Rupert Lowe: Restore smoking in pubs
It was reported last week that Restore Britain, the ‘far right’ party led by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, supports separate smoking rooms in pubs.
Headlines suggested the party ‘wants to bring back smoking in pubs’ which was technically true, but the proposal is actually a little more nuanced than that. According to Lowe:
A Restore Britain Government will allow pub landlords and other venue owners to install a smoking room. "If adults want to smoke inside a contained room, and the landlord is happy to provide that, then it's none of our business. Crack on.”
GB News requested an interview but I was at sea (see previous post) and unavailable. Had I been available I would have supported the idea because Lowe is absolutely right - it should be a matter for the landlord, not the government, to choose a policy on smoking that best suits his business (including staff and customers). Indeed, it was one of several arguments we employed 20+ years ago before smoking was banned in pubs (and other indoor ‘public’ places) in Ireland in 2004, followed by the rest of the British Isles in 2006/07.
Furthermore, the well-ventilated designated smoking room - which Restore is advocating - was something Forest pushed for when we launched the Save Our Pubs & Clubs: Amend The Smoking Ban campaign in 2009. The following year Conservative MP David Nuttall tabled a ten minute rule bill to amend the ban just so, but it was defeated in the House by 141 votes to 86.
Anyway, Lowe’s proposal prompted the usual tsunami of comments about how much nicer pubs are without people smoking indoors (which conveniently overlooks the number of pubs - around 10,000 - that closed in the ten years after the introduction of the ban), not to mention the health ‘benefits’ of not breathing other people’s smoke, despite the lack of evidence that it poses a significant risk to non-smokers’ health. (This is disputed, I know, but I would still argue that there is very little evidence that proves that exposure to ‘secondhand’ smoke is a significant health risk. Unfortunately we lost that PR battle many years ago and neither government nor the mainstream media has any interest in revisiting the subject.)
And that, of course, is one of many problems we face. A generation of pub goers has grown up having never experienced smoking in pubs so the common assumption is that, prior to the ban, every pub was either smoke-filled or stinking of stale smoke, which - by the Noughties - was far from the case. You’ll never convince Gen Z of that, though, nor will you convince the intolerant anti-smoking brigade for whom even a whiff of smoke is an unacceptable intrusion into their personal space.
Meanwhile it’s a pity that Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, a well known smoker, hasn’t made a similar commitment to amend the smoking ban. (To the best of my knowledge, the only anti-smoking legislation Reform would amend or repeal is the generational sales ban.)
Perhaps Nigel thinks there aren’t enough votes in it (and he may be right) but the principal of allowing landlords to choose their own policy on smoking is an important one. In practice, I suspect that very few publicans would change their current, legally-enforced, no smoking policy, but they should be given the option of having a smoking room, indoors or outside. In particular, I’ve never understood why pubs aren’t allowed to erect a warm and comfortable smoking room outside, rather than a ‘shelter’ that is 50 per open to wind and rain and therefore useless in bad weather.
Interestingly, it has been reported that ‘Lowe also wants landlords to be able to serve under-18s low-alcohol booze at the bar’, which is another policy I would support because, based on my own experience 50 years ago, I’ve always felt it’s better if 15-17 year-olds are drinking in a pub under the watchful eye of staff, rather than drinking, unsupervised, on the street or in the local park. That’s how it was in my day (the Seventies) and, even though it was illegal to serve alcohol to anyone under 18, many publicans turned a blind eye and I don’t believe it was a major problem.
Anyway, both policies seem, to me, to be perfectly reasonable and worth debating. Unfortunately, there are arguably even better reasons not to vote for Restore (which I won’t go into today) so I can’t see Lowe’s comments - welcome though they are - changing the political dial.
What is remarkable, though, is that the pub smoking ban still has the ability to generate headlines two decades after its introduction, which suggests the subject remains divisive, even today. I’ll have some more information in a few days, so watch this space.
Update: Chris Snowdon has written an excellent article for The Critic, ‘Time to scrap the smoking ban: Intolerance, not smoking, is what should be considered irrational and unpleasant’.
PS. Amid the many responses to Rupert Lowe on X was a comment by a so-called ‘Believer in freedom and civil liberties’ who wrote, ‘The indoor smoking ban is one of the few nanny state measures I actually like’.
When I blocked him from following the Forest account I did so half-jokingly to highlight the hypocrisy of calling yourself a ‘believer in freedom and civil liberties’ and then supporting the smoking ban.
However, his reaction to being blocked (‘That is kind of pathetic’ and the even better ‘Can they please unblock me?’) made me laugh even more and he remains blocked. Permanently.
Home page photo credit: iStock / philpell
