Don’t do it, Hewitt

John Dodd on the ignorance, humbug and dodgy statistics behind the drive to ban smoking in pubs If this increasingly intolerant government resembles anything from history, it is the American administration of 1920 which ushered in Prohibition at the behest and the pounding of the teetotal zealots. How else could such a ludicrous proposal as a ban on smoking in pubs, the retreat of its most diehard voters, ever end up on a Labour manifesto and, even worse, pass into law?

The oft-repeated mantra of the Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt is that 54 people — ‘from the hospitality industry, John’ die every year from the effects of passive smoking and, in all, 617 die from secondhand smoke in ‘the workplace’.

It is more than interesting that these figures should have arrived in Britain just before the election. Previously, anti-smoking campaigners preferred to say that a ‘weight’ or ‘mass’ of evidence existed to connect passive smoking with deaths from lung cancer, heart disease and strokes. All that changed when a Professor Konrad Jamrozik, of the University of Queensland and formerly of Imperial College, released his study claiming that 617 Britons died every year from passive smoking in the workplace, 54 of them in the 1.1 million-strong (his figures) ‘hospitality’ industry.

Now I don’t want to challenge Professor Jamrozik’s maths, but I have been able to ascertain that more than 610,000 people die every year in Britain and that in 2003, the last on record, it was 612,000. According to my long division, and Michelle the barmaid’s pocket calculator, 617 divided into 612,000 is about — and this, remember, is a claim, nothing in detailed actuality — one in a thousand. So one death in every thousand might — just might — be attributable to passive smoking at work.

And then if you divide 612,000 by 54, the number of barmaids and the rest popping their beer aprons, you arrive at a figure of one in 11,333. So the Department of Health’s new cause célèbre — ‘we have a duty, Jim, to protect the health of bar staff’ — is roughly one for every 20,400 people who work in the ‘hospitality’ industry. Am I showing my age, or my callous indifference, or perhaps both, in saying that I struggle to cope with caring for one in every 11,333 or 20,400 people?

And for those Blairite Labour people who don’t go into such awful places as public bars these days, here’s what happens in my local. June, the landlady, smokes; as do Jackie, the chief barmaid, Matt the chef, Kirsty the kitchen helper, Michelle the weekend barmaid, Colin who comes in midweek, Den the potman, Jonathan the washer-up, Trish, our local traffic warden, who comes in part-time and Katy, just back from ‘uni’.

The truth about pub bar staff is that they are nothing like the innocent nicotine victims the government would have us pretend they are. People work in pubs because they like the association of drink, smoke and conviviality. So, absurdly, the government is going to protect the health of my local’s staff from non-smokers like me.

That, of course, is almost by the way. Professor Jamrozik and his figures are much more interesting. Professor Jamrozik is what’s known as an epidemiologist, professor of evidence-based healthcare. ‘Evidencebased’, as far as I can tell, means he has never met anyone who’s actually ill or at death’s door but scans and meticulously dissects everyone else’s research and then extrapolates possibilities or more from the enmeshed glue of the statistics.

Even forgetting what Disraeli said about lies, damned lies and statistics, epidemiology is a fairly new science about which a lot of other scientists have reservations. But what the professor does do at the end is acknowledge that data which helped him was from no less a body than Ash, Action on Smoking and Health. Professor Jamrozik makes no bones about the fact that he is a ferocious anti-smoker, someone, indeed, who has been known to heckle pro-smoking speakers at public meetings.

For years, people like me who believe in funny old-fashioned virtues like live and let live, give and take or, in other words, tolerating other people’s habits had waited for Ash or anyone else to put a figure on exact ly how harmful passive smoking is, so perhaps the professor was doing us a favour.

Yet there at the bottom of his analysis is the acknowledgment that his report was commissioned by 33 London boroughs campaigning for a smoke-free London. So hiring Professor Jamrozik was perhaps like getting Al Capone to produce an impartial paper on bootlegging. Am I alone in believing that there really was a stitch-up planned by Millbank, co-ordinated in the Labour town halls, via Ash, deliberately to let Professor Jamrozik produce a report that would coincide with the Labour party manifesto planning and at last provide ministers with suitable soundbite numbers of 617 and 54?

And why is it that the most comprehensive passive-smoking study of all — that in California by Enstrom and Kabat, which covers 35,000 non-smokers married to smokers and lasted more than 39 years — is now sneered at by almost the entire anti-smoking industry? It was published in 1998 and found that there was no ‘causal’ link between passive smoking and resulting deaths. Poor Enstrom and Kabat. After 38 years, when their findings were clearly going the wrong way for their anti-smoking donors, they completely lost their funding. In order to complete their research during their very last year they had to turn to that great Satan of American commerce, the tobacco industry. Lifelong non-smokers themselves, they were the first victims in a campaign which isn’t really a campaign at all, but a religious crusade that brooks no argument or dissent, where having separate bars for smokers and non-smokers isn’t good enough and where thousands of British pubs closing down doesn’t matter a jot.

Anti-smokers may point out that the 54 represent passive deaths. But there were 559 passengers killed in car and taxi accidents last year. Sitting in a car passenger seat is a passive activity, too, but not even New Labour proposes legislation to prevent people getting lifts in cars.

One hopes that, should he become leader, David Cameron will realise that the Health Improvement and Protection Bill is not a relatively unimportant issue that, anyway, merely brings us into line with Europe and the Celts and Irish of these isles. Rather it is something that goes to the very essence of what England, at least, is supposed to be about: tolerance, common sense, fair play, even a rather dull, phlegmatic even-handedness, plus an inborn desire to blow raspberries at anything that sounds like gobbledygook.

He must take the Tories into resolute and irreverent opposition to all of it. The first thing they must do is to start laughing at Labour ministers, to ridicule them in public and finally, if faced by Patricia Hewitt and her damned lies and statistics, let Fatty Soames take his trousers down and moon at her.

John Dodd is a former chairman of the Save Our Country Pubs Campaign.