Plain packaging kicked into the not very long grass?

I chanced on a tweet that sported this link, and the relevant paragraph is here, embedded in Amendments to the Children and Families Bill:

(1)   The Secretary of State may, if satisfied that doing so is in the interests of preventing harm to the health of children under the age of 18 or of promoting the health of children under the age of 18, make regulations specifying retail tobacco packaging requirements.

The relevant legislation, if this amendment is passed and the bill becomes law, will enable the Secretary of State to write up the regulations just like that. Another amendment to the Bill is to make it an offence to 'fail to prevent smoking in a private vehicle when children are present'.

It seems that there is something more than a little underhand to prepare for the legislation to be brought in without further parliamentary debate, as part of a bill that will be full of glowing language about how life is being made much better for children.

This is clearly the solution that junior health minister Anna Soubry was working to enable but I didn't expect to see it in writing quite so soon as this!

David Nuttall talks about his Bill to amend smoking ban

Link here to the blog of David Nuttall, whose Bill to amend the smoking ban will be heard tomorrow at Westminster.

Can we blame the smoking ban for pub closures?

Can we? Or is it the general decline of the licensed trade, supermarket prices and all those things that anti-smokers love to blame, forgetting how many recessions pubs have survived in the past?

Two recent papers are pointing firmly toward the smoking ban, pointing out that there have always been underlying problems but the sudden fall in demand in many establishments from their core customers has been an added shock that accounted for the great escalation in pub closures over the last three years.

Paper 1 Smoking Gun, is a research paper carried out by CR Consulting for the Save our Pubs and Clubs Campaign.
Paper 2 is a research paper by David Atherton of Freedom2Choose (UK) for the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Campaigners south of the border are still pushing hard for an amendment, on the basis of economic damage. Of course they are right, the damage to pubs, publicans and their families has been devastating. But even if I were proved wrong about the economic consequences, the ban itself is objectionable on so many other grounds that I would still be opposed to it.

Link to Taking Liberties for action on UK ban.

Edit: it seems that would-be reformers have an uphill task in their attempts to amend the ban.