Roy Beers: Ready for round two of the great war on smoking?

It's still, take your pick, either the "greatest health reform for a generation" or (my preference) a crude attempt at social engineering which badly backfired.

The choice depends on whether you agree with the views of the since-ousted Labour administration which railroaded the ban into law, or, for example, those of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association.

When the ban came into force on March 26 2006, so we were told, a valiant blow was struck for Scottish health which would deliver incalculable benefits for us all. We're still waiting.

Former First Minister Jack McConnell's unilaterally-declared health crusade was announced with considerable bombast after a visit to exactly one smoke-free chain pub in Dublin.

Did he have a sort of Damascene conversion to blanket ban, or was he following orders from Number Ten? Nobody knows what went on in political smoke-free rooms.

Many observers at the time commented that McConnell, frequently criticised as "weak", had a great political need to be seen to be doing something "strong".

He needed a stratagem to equal fictional PM Jim Hacker's defence of the Great British Sausage against the hated Eurosausage - something populist and apparently laudable but unconnected to serious politics.

Even if that were the case (and of course it's just a cynical theory) he was surely sincere in thinking he was doing the right thing, although as it turned out he gained absolutely no political kudos from the ban in any case.

The legislation was continually trumpeted as a "success" throughout Labour's doomed 2007 election campaign, which however saw McConnell defeated, losing office to the SNP's Alex Salmond - a catastrophe for Labour which at a stroke ended half a century of political hegemony in Scotland.

Amid all the sound and fury of the one-sided debate leading up to the ban was the SLTA's insistence that a partial measure, allowing bars to have indoor smoking areas staff wouldn't have to enter, would be a fair way of dealing with the situation. However nobody was listening.

Such a compromise solution would have guaranteed bar staff clean air, given everyone free choice, and would in many cases have avoided all the subsequent hoo-ha about who could and couldn't have a shelter, canopies etc; and, sure as night follows day, the complaints about noise from smokers.

Not every bar could have brought in such measures, of course. Many town and city "trad" bars are single-room operations, often with nothing but the street as an outside area. They were marked for slump or closure from the start.

The ban was bounced through the Scottish Parliament, opposed only by the Tories, and bar operators promptly found themselves playing postcode lottery.

Some councils, for example Dundee, took as negative and unhelpful a stance as possible; others, for example East Ayrshire, bent over backwards to help licensees. Glasgow's senior civil servant on the case told a packed licensees meeting a shelter couldn't have a roof (not true), only to have to admit very soon after that she'd got it wrong. It was a good old-fashioned shambles.

As the farce unfolded through a thousand little planning sagas, replete with municipal obfuscation and petty tyranny, operators including Belhaven and Punch pumped money into outdoor areas: independent operators with cash and viable areas did likewise.

Hardly anybody has been fined for smoking or permitting smoking, although, absurdly, innumerable taxi drivers in over-zealous Paisley were spot-fined for smoking in their cabs while awaiting a hire - a classic example of officialdom completely losing the plot.

Walk down pubs-and-restaurants strip Ashton Lane in Glasgow's West End any busy-ish day of the week, and you'll see (I'm sad enough to have tried this several times) that every outdoor table now plays host to one or more usually several smokers.

A few of the "luckier" bars in the area have those decked shelter areas you only used to see on holiday, while countless ordinary cafes have sprouted canopies, tables and chairs to hook into a mythical "continental table café culture", in which we all become jolly boulevardiers.

One journalist, perhaps a little unkindly, described Glasgow these days as "looking like Paris after a nuclear attack" because of this new scruffily-defiant street life.

Meanwhile SLTA chief executive Paul Waterson says he's convinced hardly anyone has given up smoking - some may have had a shot at it - and that the main effect has been a retreat of the former smoking regulars into each other's living rooms, where they're free to enjoy discount supermarket beer with no licensing hours constraints.

The new customers the trade was promised (admittedly by people who had never run the proverbial whelk stall) haven't arrived, he says. Some did pop down to the pub out of curiosity, or novelty, but they didn't make a habit of it.

Arguments will continue to rage about the damage done to the trade, and about whether the ban really did any good, but of course there have been winners: the idea that every bar could become a restaurant always seemed a bit daft, but some operators have managed to make a main attraction out of food.

More impressive still, to my mind, are the traditional bars which have no intention of bringing in food in any big way - it's not the job they want to do - but which have instead got by through offering, say, quality cask ale, or a good selection of malt whiskies, but most particularly just by "being themselves".

The best publicans have often managed to retain their smoking regulars by being the same old indispensable social forum as always. A sort of "Dunkirk spirit" prevails between landlord and regulars: "the Government" can't be allowed to close the pub.

Of course it's also beyond dispute that some bars badly needed to be tackled; it was no longer acceptable to see clouds of smoke drifting over a bar area.

The most common comment now is that your clothes no longer stink after visiting or working in a bar, and of course the ban has meant many people with asthma or other respiratory problems have been able to visit pubs as never before.

But the ban was never about any of these individual benefits. It was always about choosing a high profile easy-mark target through which to exert a form of social control: no thought or consideration was given to any of the cogently-argued alternatives, and the trade was treated with ill-disguised contempt throughout what many declared was a sham consultation.

So far claims about any alleged health benefits of the ban have been sparse. One or two of the more bizarre attempts to talk it up have been laughed out of court. Bar staff are better off, which is great (although this could have been achieved with a partial ban) and children, where allowed in bars, aren't exposed to fumes.

But in the areas where most smoking happens - say, for example, Shettleston in Glasgow's East End, with something like 44% adult smokers - it's hard to see the point of the ban. Very often the local trad boozer has shut, and/or its customers have simply taken the anyway much cheaper option of going home with a carry-out.

The middle class world of licensed bistros inhabited by politicians is reassuringly squeaky clean; but even here we're told people don't visit as often, and don't stay as long.

Food sales help, particularly if they're inspiring quality wine sales, but it's a labour-intensive exercise relative to the benefits. Besides, substantial numbers of people still value the concept of "the pub" over the licensed café-bar: they don't want to sit and watch people eating - they want a "proper bar", not a restaurant.

But, two years on, surely the dust has settled and we can all get on with our lives?

Unfortunately, not quite. A year or so ago there were a couple of abortive attempts to ban smoking outside pubs - one argument being that customers entering or leaving bars were having to run the gauntlet of clouds of smoke billowing from refugee smo