Toot, toot, it's Edwin Poots
Northern Ireland's health minister has threatened to ban smoking in all vehicles.
Edwin Poots, a member of the Democratic Unionist Party who sounds like a character from a Charles Dickens' novel (The Pickwick Papers comes to mind), said yesterday that he would consider banning smoking in all cars and not just those with children as passengers.
The BBC has the story here: Edwin Poots launches car smoking ban consultation. It includes a short response from me on behalf of Forest:
"We don't condone people smoking in cars with children present. It's inconsiderate, certainly, but the evidence doesn't support the argument that smoking in cars is a serious health risk to children. Legislation is a gross over-reaction. What next, a ban on smoking in the home?"
I was also asked to write a few worde for today's Belfast Telegraph. Link to follow.
Paul Rowlandson, a lecturer at the University of Ulster in Londonderry and Forest's spokesman in Northern Ireland, writes:
This is the predictable consequence of devolution - power is devolved to interfering arrogant busybodies. The tyranny of the council and the local assembly is worse than the tyranny of Westminster.
We now have a tax on plastic bags, a levy on large stores (Sainsburys, Tesco, M&S etc) to subsidise small businesses in city centres where consumers choose not to shop (IKEA are now likely to close their only NI store as a result), and now this illiberal attack on smokers. Nobody ever lost votes by attacking smokers.
In the BBC report it says 'The DUP's Jim Wells also said statistics from the Ulster Cancer Foundation showed 300,000 children throughout the UK are being referred to a GP every year as a result of tobacco smoke inhalation.
He said 9,500 of these cases led to hospital visits.'
Is there any evidence for this? The RCP estimates that 300,000 children are referred to GPs for consultations for ailments which the RCP attributes to passive smoking, even though their own figures show a “progressive increase in relative incidence for lower respiratory infections, wheeze, asthma and meningitis with increasing socio-economic deprivation” (p110 of the RCP report).