Musings

Last week at work I got myself speakers with a headphone jack (one of the applications I was testing had sounds that needed to be checked) so this week I've been listening to BBC Radio 4, something I got addicted to while living in England. Lets face it - no one in the world does news like BBC, something I got really blasé about when it was the standard but that I've really now missed in Canada where the news come from various biased sources (unfortunately some of them American - never good). And I still like to follow British politics, it was part of my life for so long that once and a while I need to check how "folks back home" are doing - whereas Finnish politics are starting to feel like ancient history and only things that stick to mind are idiots like Vanhanen and Karpela which probably doesn't give a very accurate image of the state of the affairs.

Anyway, British politics. Something that they have been wrestling with lately has been banning of smoking in public places. This is actually a topic close to my heart - something that basically prevented me from spending much time in British pubs was the smoking: I literally get sick from tobacco smoke, and I'm not even getting to the effect of second hand smoking that are quite widely known. In Vancouver there is a total ban on smoking in public places, and I love it, love it, love it... The fact that you can eat your lunch or dinner in a nice environment, but also that you can spend an evening in a club without getting sick from the smoke is simply fabulous. And this was the way England was going to go, too - I understand Scotland had already decided to do that, and Wales will probably follow suit - until Blair started flip-flopping and yesterday made a decision to go for a partial ban. The arguments put forward have been ridiculous to put it politely - for example that "if people can't smoke in the pub they go home to smoke and expose their kids to second hand smoking" whereas research shows that in the countries where smoking on public places has been banned there has been a decrease of smoking altogether - people still want to drink more than they want to smoke.

Result is that smoking has been banned in places that serve food and will be allowed in clubs and pubs that don't serve food (although what constitutes as food is apparently not defined), and in "private clubs". This does very little for the original aim of the ban that was supposed to protect the bar staff - it puts them in unequal position where in some places they are protected and in other they aren't, let alone compared to their colleagues in Scotland and Wales that are all protected. It's a complete cop-out, and the only reason I can think for this is got to be some kind of lobbying from the tobacco companies. Research done on the bans in other countries prove that bans are in fact very popular and health benefits are tangible, so I find it difficult to believe that the result is because they would be afraid of what people will think.

And one thing I have never understood either, has been the insistence that smoking is somehow an issue about personal freedom. Yes, I can understand why people argue they have a right to pollute their own lungs and take years off their own lives - albeit it means they still use the hospitals that I pay for - but why do people think they have the right to do that to anyone else? Some people wouldn't dream of smoking in front of their children (and good for them) - but still insist they should be able to do it with their friends and complete strangers. They oppose having to go into smelling smoking rooms on the airport, but still think it's fine to expose me to that smoke and make my clothes smell like that. I hope the government in Britain will have the balls to go with a total ban eventually.

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