Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said the change, expected to take effect in summer 2007, would "save thousands of people's lives".

Ministers gave a free vote amid fears Labour MPs could rebel against plans to exempt clubs and pubs not serving food.

The Commons decided by a margin of 328 to ban smoking from all pubs. It then voted by 200 to extend this to clubs.

x-ray
if your back's against the wall, turn around and write on it...

 Banned in private clubs as well.

 Bag of shite.  No one really sees the problem with allowing private member's clubs to smoke but it is just generally ignored as an issue.  Can't wait to see the Old Bill piling into the Royal British Legion to hand out some spot fines to some war veterans enjoying a fag and a pint of dark mild.

 Did I mention it's a bag of shite?  And if it reflects popular opinion, then popular opinion is a bag of shite, much like I'd always known, to be fair.

 I forgot momentarily that I don't post here anymore, because everyone here is a bag of shite.

Well, wonder of wonders, I agree with the sentiment if not the tone of herofix's comments. You shouldn't stay away, Andrew! It is only through dialogue and disagreement that we maintain our views or change them out of rational thinking. Who needs an echo chamber?

I spent many a year as an anti-smoking zealot but this was back in the day when I worked in a smoky nightclub, hacked myself to sleep afterward engulfed with smelly hair around my face all night long. Yech! I kept an ashtray in my home with the first of the Surgeon General's warning engraved on the surface. I lectured ad nauseum to smoking friends. But little by little, as smoking was curtailed, I started to think enough is enough already!

The first changes came about when the cigarette ads were removed from TV. Then the warnings on the packages. Then the movie theaters banned smoking and included the announcement as the lights went out. This was good as it was always a drag to look for the people who didn't seem to be smokers before grabbing your seat only to have them light up as the movie began. The no-smoking sections of restaurants were good though not perfect for a non-smoker. Non smoking sections of airplanes was never so hot because a plane's cubic footage was too small to keep the smoke isolated with the nicotine fiends. So I was well pleased when domestic flghts became all non-smoking. That should have been the end of it though.  But no...

Forcing bar and nightclub OWNERS to ban smoking was a liberty issue and seemed over the top to me at least in a country like the US and A!  When they were banned from just about every place in Los Angeles, from the beaches, to parks to shopping malls and the outside Hollywood Bowl, I really thought it was, to borrow a leftist throwaway line, soooooooooo fascist! ; )

This new UK ban only reinforces my belief that most of the incursions on personal freedom and civil liberties have come from the left of center and not from the likes of Bush, Ashcroft, or Gonzalez-types.  That is where the desire to control is really running rampant out of their desire to force us all to live HEALTHY lives until such a point as you decide you want to have a doctor assist your suicide and that's alright too.  

Worshipping at the Altar of Eternal Health will still find you in a grave at day's end even if your end comes 5 or 6 years later than a non-smoker.  All things being equal.  Which they're not.  

It is not within the legal purview of the government to curtail the rights of law abiding citizens to partake of a legal product. If they are sincere in their belief that cigarettes are so dangerous they should be banned, they should outlaw nicotine as an honest indicator of their concerns for the health and welfare of a nation's citizenry. Kinda like heroin or cocaine are illegal.

I'm only serious. Geez, for people who like to argue what is within international LAW and what isn't, it's hard to fathom the ready acceptance of such an intrusion.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

I just typed out an entire reply and somehow accidentally closed my browser!  Bag of shite!

 This gist was that I'm at least glad the whole process, which had a weary air of inevitability, is over now so I can just forget about the issue since it winds me up.  Accept that I am a pariah, and hopefully some sort of speakeasy culture for fellow pariahs will develop. 

P.S. The reason I don't post on here anymore is because I have ended up doing the 'Culture Wars' row over on another messageboard and it is way too much on just one, never mind trying to keep it up on two.

 I don't really think you're all a bag of shite, just the vast majority of you.

Uppity twit!

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Take a look at this one!!!!

The new Calabasas secondhand smoke ordinance, which would prohibit smoking in all public areas of the city including parks, sidewalks and outdoor businesses, will take effect by the middle of March, city officials said.

Final passage of the ordinance is expected at the city council’s Feb. 15 meeting.

At its Feb. 1 meeting the council outlined certain exceptions to the law.

Officials from the Los Angeles County Department of Health, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, Healthier Solutions, Inc., Smoke-Free Air for Everyone and the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Los Angeles expressed strong support for the new law. Of the 17 public speakers at the meeting, all but one supported the ordinance.

Last month, California became the first state to declare second-hand tobacco smoke a toxic air pollutant.

“. . .The California Air Resources Board, which is the agency which regulates air quality in California, has adopted a regulation to treat secondhand smoke as a toxic pollutant of the air, like the kinds of things that come out of petroleum smoke stacks and out of the tailpipes of cars,” said Michael Colantuono, Calabasas city attorney. “That decision is the first time a state regulatory agency of any state in the nation has reached that conclusion.

The city council agreed to allow smoking in the following areas:

•Private residential property, other than housing used as a childcare or health care facility when employees, children or patients are present

•Up to 20 percent of guest rooms in any hotel or motel

•Designated smoking “outposts” in shopping mall common areas that are at least five feet away from any doorway or opening that leads to an enclosed area.

“I think the reason that (city) staff recommended a relatively small number (of outposts) in this instance is because (the city is) going to be dealing with a variety of commercial property: some large, some small, some that are big rectangles, some that have odder shapes,” Colantuono said. “We wanted to have the ability to have at least one designated space on each commercial property that meets the requirements. The feeling was that if you don’t provide an outlet, then people would simply defy the ordinance.”

The city said it would relax the ban at times when non-smokers aren’t present in a public area.

Business owners will be responsible for ensuring that all employees and patrons comply with the new law.

Individual citizens can report offenders to the city and officials will determine how to handle fines on a case-by-case basis, said Tony Coroalles, Calabasas city manager.

To view the second-hand smoke ordinance, visit www.cityofcalabasas.com.

---

I'm not a smoker and don't really like to smell second-hand smoke (can make me feel sick at times). BUT I find all of these prohibitions against smokers extremely wrong. Granted, I understand the reasons for doing this but I think that we've really gone to an extreme when we start banning smoking in "public areas" outside and a ban of smoking in restaurants (if that restaurant already has a smoking/no-smoking section).  

Jordan .

Danwhy knows Calabasas! I think he took a tour of that town one night. Calabasas is Spanish for pumpkin so each October they hold the redundantly titled Calabasas Pumpkin Festival.

Anyway, I LOVE Calabasas which is about 5 miles north of us. It's an old town by SoCal standards and the "downtown" section has several original early 19th century buildings, ancient oak trees and even some of the wooden sidewalks. Downtown features the Motion Picture and Television Country Home and Hospital which is a wonderful facility where aging actors can live. Johnny Weissmuller lived there and although I'm not sure it's true, it was said that he'd wander the hallways doing his Tarzan call. The hallways of the main bulding are lined with classic B&W movie photos of stars from the old days. It's very un-hospital in feeling. Out back there are individual cottages -- the senior housing -- that resemble a movie set. There's even a teeny old fashioned small town chapel. Charming!

Across the street is the Sagebrush Cantina, a mostly outdoor hangout-restaurant-bar with live music. On Sundays, it's filled with motorcyclists who ride through the canyons to and from the beach. In the warm months there is always a wait for the outside tables. They specialize in large pitchers of margaritas and Mexican food.

Next door to the Cantina is the Leonis Adobe ranch house -- which belonged to one of the founding families of Calabasas. It's set up like a museum with the original furnishing, the well, the barn and many of the same types of domestic animals including a long horn steer, horses, goats, chickens and the like.  

In the evening hours, you will always hear bullfrogs croaking on the edges of the creek that winds through the town.

Once you leave the downtown section, you have a nice shopping area with a movie theater that features the Annual Method Fest -- a film festival focused on actors performances above all else. There's a nice upscale everything in the center -- ice cream store, clothing stores, book store, jewelry store, market and restaurants.

All around this area are business complexes. But when you go up in the hills you have beaucoup houses -- almost all of them built within the past 10 years. It's close enough to LA but you still feel the wide open spaces around you so it's become a popular place to settle down for those who don't want to deal with city traffic, parking problems and crowds.

Wow. It seems like I work for the Calabasas Chamber of Commerce, doesn't it? I wouldn't want to live there but I do shop and dine there. It will be interesting to watch the smoking ban in action. Can't imagine it will cause too much strife actually. Just observing the demographics it seems to be mostly young upscale families with little kids. Since everyone in the Los Angeles area wants to live forever, I'm sure most have already tossed their ciggies, especially in happy Calabasas.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

It's a bit beside the point now, since it is all over and done with, bar the actual opressive nannying tactics they choose to emply to enforce this crock of shite, but here you go anyways. 

It's official: 'Second-hand smoke kills' is the new 'We all agree Iraq has WMD'

Passive thinking is fatal By Tim Luckhurst

"AS MPS CHOOSE today between partial or total bans on smoking in public places they must ask themselves whether lying to promote a cause is ever legitimate. The question is urgent because the claim that secondary smoking kills is alchemy, not science, and honest anti-smoking lobbyists know it. The theory that cigarette smoke kills non-smokers was dreamt up 30 years ago by anti-smoking activists; only after inventing it did they attempt to prove it. Dozens of peer-reviewed scientific studies have followed. All point to a compelling consensus that there is no causal link between passive smoking and fatal illness. One of the most comprehensive studies was published in the British Medical Journal in 2003. It concluded: “The results do not support a causal relationship between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality.” That was unsurprising. The International Agency for Research on Cancer notes that of 23 scientific studies into the effects of workplace exposure to second-hand smoke only one found a statistically significant risk for lung cancer. One in 23 is what objective science calls an anomaly. Even the research director of Action on Smoking and Health admits: “A lot of the studies that have been done on passive smoking produce results that are not statistically significant according to conventional analysis.” In plain English that means there is no convincing evidence that secondary smoking kills. That is why anti-smokers have resorted to asserting that secondary smoke is responsible for problems such as asthma and bronchitis instead of fatal diseases. It is why they claim that “there is no safe level of environmental tobacco smoke” instead of trying to enumerate a death toll from a syndrome that does not exist. In 2003 the BMJ’s editor confessed that the debate about secondary smoking is “more remarkable for its passion than its precision”. Sir Richard Doll, the scientist who proved the link between smoking and lung cancer, said: “The effect of other people smoking in my presence is so small it does not worry me.” It should not worry MPs either. Parliament should assert the primacy of facts. Disliking cigarette smoke is reasonable, but pretending that secondary smoking kills means abandoning science for quarter-truths and irrational sanctimony."   ---------------------------------------------------------

The smoking ban takes effect in Colorado in the summer, too.  I won't miss it at all.  I'm a social smoker, but only because I figure I'm inhaling the stuff in the bar, anyway. 

If only they could somehow ban Kentucky Fried Chicken...

 I like the cut of your jib sir. Bag 'o' shite indeed.

smoke Parliament!!, Mr Neff your bang on there, Guy Fawks failed us

Speaking of which....Did you know there is going to be a exception to the total smoking ban in the UK? Guess where? Parts of the Houses of Commons, double standard anyone?!?

Please check this link to see my love/hate of smoking up close and personal....

http://www.2000revue.com/community/topic.cfm?topicid=406&page=5 post 104,

http://www.2000revue.com/community/topic.cfm?topicid=406&page=4 post 94.

Right I'm gonna have a smoke now in the comfort of my own home, while I still can.

 Man, don't encourage my revolutionary fantasies.  I'm on the brink!

I used to smoke Parliaments too.  Maybe for a year or so.  I really thought that recessed filter was groovy.

 As an update to the situation here: all indications from personal observation and media coverage indicate that compliance was immediate and total, and continues to be.  My one observance of non-compliance was at a Morrissey gig in Dundee which sent the security staff into a tizzy of scurrying around like headless chickens when they noticed it, at which point the non-compliant person having taken 4 or 5 drags put it out before she could be identified and chucked out.  There was a comment made by Moz at the Aberdeen gig which gave me an idea though.  'I suppose you'll all be going to a crack house after this - you look the type' he quipped.  Now, that's not a bad idea.  Then I was watching The Bill last night about an underground bare-knuckle fight taking place in abandoned warehouses.  Surely in these places I could bring a couple of bottles and smoke in peace in a sociable setting?  I even thought of a witty response to being offered the crack pipe.  'No thanks, I'm just here for the craic.'  All I need now is to move in less salubrious circles so I know where to go.

June 30 this year smoking in all pubs and clubs in Australia prohibited out right. You haven't been able to smoke in a resturant in Australia since I can remember, probably about 20 years.