Smoking and Freedom

I regard it as unadulterated nanny statism to ban smoking in pubs, and, god help us, on open air railway stations. It is also an attack on freedom. But, I do want to give up smoking and it may therefore be helpful to me personally. I am not going to want to spend a lot of time outside under shelters in the wind and rain.

The ban is unsupportable, though. This infingement of the liberty of the citizen cannot be justified. Nanny has become a dictator and good motives do not justify that.

Freedom must include the freedom to say unpopular things or to do unpopular acts or it is not really freedom. It is the dictatorship of the majority.

Freedom is about minority rights and upholding them. Freedom is about letting other people do or say things you dislike them doing or saying.

There were perfectly obvious other solutions that would have infringed no-one's rights. The simplest would have been a law that said that pubs with one bar should be non-smoking but that pubs with two or more bars could designate one of them as a smoking bar. In employment law it could have simply have been enacted that it would amount to discrimination to fail to employ bar staff who only wanted to work in a non-smoking environment.

It is legitimate to restrict freedom im in extreme circumstances (in the face of terrorism, for instance) but only so far essential, not merely expedient. To restrict freedom unnecessarily is both foolish and dictatorial which will be part of the Blair Legacy.