Welsh Labour wants to ban smoking - everywhere...

Early morning raids of homes in the Rhondda Valley, the local gaols filled to the last cell with mothers and innocent grandmothers, and an ever-present MI5 spying on teenagers going to school in the morning, this is Wales under Labour. Well, not yet, you might say, but soon if the Labour Government under Carwin Jones is getting its way. Why? Because it wants to make smoking illegal. No, not what you think: to ban smoking in restaurants and pubs, but to make it illegal everywhere, even in your own home. 

A spokesman of the Welsh Government tried to calm the nerves today, saying ‘we do not currently have the [legislative] powers to make smoking illegal’. But as and when they do, Carwin Jones will turn Wales into what he and the Welsh Labour Party always wanted it to be: a country where people are arrested on a whim and a rumour for having had the audacity to indulge in the personal preference to light up a ciggie. 

It is probably here that I should declare an interest, or a ‘non’-interest, to be more precise. I do not smoke, and I have never been a fan of any sort of tobacco based products. But count on it: if the Labour Government will outlaw smoking in Wales, I will take it up. 

I am more than happy to go to jail to protect the liberties of ordinary people across Wales against the vicious anti-libertarian instincts of this Labour government. A government that has, incidentally, failed to bring investment to Wales, is failing the Welsh NHS with rocketing waiting times and imminent hospital closures, but wants to crack down on the few pleasures some of its citizens still have. Do they have nothing else to do in Cardiff Bay than to think about how to make the lives of their citizens more miserable by the day? 

Well, as I said, if the Labour Government goes ahead with its proposals to ban smoking everywhere: see you in Cardiff Prison! 

Individual versus collective responsibilities in health

The British Medical Association has recently proposed to ban smoking in cars. The reasoning behind this proposal is that toxic fumes reach a higher concentration in cars than anywhere else because of the confined space. This may harm children who might travel in the same car.

There has been plenty of debate on this subject since and I will add another sound of outrage or anger. Instead I would like to mention a curious anomaly that often seems to be overlooked in public health debates.

Our health system is tax funded and it is often argued that this injects an element of mutual solidarity or social responsibility into society. In effect, we fund the outcomes of other people's actions that may lead to situations where they either harm themselves or others. Still, there is widespread consensus that this is part of a minimal reciprocal commitment to strangers with whom we live together in this country.

What is interesting to note however is that the main thrust of harm prevention programmes targets activities that are rooted not in social responsibility, but individual responsibility. Public health prevention aims to reduce risky behaviour of individuals, not of societies as a whole. In other words, the impetus of prevention is rooted in an acknowledgement that conduct emerges from individual decisions, which in turn may only be curbed through individual behavioural change.

Where does this lead the reciprocal commitment that is manifested in the foundations of our health system? Does this mean there is a clash of moral principles that animate preventive programmes and those that lie at the heart of our health care system?