Health Bill

I have added my name to Amendment No. 37 and I support the extremely sensible Amendment No. 38—I must admit that I had not spotted it until today—which surely the Government cannot possibly resist. As so many noble Lords have argued, please let us keep a sense of proportion. If tobacco smoke were as harmful as mustard gas or chlorine gas or even CS gas, then the Government would have a case for resisting Amendment No. 37 because everyone would be affected by such poisonous or extremely irritant gases, and, if they were exposed for long enough, would either die or be harmed when exposed to too great a concentration of CS gas. Tobacco smoke is quite different in that not everyone is affected by it. The unfortunate noble Viscount, Lord Simon, is an asthmatic who is extremely ultra sensitive to tobacco smoke, and one has to accept that there are a few such very unfortunate people. Some people are mildly affected and a lot of people are not affected at all. There are people who go on actively smoking into their 80s and 90s—and even later in the case of Madame Calment of Arles, who went on smoking until she was 116 and lived to 121—and they are not harmed. So it is random; some people are affected and some are not. Certainly I do not think it can be argued that people who are subjected to a little bit of smoke drifting in from outside can be harmed. We are told that carbon dioxide is a deadly poison, but it is not. It is only a deadly poison in concentrated proportions. Indeed, people suffering from hyperventilation are urged to inhale carbon dioxide to counterbalance the excessive oxygen in their bloodstream. Carbon monoxide is only a poison if there is absolutely no ventilation at all, and so on. So we are referring to two utterly different things when we talk about tobacco smoke and something which is really poisonous to everybody and anybody.