The government are considering banning smoking in cars when children are present. Encouragingly it passed a vote yesterday, and the news today is saying that it could be law before 2015.
This sounds like great news to me, but it has been interesting to hear some of the arguments made by those who oppose the introduction of this new legislation.
It'll be hard to enforce
This is undeniably true, but then, does the fact that a law is hard to enforce necessarily make it a bad law? Surely, there are lots of laws already on the statute books which are hard to enforce but which we all agree are appropriate to have. Doesn't the whole fall-out from the Savile scandal tell us that certain offences are hard to deal with for all sorts of reasons, but we still need clear laws about what is or is not acceptable behaviour. In an analogy related to cars, I think that there is a pretty clear consensus that making it illegal to travel in a car without a seat belt on was a very good idea. Given that there are millions of car journeys every day in the UK, it would clearly be very hard to enforce this law effectively, but the fact that we have had it for a generation now means that the vast majority of people comply with it, and it doesn't need a whole lot of enforcing. Hopefully a law about smoking in a car with children will also result in a change in behaviour in the same way, and it'll become socially unacceptable to light up when there are children in the car.
What about civil liberties?
This is a tricky one, as we start to get close to the whole "nanny state" debate. We could argue that smoking should be make illegal on the basis that it has been clearly shown to be harmful to health, or on the basis that we all, as a country, pick up a pretty enormous tab in terms of health service costs to deal with the consequences of smoking. But then shouldn't all sorts of other harmful activities (unhealthy eating, boxing ...) be made illegal as well. So, let's not go there and let's accept an individual's right to smoke if they wish to. But freedoms have to be balanced against responsibilities, and whilst we may wish to give people the freedom to smoke if they wish, smokers should also have a responsibility to minimise harm done to others as a result of their own harmful activity. Scientific study has shown undoubtedly that second-hand smoking is harmful, and that the concentration of smoke in the confined space of a car (irrespective of whether windows are open) makes passengers at an even greater risk. Surely in the vast majority of cases when smokers are in a car with children, aren't they most likely to be their own children? And wouldn't we expect parents to do everything they can to avoid any harm coming to their children.
Why stop at cars?
The nay-sayers suggest that perhaps this is the thin end of a wedge, or that the proposed law seems peculiar because it singles out car travel, rather than other situations when smokers may be in an enclosed space with children. Well, so what? If we can agree that there is a benefit to stopping smoking in cars when children are present, then shouldn't it be seen as a positive step in the right direction. Just because it deals with one bad situation without dealing with others shouldn't distract from the fact that there is an opportunity here to deal with one bad situation. And that should be seen as a good thing.
So, roll on the introduction of the new law.