Last updated 13:16, Tuesday, 01 July 2008

It’s a year now since smokers were given their skulking orders. A whole 12 months since the demonising message – backed by heavy-handed law – was delivered, received and understood by a population which used to enjoy rights of life choices and nights out in the pub.

Cumbria County Council should be more concerned about fixing potholes than smokers

And so far as this Government is concerned anyway, the ban that did to entirely legal, duty-paying tobacco users, what nobody has yet dared to do to illegal groups of persistent offenders, cocaine or heroin users, has been a resounding success. It has made people who choose tobacco unwelcome anywhere but in their own homes. Mission accomplished.

They’ve been chased away, along with their once useful contributions to Treasury coffers, as unclean and unwanted; unlike coke and smack addicts – even those in prison for violence or thieving to fund their tolerated habits – who are freely offered publicly funded sympathy, counselling and fashionable, right-on detox treatments.

Fair dos all round. No grumbles from this quarter. Soft targets have always been a useful tool in the business of distraction politics. All politicians have always known that.

When they can’t deliver what they should deliver, they’ll serve up anything likely to appeal to the usual armchair lobby suspects of worthy vocals... smoking bans, wind farms, fortnightly bin collections, fox hunting bans, anything a bit trendy will do. It makes them look busy.

Soft target smokers played along – not that they had much option. They tend to be a sociable lot who, having been beaten into inevitable submission, now cower in their shelters and back gardens with cheerful resignation. At least they’re among friends. What’s done is done. What’s the use in complaining?

So, without complaint but in puzzled observation, this smoker now asks why Cumbria County Council found it so urgently necessary to leap onto a year-old bandwagon and crusade anew to cut further the number of people who smoke?

Times are hard in these depressingly credit crunched days. Why would a council want to add to its problems, financial burdens and unmet responsibilities – when it can’t even manage to fix the holes in its roads?

The council last week backed one of its own internal reports, calling for cigarette sales to be licensed in the same way as alcohol, which was bad enough. But in the manner of all distractions, that idea has now grown. Now eradicating poverty is on the agenda – based on the false impression that only poor people like cigarettes.

My word, how the remit of the county council has suddenly burgeoned. Positively Biblical, it is now. And with missionary zeal, councillors now fancy licensing all retailers to sell tobacco, so that business can be monitored under threat of permit revocation.

Their report, the Last Gasp, puts the case for strict controls which could in turn lead to a change in the law. Another one?

An interesting aside to the distractions that make a monkey of politics at all levels is that British taxpayers will this year contribute millions into a fund worth more than £200 million to subsidise southern European tobacco farmers hit by smoking bans.

Direct payments to the farmers were agreed by a vote in the European Parliament to maintain the aid. Chairman of the European Parliament Agriculture Committee, Neil Parish, wasn’t happy, of course.

“It beggars belief that while food prices are going through the roof, we are still directly funding tobacco farms around Europe. On the one hand the EU talks about cutting dependency on tobacco, then on the other it sanctions an extra three years of direct tobacco subsidies.”

To add to the bewilderment Mr Parish said that £30 million was being spent in the UK on tobacco awareness schemes and healthy living. By which he means demonising.

Ah yes... that’s politics, see? The nature of politics is to beggar belief. Otherwise it wouldn’t be politics, it would be common sense making best use of available public money.

Which brings us back to those councillors who aim to eradicate poverty. Nice idea guys – but bigger boys than you have tried and failed over the last several millennia. That’s one heck of a huge distraction.

But here’s a good start. Try trimming your expenses, stop complaining about your mileage allowances to attend unnecessary meetings – about smokers, for instance – pass the savings onto taxpayers, who will pay less in council tax, feel better off and according to your own reasoning, stop smoking!

Then you’ll be able to concentrate of fixing the holes in the road.