So much control

These days I quite often find myself reading things that seem quite absurd, but are occupying our politicians to determine what's best for this country. Several topics spring to mind.

Yesterday, for instance, I was reading about the plans for a partial smoking ban in the UK.

What's now being proposed is that there will be separate smokers' rooms in pubs, so that pub staff won't have to inhale smoke from their smoker patrons. So, I'm visualising lots of pubs having to put in partition walls and have heavy fire doors so that the rest of the pub's customers won't be put at risk from smoke leaking out of the room. Apart from changing the way a lot of historic pubs actually look, this would be quite an expensive process, and would no doubt lead to a further increase in the cost of drinking for the end consumer. In my mind's eye, you'll also have drinkers who are now no longer entitled to have their empty glasses collected for them, lest the staff of the pub inhale their smoke. Or, maybe pubs will start to specifically recruit staff who are smokers themselves and don't mind customers' smoke, in order to service these new specialist smokers' enclaves. Yes, I'm being a little facetious, but this is the way things are going. Why does this government need to legislate over everything?

My friend Giles once pointed out that although there's a high cost of treating smokers through the NHS, maybe the NHS wouldn't be able to keep going if Mr Brown wasn't taxing smokers so heavily. I don't know whether it's true, but it'd be an interesting idea to test.

I don't smoke but I'm also not some kind of anti-smoking Nazi. If people want to go to the pub, they have to accept that there may be smoking going on, just as there may be smoking on the street. The next thing will be to confine smoking to the home. If there really is such concern over passive smoking, wouldn't it be a good idea to offer licensees some kind of tax break for installing powerful extraction systems? That way everyone'd be happy. The government keeps taking its tax on cigarette sales, smokers aren't sent into a special room, non-smokers aren't bothered by the passive smoking. But actually all of this misses the point. It's the meddling mentality that bothers me most - I think people are quite capable of looking after themselves with regard to smoking, and the government shouldn't get involved. I feel the same way about fox hunting, another matter that I have no vested interest in.

If the powers that be are looking for something to spend their time on, why not sort out public toilets? There aren't enough of them, many are no-go areas for those of us who don't go cottaging, and most are in a horrifying state of piss-riddled disrepair. I'd also be very interested for something to be done about coffee shops where they don't offer toilet facilities. You can walk down Picadilly in London and go into shop after shop that's selling food and hot drinks, where you can eat in, and drink in (at great cost) and they somehow seem to avoid responsibility for providing toilet facilities. If anyone can explain the rules and regulations in this area, please add a comment to this post, because I'm really interested.