I do know one explicitly no smoking pub – I can’t remember the name, but it’s in the City of London, near Bank – you can spot it quite easily, it’s the one with a bunch of smokers hanging around outside the doors.

Another possibility is licensing smoking pubs/restaurants etc. Just as councils are allowed to limit the number of premises selling alcohol, they could limit the number of smoking pubs. I’m not sure that the market alone will produce many non-smoking pubs, just as the mass of television stations, newspapers, films and even political parties all tend towards serving a prime demographic, so do, from my personal experience and anecdotal evidence of city centre drinking, pubs. As a result of market-led business choice I’d expect to see a few expensive non-smoking bars. A licensing scheme might allow democracy (debated rational decisions) to balance up the market (which is far more open to manipulation by powerful interests than debate, and most certainly is not the same thing as democracy).

One possible solution on the job side would be for the government to permit anyone who quit a ‘smoking-environment’ job (having first asked their employer to move them to a non-smoking job) to claim dole as if they’d been laid off rather than having resigned; and to refuse to count ‘smoking-environment’ jobs as ones that people are obliged to take rather than claiming the dole.

This would force wages up for smoking jobs, and would leave people with a genuine choice between a living-but-minimum wage and a higher-but-riskier wage – exactly as we do for jobs in the army, the police, Iraq, etc.

But apart from that, we’ve got the problem of persuasion. To argue that we can’t be persuaded is to deny the possibility of science, democracy, or any other ideology based on empirical rationality. But we are persuaded by more than overt arguments (and even in these the persuaders on the side of a choice which is, beyond all doubt, bad for those who they persuade to take up that choice deploy a far greater arsenal of means and methods than their opponents), but also the more subtle arguments of our built (or unbuilt) environment, the availability of different leisure, culture and work opportunites, our economic arrangements and so on. By preventing smoking in public places we will do a little to level up these persuasive forces.

It is, as racism has demonstrated, not enough to simply level up the respective positions ‘from now onwards’, banning new smoking adverts, unless we take into account the long history of smoking in our society and culture, as something adult, something cool, something to calm, something to do when drinking, and so on. How to we combat these? How do people concerned about public health challenge the weight of smoking’s infiltration into our culture?

Yes, at the end, it must remain an individual choice. But that does not mean that I, and the government, should not take a strong role in trying to persuade people otherwise. At the extreme of individual choice we have suicide, and I am all for public heath interventions to decrease suicide, by altering the built environment to remove opportunity, by offering health resources to mitigate mental health problems, and to produce a culture and society that produces less suicidal persoanlities.