Quote of the day
“It was a mistake. It demonised millions and was an illiberal move.”
- Labour MP Tom Harris on the smoking ban
16 Comments
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Bugger I!
An honest comment.
Meanwhile 30 pubs every week go down the pan.
F*ck me. I do like Tom!
I don’t.
But his comment is spot on.
Since I stopped smoking over 25 years back, all you weed addicted tossers can get on with it..but not near me please.
I was against the smoking ban, for exactly the reasons Tom Harris has stated.
As a musician though, it has changed the environment that I work in dramatically. I no longer hack and cough the morning after a gig. I don’t lose my voice any more, though I sometimes play a 2 hour show. I don’t stink, nor does the gear or the van (which already stinks of sweaty muso most friday & saturday nights, and that’s bad enough I assure you!)
What regrettable though, is the constant train of smokers who can’t last a whole gig without a fag.
It is illiberal, it has put pressure on businesses, and it should have been implimented in a far more sensible way, especially the abiity to have indoor smoking bars/rooms. That said, I would not want to return to the way things were.
What Julia M says.
@ Tony E, I used to be in bands when I was young, and I only met one single musician out of dozens who didn’t smoke. How times change.
When and where did he say it?
As a non-smoker, I really like going into a pub (especially a live music venue) and not having to suffer other people’s smoke. But I still think the law against smoking was wrong. The downside of the ban is that pubs, including music venues I really liked going, to are closing down through lack of business.
Pubs that had the ability to segretate smokers and non smokers should have been allowed to do so. The presumption should have been that if they couldn’t segregate smokers, then the pub was deemed to be non-smoking throughout. Bar staff should have been recruited to serve in either non-smoking areas or unspecified, with apropriate employment protection in place to prevent coercion. There should have been an onus on employers to advertise ’smoking area’ employment if they needed staff to work in a smoking area.
The downside of the ban is that pubs, including music venues I really liked going to are closing down through lack of business.
The presumption should have been that if they couldn’t segregate smokers, then the pub was deemed to be non-smoking throughout.
Not much use at a rock’n'roll venue then is it? Are the band supposed to play one gig for the non smokers and one for the smokers in separate rooms?
I’m a live music fan too. I spent many happy times in my youth in venues that could best be described as “grotty” and frankly I like that ambience. Particularly part of the ambience was the scent of wacky backy, Rock’n'roll isn’t supposed to be clean and polite and safe- Dick Puddlecote did a good post on this recently about the sterile War Of The Worlds concert he’d just been to. Could punk or rock have evolved in the socially policed elfin safety atmosphere of today, with safety wardens ensuring you sit in your nice seat so you don’t hurt yourself and throwing people out for lighting a tab?
Well I think smoking is part of that. There are lots of nice clean safe places; pubs and particularly music pubs shouldn’t be shoehorned into niceness. It just isn’t rock’n'roll. And the fact that venues are closing down indicates that a lot of their customers feel the same way.
What next, “I don’t like the smell of beer and drunk people dancing around and jostling me”? Well, don’t go to a bloody gig then. Take up flower arranging or something nice like that.
@Ian B
I remember the types of gigs you are talking about, and they are still there despite the smoking ban.
I played at the Cavern Club in Liverpool last year, the temperature in the building alone was enough knock you back as you came in the door. The walls drip with sweat, before the first band goes on. Bloody Brilliant! Most village hall gigs used to get like that, but now you just can’t get a licence for those.
The Dutch have it right (as they usually do being a liberal and sensible people). We played this year in a partitioned venue under the new laws. If you want a drink, you have to go to the non smoking bit to get one. No-one permanently works in the smoking bit, but then they can all get totally hammered and no-one ever starts a fight! (And they all return their glasses to the bar!). The band play in the non smokers end, a partition wall with big windows allows a good view of the band, and the bands are allowed to play at a good volume so the sound bleeds through well.
Now just why is it that we couldn’t have a law like that?
Maybe it’s because if we were all left alone by the law, we might just behave better towards each other, and their whole argument for the police state would fall apart.
Dramatic laws take courage and this will probably be the only time I say this but Labour actually stuck there neck out on this one and did the right thing. Think of the laws in the past that have ‘demonised millions’ but we now look back on in shame that that could have ever happened. Think of working children, African slavery, bear baiting, otter hunting etc etc. All banned because they were deemed to be doing harm. Smoking is also in this category. And so in theory should be banned outright – but too much money is made from it so that will never happen.
Change happens in giant steps which is always going to anger people but in a generation or so no-one will think anything of it!
Smokers are members of this democratic society too. They have been treated appallingly. They STILL pay a considerable amount of tax on tobacco and have less freedom.
Ironic that a labour MP should NOW come to that conclusion. Now, that they are slowly realising that they are responsible for the closure of thousands of pubs, clubs, bingo halls and cafes.
True democracy is giving “everyone a choice”..
“…partition wall with big windows… sound bleeds through…”
crikey almighty, that’s watching a band is it? Staring through the window from the naughty area? I feel a sense of utter despair that anyone could consider that a rational thing for government to demand.
Okay, let’s look at beer. It’s the last legal, socially acceptable drug. The Temperance Movement had to lay off it a bit for a while due to the mess up with prohibition, but now they’re back on it. Today in the Telegraph for instance was an announcement that alcohol causes “a tenth of all deaths”.
Part of the justification used for the smoking ban was “denormalisation” and “breaking the link between drinking and smoking”. Okay, let’s apply the same reasoning to alcohol. It’s considered too socially normal. We want to denormalise it, and break the link between, say, eating and alcohol.
So, restaurants are told that people may not drink alcohol with their meal. They are allowed to go outside and drink if they must. Now, how’s that going to affect the experience of having a meal in a restaurant? Not going to be much fun guiltily going outside for a glass of wine, is it? Why bother going out for a meal if you’re treated like an unwanted sinner?
Now you may say, that’s a ludicrous assertion, but I don’t think it is. Imagine telling somebody twenty years ago that people would think it normal to watch a band through big windows, with the sound miserably bleeding through a wall. They’d have called you a paranoid loon.
It would be easy for the State to stop issuing drinks licenses to music venues. “People can still enjoy music” would say the prune-faced minister, “we have to do something about the appalling death toll from drinking” and so on. Remember, anti-smokers were once considered a rather neurotic, antisocial minority of killjoys. Now they are triumphant. There are lots of anti-drinkers out there with a lot of good arguments. Smoking doesn’t make people beat their wives, but drink does. Smoking doesn’t make people dangerous drivers, but drink does. Drinking destroys your bodily organs, wrecks your nervous system, causes mental illness. Nobody was ever rendered a psychological mess who can’t work by smoking, but drink does it all the time. Drinkers are very much back in the frame, and this time the Temperance Movement have all the experience gained with tobacco to make sure they win.
Watching through windows. Jesus. What have we come to?
Ian, your prediction of booze becoming banned is a little reactionary. I proffered the Netherlands situation because it clearly works better than here and is not forcing as many businesses to close. It is also much more liberal than UK law, but is based on the same EU legisaltion.
Most people have a smoke and return to the action in the smoke free bar, and actually prefer it that way. I am sure you are not alone in wanting a return to the way things were, but I really wasn’t trying to make the point that the venue or the atmosphere of the gig is better or worse for it, just that it leaves me more able to put on a decent gig without the smoke, and that other EU countries have been less draconian over the ban.
Tony, I’m not sure that reactionary was the word you were looking for, I can’t make the sentence make sense with it. Did you mean, alarmist or something like that?
As we’ve seen with tobacco, the Temperance Movement now don’t push straight for an outright ban- they are more subtle, first producing a massive level of demonisation and public condemnation, such that many ordinary people develop an enormous antipathy to the Damned Thing, and then move for ever more extreme restrictions. We can already see this process happening with alchohol- demands for increased prices, drink control zones, churning out of propaganda about drinking rates, that same stock photo of the two drunk fat girls that pops up with dismal regularity in the press, and so on. They are building another moral panic around us, and if it continues it may well be that, say, twenty years from now, people will be amazed that back in the 00s people were allowed to drink at rock gigs. And there will no doubt then be people saying how nice it is to be able to play a gig (at one of the few remaining grim venues) without it being full of drunks, and so on.
The principle is one of shifting the normal, such that over time extremism comes to appear to be normal- just as in a strict muslim country, people think an unshrouded woman is shockingly weird, because black bags are their “normal”.
Ian, I agree, an incorrect use of language, alarmist works better.
I have been thinking about this, because your argument over the temperence movement is maybe not as far fetched as I originally would have liked to believe. That worries me greatly, because that would ruin the livelihood and enjoyment of huge numbers of people.
The reasons I think it is unlikely that it will get that far is that there are huge vested interests involved. At the EU level, European brewers would kick off worse than a bar brawl. Also, few Eu coutries have the problems we have with alcohol consumption and crime, so there is maybe less reason for the EU to impose it upon us from Brussels.
Secondly, I don’t think any national government who imposed it could survive very long. The scale of the panic that they would have to create to carry the people on such a law would be too huge a task to engineer. Rural England for example, would never fall for it, and the big cities would lose so much money in tax revenues (bars, nightclubs and restaurants), that they would be against it also.
I think the difference with smoking, was that the act itself creates the problem. If you smoke, then everybody around you smokes. It is an absolute, there is no way of mitigating it in a small space. (Ventilation is the usual argument, but that is difficult in older buildings like pubs).
Drinking is different. I have a pint, you have a coke, you don’t get drunk, and unless I have more than I can handle and become mindlessly ignorant or violent, we can co-exist in the same confined area without detriment. Violence, whatever its causes, is a criminal act, seperate from the consumption of alcohol. Nearly all of us like a drink from time to time, but 99% never cause any harm to others.
While we (the average sensible drinkers) are in the majority, I hope it will be difficult for the ‘norm’ to be shifted in the way you describe, but I certainly see that it is not impossible.