tim's experiment

Let me say at the outset that the campaign to discourage smoking has been hailed as the greatest public health success of the last half century. It has improved many lives. Unfortunately it also attracts more than its fair share of busybodies who enjoy tampering with other people’s pleasures. And in the strong consciousness of their own righteousness these people can sometimes be less than honest.

Those of us who have been around for a while can remember when the campaign for non-smoking areas was presented as a defence of the minority who — in those days — did not smoke and did not wish to inhabit smoke-filled rooms. This was a fair request which many smokers supported. But once it could be claimed that non-smokers were a majority, the concern for minority rights evaporated. Even suggesting that people who wished to smoke were making a choice to which they had a right, and should be able to pursue without unreasonable inconvenience, became sacrilege. And so we have now reached the stage where the habit is banned almost everywhere indoors, and in a good many places outdoors as well.  Restrictions are more and more aimed not to protect non-smokers but to persecute smokers.

This brings me to the latest complaint, coming soon to an op ed page near you, which is that pubs, finding that customers who smoke have to do so on the pavement outside, have taken to providing the odd table and chair for them. This is not condemned as a threat to anyone’s health, which it isn’t. It is attacked as causing obstruction to the pavement, and involving an unlawful extension of the pub’s operating area. Now it may be that there are people out there who have for many years battled against the endemic obstructions on Hong Kong’s pavements. Goodness knows there are enough of them: bus stops, street signs, queueing enclosures, overflows from shops of various kinds, PCCW junction boxes, post boxes, litter bins … the list is endless. If such a person emerges and complains about pubs putting chairs on the pavement he should be listened to with respect. If, on the other hand, the person complaining has never shown the slightest prior interest in pavement obstruction, then we can safely conclude that the complainer is a hypocrite who is using obstruction as a convenient stick with which to continue the persecution of smokers.

It is, I know, depressing to see huddles of smokers round doorways or the outsides of pubs. But it is not their fault that they gather there. They gather there because they are not allowed to smoke anywhere else. This has no doubt contributed to smoking becoming rather a rare habit in Hong Kong. Anti-smoking fanatics now need to get their heads round an unfamiliar idea: enough is enough.