Another voice
Pop goes the weasel
Auberon Waugh
The Duke of Gloucester waited ten years before making his maiden speech in the House of Lords. Perhaps it has taken him that amount of time to think of anything to say. Perhaps he felt the country needed ten years to recover from the shock of his father's death. It may well be that the younger generation of Spectator readers has quite forgotten the old boy, described in his Times obituary of 11 June 1974 as 'a true descendent of George III'. But it was in the same year of evil memory — the last weeks of Edward Heath, two general elec- tions, two Labour victories — that the pre- sent Duke, then in his 30th year, became patron of an unpleasant and querulous organisation called ASH, Action on Smok- ing and Health.
Possibly the Duke felt he should wait until he was in his 40th year because we might not attach enough importance to the thoughts of a younger man. But as his remarks bear an uncanny resemblance to everything which has been pouring out of the ASH organisation all these years I fear we must ignore the noble lips and mature mind from which they come. We might even forget about the Duke for a moment and concentrate on the matter and timing of his first unhappy foray into public life.
Nearly every word he spoke, as I say, came from the literature of ASH, the organisation of anti-smoking fanatics. The Duke has allowed himself to be led by the beard, possibly thinking of that earlier Gloster who remarked: `Tis the times' plague when madmen lead the blind.' Our present Duke, unfortunately, seems to lack the same felicity of expression.
'I regret,' he said, 'that many schools regard examinations as more important than health education on how the body works and the effects of mistreating it.'
I wonder on what basis he makes that statement. My own impression, having educated four children, is that a large part of the education system is devoted to nothing else. It may not be true as I have read (or possibly written) that many educa- tion authorities have 'Reasons for Not Smoking' as a subject on the CSE Cur- riculum, but it is certainly true that every school in the country of which I have any knowledge devotes a whole course of lessons to the subject. Diseased lungs in plastic containers are passed round as regularly as collection plates in church. And the final result of all this anti-smoking pro- paganda is a generation of children with ex- traordinarily bad examination results who smoke like chimneys. Perhaps my own observation is not typical, but it seems to me that those who are now aged 15-20 smoke about ten times as much as those in the age group 21-26.
'The Government receives 3.7 per cent of its revenue from smoking,' said the Duke, reading, I imagine, straight from his ASH brief, 'but the National Health Service spends £170 million on treating smoking- induced diseases.'
He went on to produce the familiar and grotesquely random figure of 50 million working days lost through smoking, com- paring it with the much smaller figure lost through strikes. Never mind that strikes stop production while occasional illness of staff usually has no effect whatever. The most glaring suggestio falsi is contained in the apparently insignificant figure of 3.7 per cent of government revenue Avhen set against the huge figure of £170 million spent by the Health Service. In fact govern- ment revenue from tobacco tax is nearer £4,500 million. The government makes a huge profit from the smoking habit, and any arguments against it based on fiscal convenience are a gross and deliberate perversion of the truth.
The fact that ASH is prepared to wheel out fiscal considerations in support of its case reveals better than anything else that it is an organisation of fanatics. When it talks of 'premature' deaths through smoking maturity, presumably, being assessed on something like the average life expectancy in developed countries, which has increased from 65 to 73 since 1950 — it does not men- tion that there is no conceivable economic advantage, and considerable economic disadvantage, in prolonging life expectancy still further. Although there may be some
loss to the economy in pre-retirement deaths among that proportion of the workforce which is productively employed, it is more than offset by the gain to the economy in 'premature' post-retirement deaths and pre-retirement deaths in the parasitic sectors — coalmining, steel, ship- building, social services etc. So far as government health policy is concerned, we are left with a repudiation of the whole horrible and tragic phenomenon of death and a vague, Scargill-like feeling that the government should do something about it, even where people freely decide on a course of action which may shorten their lives. But there is a further argument for government action against smoking based on its anti-social aspects: that smokers cause a nuisance and create a health-hazard for non-smokers, too. It is for this reason that trains and buses have always set aside areas for non-smokers, and accommoda- tion has generally (if not always) been made in places of common resort for non- smokers to avoid the society of smokers, if they so wish. I confess, for my 0" part, that I generally prefer the companY of smokers, finding them more trustworthy and likeable, although I am also prepared to put up with the company of non-smokers if they are not too boring and do not smell too bad. All that has changed in recent years is that the anti-smoking fanatics have discovered how non-smokers are in the ma- jority. Quite suddenly, the right to smoke has lost all moral justification. Every busybody in the country feels he (or she) has been given the green light to ban smokers from any and every public area, and anyone subjected to momentary irrita- tion from someone else's tobacco smoke feels justified in demanding redress. MY own answer to this is that almost any form of social intercourse involves annoyance. People offend me by their stupidity, by their ugliness, by their smell, by the noises they make, and increasingly by the things they eat. Wherever I go people blow their microbes over me in foul-smelling gusts of air with pieces of hamburger and vinegar- flavoured crisps, egg sandwich (one of the worst) and Kit-Kat bars. I just smirk and cringe and agree with whatever banal obser- vations they have to make about the weather or John McEnroe. The only people whose susceptibilities are adequately catered for are those who object to tobacco. Yet the anti-smoking fanatics now feel they can conquer the world. Nothing else explains how a newspaper like the Standard dared ride roughshod over the very substan- tial minority of its readers who still smoke in demanding a London Transport ban. Nothing else explains why the Duke of Gloucester should now decide to offer us his weasel face as a pious figurehead for all the oppressive frenzies of ASH. His words, as I say, were not his own. He is only a sym bol. We will not be doing anything to stifle debate, merely responding to his own sym- bolic role, if we pelt him with eggs.
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