Health Bill

My Lords, I declare my usual wholly non-financial interest as president of the Society for Individual Freedom and a supporter of FOREST, although, of course, neither of those offices affects what I am going to say in any way. The fact that I am also a light smoker may do so to some extent—although I would hope that, even if I were not a smoker, I would stand up for individual freedom in the same way that the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, has, and the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, will do shortly. When this Bill received its First Reading in another place, I suppose it was correctly titled. It contained many inconsistencies and illogicalities, and was illiberal in many respects—but then illiberalism is par for the course where much recent government legislation is concerned. However, the legislation that has emerged from the Commons can be better described as a health fascism Bill and a slap in the face for the Labour manifesto on which this Government set such store. It embodies a puritanical zealotry we have not seen in this country for 350 years. As the noble Lord, Lord Rees-Mogg, wrote in the Mailon Sunday on 19 February, under the headline, ““The week our freedom went up in smoke””,"““The House of Commons is full of busybodies . . . looking around eagerly for [any] . . . opportunity to bite into personal liberty . . . The ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces and workplaces . . . is an invasion of private freedom . . . [and] an abuse of the power of Parliament . . . They [MPs] use their free vote to take away our personal freedom””." It is interesting to know how many of those who voted to shackle traditional English freedoms represent Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish constituencies. We can all agree on one thing: when people’s eyes, ears or nostrils are irritated by other people’s habits, as so often happens, they normally have to suffer in silence through gritted teeth. So, if just one of those habits can be deemed not merely irritating but positively lethal to bystanders, it is only natural that the sufferers should take the opportunity to press for the habit in question to be heavily curtailed in their presence—however little truth there may be in the mortality claims. The operative words here are ““in their presence””. To a very large extent, this has already happened. For example, by 2004, smoking in the workplace for 92 per cent of the population was either banned or confined to segregated smoking rooms. Those who are especially sensitive to smoke, like the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, will surely concede that life is very much more agreeable for people like her now than it was even five years ago, let alone 25 years ago. As the general public is much more tolerant than the current House of Commons, only 31 per cent of people want a complete ban in public places. Five per cent want no restrictions and a majority is entirely happy with separate smoking and non-smoking rooms in pubs and suchlike. According to the Office for National Statistics—and who could be more impartial?—this contradicts the claim made by the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege. But as the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, has already hinted, the long-term and indeed the medium-term, aim of the zealots is to turn all smoking into a shameful, outcast activity, indulged in furtively by men at street corners with their coat collars turned up as if they were peddling hard drugs or pornography. In other words, it is a form of psychological warfare directed against smokers. No matter that most of the men who fought in the trenches of Flanders in the first world war were smokers and honourable men. No matter that most of the men who fought in the second world war across the north African desert, up the spine of Italy, on the beaches of Normandy and in the jungles of Burma were smokers and honourable men, as were those who fought in the Battle of Britain. No matter that Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, all enjoyed their pipes or tobacco, as the case may be, and lived to the ages—note this carefully—of 90, 84 and 79 respectively. No doubt their pleasures will soon be literally airbrushed out of history, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s perpetual cigarette holder has already been airbrushed out of history in the United States. Judging by what the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said, she would be quite happy if airbrushing took place in this country. The zealots hope to achieve their aim by claiming, which Professor Sir Richard Doll and Professor Sir Richard Peto never did, that second-hand smoke is so lethal that anyone entering a room, or indeed a company car, which the last smoker vacated possibly several hours previously is in mortal peril—indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, claimed that 600,000 people a year die from passive smoking, but that figure is larger than the total number of people who die in Britain every year from all causes. If that were the case, virtually none of us would be here today. Anyone born before, let us say, 1955 necessarily, whether they liked it or not—and most of us did not like it—spent their formative years wreathed in other people’s exhaled smoke, since, even if neither of their parents smoked, smoking in public places was ubiquitous. Yet our generation—or perhaps I should say ““generations””—have statistically lived much longer than anyone predicted, much to the dismay of annuity providers. Incidentally, have any death certificates listed passive smoking as a cause of death? I think not. Anyone who doubts the draconian nature of even the original Bill should scrutinise Clause 11 and Schedule 2. By comparison, Clause 13 is relatively mild—albeit wholly inconsistent. It is inconsistent because five and a quarter years ago, on 13 November 2000, the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich—I am sorry that he is no longer in his place—revealed to the House that non-smoking teenagers who indulged in anal intercourse were twice as likely statistically to die prematurely as teenagers who smoked up to 20 cigarettes per day but took no similar sexual risks. Your Lordships, including many on the Labour Benches, took notice of what he said and voted accordingly. However, new Labour, against the wishes and instincts of old Labour but with Liberal Democrat support, forced that measure through by using the Parliament Act. How odd, then, that a minimum age of 18 is being set for the less dangerous practice while retaining a minimum age of 16 for the more dangerous one. One recognises that the Bill has not reached this House as the Government originally intended, but that is largely the Government’s own fault, partly because some Ministers changed their mind at the last moment—indeed, some of them changed their mind several times in the course of a day—but partly because, as Terence Blacker pointed out in an excellent article in yesterday’s Independent, which I commend to your Lordships,"““government by anxiety has become a favoured New Labour method of dealing with its more intractable problems. At the first sign of sustained opposition to proposed legislation that would infringe civil liberties and free speech, for example, ministers spoke in apocalyptic yet general terms about security and the threat of terrorism. The right to life was the greatest human right of all became the mantra of the moment””." Of course, that applies to all sorts of things. It is implied that if Olympic pistol shooters are allowed to practise using .22 pistols in this country, the murder rate will shoot up, and if we were to leave the EU, there would be millions of unemployed and mass starvation, and so on. If you consistently frighten people into believing that their safety is in peril, it is bound to rebound on you as a government at some point. Let us hope that in this House we can at the very least restore the Bill so that it goes no further in eroding our freedoms than what was proposed in the Labour manifesto.