THE WINNER OF THE IMPOSSIBLE QUIZ!
We’re delighted to announce the winner of our fiendishly difficult general knowledge game, published in the Christmas edition of The Spectator. Our congratulations and a case of champagne is on its way to Geoffrey Telfer of West Yorkshire. The quiz answers can be read online at www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/ pubs giving up the ghost. And all of these reports came in long before the weather turned distinctly chilly. As I say, all you have to do is look at your local pub: is it busier than was the case a year ago? Or is it deserted? And the people who come in — do they stay as long as they used to?
Of course, one shouldn’t drop a policy simply because the pubs are having a rather hard time of it as a result. But in which case, don’t bother to pretend that they’re not, that actually there are queues all down the street consisting of shiny, happy people who wish nothing more than to drink in a new, healthy, smoke-free environment. Stop lying. Say, instead, that the smoke ban is putting pubs out of business but actually we couldn’t give a toss. Truth is, the government — and the health charities — are caught by their previous, gerrymandered poll findings which purported to suggest that the entire country was in favour of a complete ban on smoking eve rywhere, when — and again, do a quick vox pop if you doubt this — the reverse was true. People would like to see genuinely smokefree areas of restaurants and pubs, for sure — but only chose a complete ban on smoking when the alternative on the poll sheet was ‘or would you like your testicles sawn off?’.
Perhaps it is true, though, that because of the ban, I shall live for ever, for which many thanks, Dawn. But I doubt it; we will have recourse to one or another means of killing ourselves, such as driving a car (4,000 deaths per year), drinking more (40,000 deaths per year) or visiting a doctor (30,000 deaths per year through negligence or incompetence: never forget that figure. It exceeds the numbers killed through smoking-related illness. And it really, really hacks off the doctors).
In fact, life expectancy figures tend to refute the notion that there is a direct link between early death and smoking. Indeed, those countries with some of the highest life expectancies in the world (Austria, for example) also have the highest numbers of smokers (in Austria, more than double our own rate of smokers, at 50 per cent). If I were as fond of false correlations as the self-important twits working for charities such as ASH, I would ascribe a correlation between those two statistics — but of course, there isn’t one, unless it is simply the case that people who are not hounded by the authorities over their personal predilections tend to live longer than those who are.
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