Blood on the smoking shelter floor

As pubs, bars and clubs start to put the shutters up with alarming regularity, Adam Edwards reveals the details of his one-man protest over the nanny-state antics of New Labour

It is a year now since I took up smoking. It was on 1 July 2007 when, for the first time in 20 years, I rolled a slug of Golden Virginia in a green Rizla paper and lit the splinter of tobacco outside the snug bar of my local.

I had no need for a drag, no craving for nicotine. In fact it made my head spin. But I lit up because I wanted to blow smoke in the face of the nanny state. My taking up of tobacco was my tiny protest at the spiteful legalisation introduced that first day of July, which banned smoking in public places.

It was enacted by New Labour driving through an all-encompassing law based on dubious "passive smoking" research with little thought given to the economic or social consequences. Any compromise was ab-sent. A year later the pavements outside our pubs and clubs are littered with butts and the Government is also the butt of an angry electorate.

"Gordon Brown's current troubles stem in part from the legislation," a spokesman for the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Smoke Tobacco (Forest) tells me. "We have received a host of emails and letters from Labour supporters who say they will never vote for the party again."

Those left-wingers are not alone in their fury at being dictated to by a bossy Government. The owners of pubs, clubs, bars and bingo halls are also bitter about the ban, as are many of their customers.

"Over 50 pubs are closing permanently every month," says Tony Jerome, senior marketing manager for the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra). "The smoking ban and the price of cheap supermarket drink are the main reasons for the closures."

Licensee Kevin Greenacre's takings at the Crown Inn at Gissing in Norfolk, for example, are down almost 20% since the legislation. And because the pub is a listed building the canvas smoking shelter he erected has been refused planning permission. Across country, at the fashionable Kings Head Inn at Bledington in Oxfordshire, the non-smoking owner Archie Orr-Ewing is equally annoyed about the legislation. It has, he says, taken away much of the atmosphere in his pub. "We've lost £20,000 in drink sales because of it. It's true we've gained about £20,000 on the food side, but the nature of the pub has changed."

There are dire predictions within the trade that many of the country's "wet" pubs won't survive. Last month, for example, John Price, the secretary of the Licensed Victuallers Association in Wales, told the Morning Advertiser: "I'll give us six months and you won't see many pubs left in the valleys at all."

Working men's clubs are suffering terribly too. More have closed in the last year than in any previous year, according to Ken Smythe general secretary of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union. "All clubs have suffered badly, but the ban has hit the working men's clubs particularly hard as they have proportionately more smokers," he says.

And yet surprisingly, the new law, despite the trade's almost universal dislike of it, has by and large not been flouted. Most licensees are abiding by the rules, though not all are sticking to the exact letter of the law.

Research manager for Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), Amanda Sandford says that over 90% of the public have complied. "We knew it would have some adverse economic effects," she says disingenuously, adding, with self-righteous satisfaction, "the bottom line is that people abide by it because it protects public health."

However, the law-abiding nature of licensees and their customers does not confirm the worth of the passive-smoking argument. Nor does obeying the law prove the Government needed such a draconian ban.

In fact, the sprouting of more and more comfortable and cosy smoking shelters proves the idiocy of the blanket ban. More importantly, a new campaign for separate smoking rooms (CSSR) was launched in April. It plans a nationwide campaign to try to revise the ban and allow smoking in properly ventilated, staff-free rooms in private clubs (it is thought pubs could turn rooms and outhouses into club rooms).

"We do not wish to reverse the smoking ban, but allow sensible revisions to be made to it," says Ranald Macdonald, managing director of the London-based Scottish restaurant group Boisdale and a spokesman for the CSSR.

"The Government said there would be a review of the ban three years after it was introduced," says Macdonald. "This would mean a review in the summer of 2010. Significantly, this could be the year of the next general election. We will be encouraging Labour MPs to deliver on their 2005 manifesto, which stated 'in membership clubs the members will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or be smoke free'."

Needless to say, I have already pledged my support. I have also continued smoking. Furthermore Imperial Tobacco, the owner of both Golden Virginia and Rizla papers says that the roll-your-own market is growing rapidly in the UK. It is cheering to know that while we may doff our caps to the law, we secretly remain a nation of Andy Capps.