have prepared tobacco control plans that suggest new initiatives to further ‘denormalise’ smoking.

While the English Tobacco Control Plan is out to consultation – addressed to the health professionals rather than the public that will be the subject of its bullying – the Welsh plan is already having an impact. The Welsh First Minister has said that a ban on smoking in cars if children are present is “the next logical step” to the existing ban on smoking in public places. He is clearly lining up legislation within the current electoral cycle of the Assembly.

A three year public (dis)information campaign that shows, provocatively but erroneously, an infant smoking a cigarette is being “tried first” to shame parents into not smoking in cars, although the evidence of how many actually do this is scant and unreliable.

The First Minister and his health advisers have not said what the current prevalence of Welsh adults smoking in cars with children present is, and have refused to say what an acceptable level will be. Without such benchmarks to measure the campaign against, it is reasonable to assume that the intention is to use the next three years to soften up the public before wheeling out legislation on the basis that no child should be submitted to second hand smoke.

The tactics of the smoke police, who populate the public health industry, health ‘charities’ and political lobbies, will include lies such as the one heard at the BMA conference held in Cardiff this year where it was claimed that smoking in a car is more dangerous than pumping the engine’s exhaust fumes directly into it.

The fact that the carbon dioxide gas produced after passing through a catalytic converter could asphyxiate a driver was conveniently ignored, as was the alternative that without a catalytic converter the carbon monoxide fumes would kill anyone within minutes through irreversible blood poisoning.

Nobody has yet committed suicide by smoking in their own car with the windows closed and the ventilator switched off.

The First Minister needs the three years to work out how a ban on smoking in cars would be introduced and policed. The problem is that the Welsh Assembly has no powers to introduce such criminal law and will have to find a means to police such an offence outwith road traffic legislation.

The likelihood is that, to make a new restriction simpler to manage, all smoking in cars will become an offence policed by local authorities. To establish enough public support for such an intrusive invasion of personal liberties will require a period of ‘education’ about the alleged risks from smoking while driving, not only to children, but to other drivers and pedestrians.

Of course the existing Welsh smoke police wish to establish a smoke-free world (preferably starting in Wales and spreading out to Europe and beyond) and would prefer a smoking ban in all cars anytime, rather than just when children are present.

The claim of protecting children from second hand smoke is nothing other than a pretext for the further denormalisation of smokers and their ostracism from the rest of society. So if this next “logical step” is limited in scope we can expect a further logical step to expand it a few years later.

Such is the relentless and dogmatic approach of today’s New Puritans.

Brian Monteith is author of The Bully State: The End of Tolerance, published by The Free Society (2009) and available on Amazon