No smoke without pucker-faced puritan zealots

The last time I wrote about this pernicious new initiative, my opening line was, “I am an inveterate smoker”.

That is no longer true. I gave up three months ago.

But I’m determined not to become an ‘ex-smoker’, giddy with the zeal of the convert.

The day that this insane micromanagement of people’s lives arrives just got rather closer.

As I said at the time, this doesn’t really affect me personally. Not because I don’t smoke tobacco any more but because I never have anyone under 18 in my car. After all, I’m not an Asian cabbie, in a Labour heartland, am I?

I touched on many of the things that make this law impractical to enforce and in some cases illogical, so I wont rehash those.

What is odd, though, is that the driver of the car will be liable to be fined if a passenger sparks up in a car where there are children. As if the driver of the car hasn’t got more important things to concern themselves with, such as threading their vehicle safely through the fabric of mongs that make up the traffic.

When it comes to seatbelt laws, to take a reasonably analogous example, if an adult passenger fails to belt up, it is that person who is liable to be fined, not the driver. As far as children are concerned, it’s the driver of the car who is liable, unless the driver is not the guardian and the guardian is also in the car.

The reason, by the way, that I’m not going to turn into an ‘ex-smoker’ is that I now use an e-cigarette, and if you read the papers or blogs of Dick Puddlecote or Chris Snowdon, you’ll be well aware that the anti-smokers are now coming after the e-cigarettes, for reasons that can be no more clear than those summed up in the Daily Mash.

So, pucker-faced interfering puritan health Nazis can suck a uranium fuel rod.

AJ