Pro-choice: Daily Mail letter, 9 August 2010

The article on which Eddie was commenting is here. (The letter can be viewed here on a larger scale.) He challenges the description of Freedom to Choose (Scotland) as 'pro-smoking'. We neither advocate smoking nor condemn it, but we do oppose the anti-smoking movement, as its tactics have allowed people to vent their frustrations on smokers. We can see in the moves by NHS Grampian signs that institutionalised discrimination against people who smoke becomes acceptable in the eyes of authority.

When people are attacked as a group they need to be able to defend themselves as a group. There are parallels with South Africa and apartheid ... which developed into an extreme situation that led to routine and regular institutionalised violence against enemies of the system. Blacks were told that they were not single group, they were many groups: Xhosa, Zulu, etc, and progressively deprived of their participation rights: not only voting but they were excluded from many classes of labour, access to civic amenities and many other things.

In order to defend themselves they had to identify themselves as a group, as they did by developing the Black Consciousness movement among others.

Things have moved on since those days. If smokers are now told that discrimination against them is acceptable because they are not a protected group, this is when all society needs to pitch in, because it means that human rights is no longer a universal concept. It means that unless you are protected by race, gender or other protective laws you are fair game. Protecting people because of their gender, race or sexuality is understandable in view of the disadvantages that some of these groups have experienced in the past, provided it is done in the spirit that inspired the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Clearly the notion that you are 'not covered' under such a declaration makes a nonsense of the whole thing.

It is well known that 'pro-choice' actors in the field of smoking and lifestyle choice include lifelong non-smokers, including the originator of Freedom2Choose Robert Feal-Martinez and the present Chairman of The International Coalition Against Prohibition (TICAP), Bill Gibson. I hardly ever smoke myself!

Our movement includes smokers, non-smokers and 'vapers': users of e-cigarettes: in other words, people. And we are people who will not apologise for our choices.

PS I just found this account of smoking and employment law: any readers from across the pond might know whether it became unlawful to discriminate against employing smokers.

Update on NHS Grampian ban

The decision to ban smoking throughout NHS Grampian sites has been deferred for six months following concerns that it would not be enforceable, the BBC has announced. Freedom to Choose (Scotland)'s misgivings about the legality and enforceability of the measure have been vindicated.

Other health boards have acknowledged that there is no legal grounding to the ban. This article has come out today: the site manager of Ninewells Hospital in Dundee is quoted saying:

we can only ask them to respect our policy on smoking but if they say they don't respect it, and ask ‘What are you going to do about it?', then we have to walk away.

Furthermore yesterday another story came out yesterday from Cornwall with much the same message.

The Scottish Government has other ideas and asserts that NHS Grampian is acting within its powers. This implies that the smoking ban legislation has always been capable of being applied outdoors without further primary legislation. Yet NHS Grampian today decided that enforceability was too big a problem to force on its workforce and the Grampian public, at least until further discussions have taken place.

Last year the Scottish government held a consultation that was designed to engineer Scottish mental health services in a no-smoking direction. This would have had the result of removing the exemption that currently applies to smoking rooms in psychiatric units, but further questions were added in the mental health consultation asking respondents whether smoking should be banned outdoors too.

Meanwhile the NHS and Health Scotland have run a seminar on Health Improving Health Services – health services with a vengeance. Ridden with jargon about working together, it refers to 'the discussion of how we make hospitals exemplar centers for health and wellbeing'; 'asking for and valuing patient feedback', and finally 'clarifying, and then enforcing, our stance on issues such as smoking on hospital grounds'. Quite a confusion of objectives here. But the seminar does demonstrate that the effort to make hospitals smokeless zones is government-led.

The issue is simple. The NHS is there to deliver medical treatment to sick people. It employs people to treat patients and otherwise service the hospital. There seems no good reason to employ any of the staff as exemplars in public health. It makes no economic sense for staff to challenge visitors to the hospital for smoking, nor does it help anyone's health. Threatening disciplinary action against staff who possess tobacco and expecting them not to smoke in break-times on shifts that can extend to 12 hours marks an extraordinary departure from normal conditions of service.

Threatening to withdraw treatment from patients who smoke on a blanket basis, or depending whether they observe no-smoking requirements in hospital, is discriminatory treatment: not a decision made on clinical grounds.