A smoker's guide to Europe - and beyond (part two)
Tuesday April 8, 2008
Joe Jackson concludes his two-part smoker’s guide, reporting from Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Israel
I hadn’t been to Italy since it became the second country, after Ireland, to ban smoking, and I was prepared for the worst. But within an hour of arriving in Milan, I saw several people smoking in the supposedly strictly smoke-free Central Station, and was almost run over by a bus driver with a fag hanging out of his mouth.
Apparently you can bend the rules a bit, but not defy the law completely, since it’s enforced by the usual steep fines, threat of closure, encouragement to report illicit smoking to the authorities, etc etc.
The good news is that, like other southern European countries, Italy has an established outdoor eating and drinking culture.
So now, with the addition of more shelter and heaters, it has an outdoor smoking culture too, and for most of the year it’s very pleasant. In Milan even the cafes in the famous Galleria all allow smoking, and this is a building which, though it’s technically open to the elements, would certainly be nonsmoking in England. Too comfortable, you see.
Oh, and by the way: since the smoking ban, sales of cigarettes in Italy have gone up.
Paradise
The Alpine countries were the most smoke-friendly places on our trip. Switzerland has no smoking restrictions, except some voluntary ones here and there which are chosen according to the free market (imagine that)! The Zurich airport has half a dozen smoking lounges with shocking signs: SMOKERS WELCOME! Of course the antis are trying it on in Switzerland too – they’re trying everywhere.
Perhaps Switzerland’s unique political status (not an EU member and with a decentralised system of its own) is at least slowing them down.
Austria is still a smoker’s paradise. In Vienna – one of the world’s most beautiful and civilised cities – you can smoke everywhere, and there are wonderfully inviting tobacconists on practically every corner, too. We went to a lively pub/restaurant which brewed its own excellent beer, and although more than half the customers were smoking (cigars and pipes, too) the ventilation was good enough that the air wasn’t smoky at all. My bassist, who doesn’t like smoke, was amazed, but I can hardly blame him. One of the many facts persistently buried by the antis is that it really isn’t difficult, with existing technology, to make tobacco smoke in the air barely noticeable.
Antismokers don’t talk much about Austria, since, like Greece and Japan, it’s a very heavy-smoking nation which is also very healthy and long-lived.
It’s also a nation where antismoking hysteria isn’t really catching on. That doesn’t mean a smoking ban can’t happen, however. Ultimately, Austrian citizens, and even elected politicians, may well have no more choice in the matter than the Irish or Italians.
Hilarious
As a sort of postscript to Europe, this first leg of our tour finished up with our first visit to Israel.
I remembered that a friend of mine had gone to Tel Aviv a couple of years ago and declared it to be so smoker-friendly that when he went to a gym to work out, there was an ashtray next to the exercise bike.
Degenerates that we are, we found this hilarious.
Imagine my surprise on finding that Israel has had a smoking ban for a few months now. It seems to have caused more confusion than in any other country, though. For instance, one journalist told me that it’s barely enforced at all. You go into a bar, ask if it’s OK to smoke, and nine times out of ten you’re presented with an ashtray. But according to our concert promoter’s representative, the law is strictly enforced.
Banned
On our first night in Tel Aviv we played safe by drinking and smoking at an open-air bar on the beach.
The many bars lining the waterfront all seemed to have banned smoking inside – though I saw people smoking inside anyway.
After the second of our two shows, we were told by one local contact that she couldn’t find us anywhere to smoke, since it’s strictly forbidden; and by another, that it was no problem at all. We decided to follow the second contact and she did indeed lead us straight to a nice bar where everyone was smoking with gusto. We had a great time, but I left Israel with a disturbing thought nagging at me.
The thought was this: antismokers operate by spreading fear and intolerance. Sure, some of them are well-intentioned or simply ignorant. But the real engines driving their movement are utterly cynical.
The whole thing would fall apart if it were subjected to any real scrutiny by politicians and media. But in the meantime its very existence depends upon outrageous fearmongering, and on promoting intolerance towards smokers. And if there’s one country which doesn’t need any more fear or intolerance, it’s Israel. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Reasonable
We didn’t make it, on this trip, to the one European country that has actually come up with a reasonable and popular compromise: Spain. The Spanish ‘ban’ merely obliges places over a certain size to have separate smoking rooms, and lets smaller places decide for themselves.
We did, though, spend some time in Spain’s polar opposite: the country where our tour started, a country which has, in a remarkably short space of time, become the worst place in the world to be a smoker.
It’s a country whose ban has absolutely no exceptions or exemptions, where outside smoking is mostly uncomfortable or impossible, where antismoking propaganda does not let up for a minute and where ugly signage blares at you from every angle. A country where antismokers are so arrogant and empowered that restrictions are proliferating in outside areas and even starting to reach into peoples’ homes, and where, if you admit to being a smoker, you can lose your job or be refused medical treatment.
Spiteful
In short, there is one country which has taken the antismoking mandates of the big health lobbies and drug companies and interpreted and implemented them in the most severe and spiteful ways it can possibly come up with. That country is the UK.
Outside smoking shelters in the UK are forbidden by law to be more than 50 percent enclosed. As the campaigning group Freedom2Choose has pointed out: a farmer who keeps pigs is obliged by law to provide them with 95 percent shelter. So the 12 million or more tax-paying British citizens who smoke are officially, legally, worse than pigs.
Why should this be so? If anyone has any answers beyond a general ‘this country’s going to the dogs’ malaise, I’d be interested to hear them. Meanwhile I’m off to the world’s second-most antismoking country, the USA, which at least has a few exempted cigar bars and other loopholes. Wish me luck.
www.joejackson.com
Comments
Joyce (Wed Apr 9, 08:39 AM)
All the luck in the world, Joe!
How lovely it would be to organise a weekend in Vienna among people on this and the “Taking Liberties” blog where we smokers could eat, drink and enjoy each other’s interesting and tolerant company in comfort without being stared at as if we’re animals in a zoo.
Peter James (Wed Apr 9, 08:56 AM)
Excellent Joe! Keep it up, I think you raise some spirits on here.
Yes Joyce. You can count on me for a trip to Vienna.
Margot Johnson (Wed Apr 9, 10:31 AM)
Thanks Joe. Very good luck with the rest of your tour and the extra effort you make to send the truth back to us.
In the combined effort that our politicians are making to completely destroy the infrastructure of our country, so paving the way for Europe to take over and gobble up all our assets, they are also ruining our tourist industry. What incentive is there for a tourist to come here now into this litter strewn, inhospitable benighted country?
I have a day-dream scenario. A good fairy has appeared and waved her magic wand. We are suddenly back in the old days as a free independent country able to make our own laws. Our government looks at the rest of the world and realises that tobacco smokers have been targeted, exploited and demonised. It also realises that there are still millions of them seeking a nice place for their holidays.
It sees a niche in the market. It reduces excise duty on ordinary tobacco products by half, and modifies our own ban so that owners of businesses can choose whether they want to be smoking, non smoking, or part smoking. It also insists that all places used by the public must be as well ventilated as they are in Switzerland.
Result? Day tripper traffic to the continent would be reversed and happy shoppers would pour into England. Our hospitality industry would boom and proprietors would be able to afford superb welcoming accommodation. Unemployment statistics would dramatically reduce.
Ah well – back to grey reality!
timbone (Thu Apr 10, 12:07 AM)
“Why should this be so? If anyone has any answers beyond a general ‘this country’s going to the dogs’ malaise, I’d be interested to hear them”.
Mr Jackson, what you said provoked me to think on this. Maybe the severity and the hysteria being whipped up in the UK is not fundamentally about smoking, it is something else. A few years ago, before the SBE had become what it has turned out to be, my son said to me that our Country was not a happy place. He was referring to a disintegrating political climate, and the many organisations telling us how our Country was loosing it’s power as a nation, and all the problems we had. Possibly, if anything could be presented to us as being one of the many major causes of our demise, then politicians would become obsessed with it, people would respond, and it would become a channel, something to vent their anger on, something to blame, some temporary relief to their unhappiness and frustration, (which was not actually being caused by what they were attacking). Let me close with a comment from the main instigators of this cruel anti smoking propaganda, ASH. In a document about their activities, I believe it was Deborah Arnott who referred to their efforts to deal with the smoking problem. Those two words, smoking problem, made me feel very uncomfortable. We all know that historically another organisation used a similar phrase.
Col Dee (Thu Apr 10, 03:39 AM)
It’s an interesting question. I don’t pretend to have any one theory which I believe, but here are some ideas…
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1. In a time of political apathy, when the political elite seem totally untrustworthy, people will ally themselves with anything.
Groups like ASH promise a better, brighter future if Britain “goes smokefree”. People, desperate to believe that progress is possible and that THEY CAN PERSONALLY HELP to bring it about, jump on the bandwagon.
The three main parties don’t listen to the public so the public feel politically disenfranchised. Things like the smoking ban are an opportunity for Joe Bloggs to get political. And it’s totally safe because anyone who disagrees with “your politics” is a tobacco stooge.
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2. We are living longer and therefore diseases are coming to the fore which have hitherto been avoided because you died quicker.
The cumulative emotional effect of this is that people are aware, perhaps more than they have ever been, of how corruptible the human body is. That, combined with our modern belief that one can expect things to be getting constantly better (because of the technological march), leads people to question how we can avoid the illnesses besetting our old relatives. They see “health” in the same way as they see Windows or Super Mario: there MUST be ways to improve it.
There really is no way to do that. If you live longer, your “window of vulnerability” to diseases of the old is going to lengthen, too. Many of us WILL get dementia and cancer simply by virtue of living long enough to develop them.
But we need an answer. So we believe anything. Organic foods? Smokefree? Daily exercise hour? No alcohol?
People will agree to any sacrifices because, deep down, they know it will all be pointless and they WILL endure a lengthy purgatory in a care home before they die.
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3. In spite of the stereotype Brit’s love of independence and distrust of authority, we have long been a nation of book-keepers and filers.
That’s why Orwell’s Ministry of Truth “rings true” in the British mind – that idea of a building full of busybodies filing every little detail and changing things etc. Think also of the massive administrative task it would have been to run the British Empire. In all those outposts, embassies and offices, there would have been busybodies cataloguing everything. And today, we have armies of HR managers and diversity trainers doing essentially the same thing: serving an ideological cause by way of interfering with the minutae of the daily lives of everyone they are able to influence.
So something like a national smoking ban is an opportunity to provide these busybodies with many more things to do – more boxes to tick, more phonecalls to make, more clauses to reinforce, more fines to issue, etc.
Listen to Dawn Primarolo or Tessa Jowell and tell me she couldn’t fit right into any office in Britain, as the woman who makes sure every staple is bent at the right angles and every paperclip is in the little cardboard box, and nobody is exceeding their alotted daily maximum. People like this enjoy mundane rules because it makes them feel important – when everyone else is writing them off as “that busybody who desperately needs a shag”.
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4. As the ties between Westminster and Brussels get stronger and the EU’s involvement in British affairs intensifies, we increasingly see laws that are not forged by British politicians but by EU bureaucrats and EU “visionaries”.
For many people in Brussels, Britain may represent a triumph because Britain has resisted Europe for centuries. So, getting it roped into things like the smoking ban represents a “defeating” of England, and the English spirit of independence etc.
If you’re that way inclined then pushing for the smokefree mentality to be implemented more fiercely in Britain than in Europe could be tempting.
Of course it seems ridiculous at first glance to think that EU bureaucrats will be bothered by stuff that went on in Britain centuries ago. But then again, as the scope of a politician’s mandate broadens, so, it seems, does the scope of his interest in the political situation surrounding his remit – both spatially and temporally. Also, as his mandate broadens so does his interest in abstract ideas like empire, democracy, global economics, power-sharing etc. We never hear local councillors talking about “historic” changes and “1000 year reichs” etc. That stuff comes from politicians whose scope is huge – and the scope of EU bureaucrats is certainly huge.
So, in a way, it makes perfect sense that a centuries-old conflict between Britain and Europe would be in the minds of EU bureaucrats when they’re drafting UK legislation, or influencing those who do. Their remit is huge, so the political/historical environment they are aware of will be correspondingly broad. After all, these are people making historic changes to European politics – things like Britain’s age-old independence WILL piss them off.
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5. The worst possible scenario is that, as an extension of 4), Britain is being used as a sort of dress rehearsal for the politics of New Europe. Sure PC is everywhere but is it anywhere more rife than in Britain?
More practically, the EU are pushing for a Europe-wide smoking ban. Does anyone seriously believe that such a ban would be based on, say, the Spanish smoking ban instead of the British one? Of course not. These fascists are looking for CHANGE, definitive and certain. The Spanish smoking ban is flaccid; the British one is total. What we’ve seen in Britain in the last two years is CHANGE in capitals, and no mistake.
I suspect that the Europe ban, if and when it comes, will be as draconian as the British one. Perhaps identical.
As the nation who have proudly resisted state intervention and Europe for centuries, the British are perfect candidates to use as an example of how the State is, today, in charge. That’s why our ban had to be the worst.
Margot Johnson (Thu Apr 10, 07:00 AM)
Superb article, Col Dee. Thank you.
Joyce (Thu Apr 10, 08:31 AM)
Col Dee, I think you’re absolutely right that an EU imposed ban on the Continent would mirror the UK ban in terms of its comprehensiveness. For the ban to work in the UK, however, it had to be complied with by smokers. The resources weren’t there to enforce widespread non-compliance. I can’t imagine our continental cousins being so obedient. In the UK I think it has to do with an ingrained attitude to authority.