Murphy's letter from Edinburgh

 

The Essential Money Cow

The Scottish Parliament has brought in new laws on the smoking of cigarettes, pipes and cigars which come into force next year, and it will be very interesting to how the law will be enforced on this issue.

Passive smoking is supposed to be the governments change in policy on smoking. And because of that, you will no longer be able to smoke in any restaurant, pub, office or any other place which is deemed to be a public place and where smoking could be harmful to other people's health.

Smoking has been banned on buses for a long time in Scotland, and there are already restaurants that have a no smoking policy.  These policies have worked quite well for years without the government or the Scottish Parliament getting involved.

But, I am a little bit curious to know how long will it be before the street or the bus shelter become classed as public places and smoking is banned there too?  They seem to have left a lot of grey areas in their legislation as to what is and what is not a public place.  And because of this, there is a lot of confusion as to what is legal and what is not.

Private clubs have been told that they will have to abide by this new legislation, much to the anger of some club members who think that the committee members of the club are the people who should make the rules as to how the club is run as long as it's within the remit of the law.

I tend to look back at history as a benchmark on issues like this and to try and make sense of what's going on as we move in to the future.  Any smoker will tell you that smoking is bad for them, but they still do it.  And according to the scientists, passive smoking can effect the people around them, but they don't seem to be able to produce any conclusive evidence apart from their word and their own personal dislike for all kinds of smoking.

Yet at the beginning of the last century there was hardly a person who didn't smoke. That went right on to the 1960s when doctors and other bodies decided that smoking was not good for you.  Since then tobacco adverts have been banned and anti smoking adverts have become normal in Britain and other countries.  The passive smoking issue is a fairly new one and I'm not convinced that it's really all about the truth.

I have a tendency to believe that it's more about government revenue rather than about health.  During the last century most housing was very cramped.  And in that house you had huge families all living under the one roof.  It was not unknown for the grandparents, their children and the new generation of five to six children to live in cramped conditions. Most adults in that household were smokers.

This was happening right up and down the country because of a shortage of housing and low pay for the working person.  Passive smoking was never an issue then, and we didn't have people dropping off like flies because they had inhaled the smoke in their environment.

Is this not the generation that are now living longer and causing the government a headache because they can't afford to pay them a proper pension because they are living too long?

In the first part of the 20th century the government drew a lot of revenue from the smoker, and was quite happy to do so because this where a lot of the revenue came from.  Cars were not the main source of revenue for the government in that period of time, so they needed all the income that smoking could bring in.

It seems to me that the tables have turned with the amount of cars now on the roads and what it generates in revenue for the government.  The government is on a sure winner with the revenue from the motorists and it can now probably afford to forfeit the revenue it used to take from the smoker by condemning it.

If you take the car and what the government now takes in from the motorists. Everything is taxed.  The fuel - petrol and oil, the buying of a car, the taxing and insurance of the car, the spares for the repairs taxed with Value Added Tax, parking, income tax from the people working within all parts of the industry.  It starts from the producer right down to the scrapyard where the car will end up eventually.

Believe me the smoker never generated revenue anywhere close to the amount that the automotive trade does for the government.  Nowadays with so many different forms of transport on the road the government is pulling a lot of money in from the transport on our roads.  The motorist has become the new essential money cow for the government.

The new smoking laws will eventually be implemented nationwide, but I believe it will cause a lot of problems for the government in the future when it comes to policing it.

If you were to ask me who I would rather sit in a garage with for half an hour with the doors shut on this issue, I would have to say the smoker.  In less than twenty minutes of a car engine running with the garage door shut the consequences are fairly obvious - I would dead.  But sitting for a day with a smoker my survival rate would probably still be 100%.

With anything from 25 to 30 million cars on the roads of Britain churning out an invisible gas that no one can see, my life is more likely to be shortened this way more than any smoker could shorten it.

So I conclude that this issue is more about government revenue rather than about the health of the population.

Written by Andrew Murphy 20 October 2005

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