The smoking ban steeplechase

Monday December 5, 2011

Brian Monteith predicts which UK assembly will win the race to ban smoking in cars

Behaving like alcoholics let loose in a distillery, the race is on for British politicians to ban smoking in cars and so display an inebriated machismo about their ability to control how lesser mortals live their lives.

Drunk on the power to do pretty much as they please against a minority that feels so marginalised as to find resistance difficult, the politicians of our four political institutions will ignore any evidence if it contradicts their beliefs and invent their own when they need some.

With the power to pass smoking bans distributed across the United Kingdom there is every likelihood that the first domino to fall will knock over the three others – and ultimately spread across Europe, just as the ban on smoking inside public places has over the last five years.

But where will it happen first? At Westminster for England, at Holyrood for Scotland, at the Senedd for Wales, or at Stormont for Northern Ireland?

My money’s on Northern Ireland.

I have absolutely no doubt that David Cameron and Nick Clegg would, if it were a simple matter of triangulating the political forces, offer little resistance to the BMA’s wish for a ban on smoking in all cars.

They would look at it this way: smokers are a minority and not one with a lot of public sympathy; years of stigmatising them have seen to that. The number of people that smoke within cars is even smaller – and the even smaller minority of that group that do so whilst children are travelling with them is enough to give politicians the moral high ground – enough even to ban it in all cars whether children are present or not, so as to make policing such a law easier.

They will calculate that resistance to such a law will be low and that those that do still smoke behind the wheel will be made to look self indulgent and conceited by a media with no tobacco advertising revenues to cause a pause for thought.

Still, there is such a thing as the tobacco control plan for England. And while it talks of considering further action to discourage smoking and protect public health, this is not exactly an example of the nudge theory the Tories profess to prefer. A ban is not even a shove, it’s a full Nelson. An on-the-spot fine with the threat of jail if you don’t pay up is the use of coercive legal force.

Far better then, Cameron and Clegg will calculate, to let others do it first and make it seem normal. Indeed I’d go so far as to say that England will be the last place in the UK to introduce such a law.

What about Scotland then, where the Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon has a passion for tobacco control quite unrivalled by any other politician I know. Well, Scotland could do it tomorrow in the sense that the SNP has an overall majority and can pass any law it wishes – without the inconvenient scrutiny of a second chamber. That much is true, but there is a process to go through and as such a ban has not been mentioned in the legislative programme that is already well underway.

The procedures require various levels of evidence gathering and debate so the earliest I expect it to be announced would be in October next year, with a Bill taking until Spring 2013 before it might be passed. It could even take longer. I think Sturgeon will lobby hard to introduce the measure but she will be hard pressed to be first to pass it.

That’s not because the Welsh Assembly will beat her to it – the Welsh also have a tobacco control plan and have in fact started a three-year process of gathering evidence before running a consultation on a smoking in cars ban (see my article in September).

The Assembly also lacks the legal authority to make it a criminal offence and has yet to resolve how it can empower local authorities to police such a ban. Again, the BMA’s clamour for the ban has come at an awkward time and the Welsh politicians are likely on this occasion to go with their strategy of softening up the public first and pushing for a ban in three years time.

That leaves the Northern Ireland Assembly – and here it gets interesting. Last month the Northern Ireland Health Secretary Donald Poots (DUP) announced a consultation on the very subject of a ban on smoking in cars. He is in fact ahead of everyone else and we all know what these consultations do – they justify whatever the politicians want. So the consultation will find in favour of a ban and it will be for all cars, whether children are in them or not.

More troubling, though, was the debate in Stormont that followed, when members of every party, from Sinn Fein to Ulster unionists to the Alliance, agreed that such a ban would be a good thing if it could be policed effectively (probably the biggest issue in Northern Ireland where being a census enumerator has been enough to get you shot).

So there we have it, an eager health minister and no opposition, Northern Ireland has a head start. Expect to see the ban in place there first, with Scotland to follow and Wales and England bringing up the rear. We can disregard the evidence, we can ignore any protests, because one thing’s certain – the politicians will.

Brian Monteith was a Conservative Member of the Scottish Parliament between 1999 and 2007. He is now a political commentator with a weekly column in The Scotsman.