Pubs should opt to go smoke-free

Four years is too long to wait: make your pub non-smoking now, says Andrew Jefford

I suppose it was inevitable that the Government would go for a compromise. That's the British way. We seem to hate any radical measure; root-and-branch reform scares us. Little by little, though, we're getting there: the minority of smokers, according to the Government's White Paper on Public Health, are no longer going to be allowed to tyrannise the majority. They used to do it on buses, aeroplanes and in cinemas. Once upon a time, they probably even used to do it in the waiting rooms of doctor's surgeries. And it's all slowly coming to an end, which is great news both for non-smokers and the smokers themselves, who will end up consuming fewer coffin nails and go to bed each night breathing a little more easily.

Personally, I'm disappointed in John Reid's various compromises. Four years is a long time to wait to be guaranteed an unpolluted pub meal. I hope now that many pubs will have the confidence to go smoke-free sooner than this. The Government's proposals will mean that the public now understands that clean air in pubs is the future, and will begin to adjust its expectations accordingly. Many smokers will accept that they can't carry on polluting the air for non-smokers for ever, and will welcome the opportunity to cut back.

I worry about the exemption for wet pubs which don't serve food ­ and for their staff. If smokers begin to use such venues primarily because they permit smoking, the atmosphere there will be even more unpleasant than it already is, totally rebuffing casual non-smokers. There is no long-term future in catering for a dying market. Forcing wet pubs to become smoking sanctuaries will condemn them to do just that.

I'm not totally gloomy, though, because I suspect that the smoke ban in food-serving pubs will, by 2010, have proved to be popular, so that whatever government we have by then will be able to nudge wet pubs in the same direction. I would be surprised if, by 2020, all pubs have not become smoke-free.

Much fuss has been made about the exemption for private clubs, but legally it seems to me that this was inevitable; a private club, by definition, is not a public place. In the long term, I would confidently expect most private clubs ­ not just the golf clubs but the working men's clubs, too ­ to take the initiative and ban smoking of their own volition. The plain fact is that not only will fewer and fewer people smoke in the future, working men included, but the social stigma attached to smoking in places where there are non-smokers sharing the air will grow until only the most selfish or most obtuse persist. Even-tually, they will politely be told to stop.

John Reid's notion that "people from lower socio-economic backgrounds have very few pleasures and one of them is smoking" struck me as patronising and wildly inaccurate. I walked past a smoker's room at Heathrow Airport last week, and never have I seen a dozen people looking gloomier: I've seen cheerier folk in dental waiting rooms. Pub smokers are generally merry because they are relaxing with their friends, and because a little alcohol has lowered their inhibitions; the cigarettes merely quench the flames of an unhappy addiction which many admit they'd be better without. The fact that workers are more likely to smoke than managers is as much to do with peer-group pressure as anything else, especially during adolescence when the addiction is acquired. Part of the "pleasure" lies in the common bond of solidarity; the rest lies in assuaging an addictive craving. All that will change, too: "people from lower socio-economic backgrounds" are not stupid. There are plenty of non-smoking youngsters on building sites and in factories who understand that inhaling a packet of Marlboro a day is not pleasure but pain.

Having at long last got this far, is it too much to hope that the British Beer & Pub Association will now give up its daft fantasy that non-smokers are quite happy to inhale smoke, polluting both their clothes and lungs, and ruining the aroma and flavour of their pints and their meals?

Let's get firmly behind the Government's proposals so that the inevitable change, when it comes, will win widespread if sometimes grudging public acceptance from all of those who use pubs, whatever side of the debate they are on. That, after all, is in everyone's interest.