Reactions to the smoking ban at a working men’s club
I pressed the buzzer on the wall of the darkened doorway of the Custom House Working Men’s Club in east London. It wasn’t clear whether the shabby building was open for business or not. I pressed again and waited.
In the early 1970s there were over 4,000 working men’s clubs in Britain. Today that number has halved to about 2,000. Recent hikes in the cost of gaming and drinking licences and loss of custom owing to the comparative cheapness of supermarket beer means that many of those that remain are struggling to make ends meet. Kevin Smyth, general secretary of the Club and Institutes Union, estimates that ‘a further 200 could have their fingers prised off the ledge’ as a direct consequence of the smoking ban. Anecdotal evidence indicates that takings have already fallen dramatically in some clubs. ‘It’s too early to tell at the moment how it’s going to go,’ says Mr Smyth, ‘but I certainly am worried about the future.’
The lack of a welcoming electric light in the doorway made me wonder whether the Custom House Working Men’s Club had folded already. After a while, however, the door opened revealing a young barman smoking a cigarette. ‘Can I come in?’ I said. ‘I’ve come to see how you’re all coping with the smoking ban.’ The barman shrugged and walked away.
Inside the club, Tammy Wynette was making her heartfelt plea for ladies everywhere to stand by their man. In one half of the room about 30 people were playing bingo. In the other half the tables and chairs were deserted. But the double fire doors on this side of the room were propped open and in the dark and narrow alley outside an elderly couple were seated at a makeshift table, smoking. A notice on one of the open doors warned against walking up and down the alley ‘as no manhole covers’. I took my pint out and asked this couple what they thought of the smoking ban.
Keith answered with a question of his own. ‘What did your grandfather fight for in the war?’ he said. ‘Freedom? Democracy? And what have we done with it?’ And did he know, I said, that the first modern nationwide smoking ban was imposed by the Nazis? It applied in every German university, post office, Nazi party office and military hospital. Major anti-smoking campaigns were a regular feature of the Third Reich until Hitler shot himself in the bunker, immediately after which his staff gratefully lit up. It didn’t surprise him, said Keith. And now we’re going down the same road of state-enforced behaviour modification. ‘We’ve even had freedom of speech taken away from us,’ he said dejectedly. ‘Here, have one of mine.’
Keith was retired, though from what he didn’t like to say. He showed me a tiny novelty tin ashtray on an extendable chain attached to one of the buttons of his braces. (His wife proudly showed the same.) They live in Barking, he said. Since 1 July a so-called street warden has been patrolling Barking High Street issuing an on-the-spot £80 fine to anyone he sees dropping a dog-end on the pavement. ‘The place is knee f—ing deep in take-away cartons and this black man is walking up and down slapping fines on old age pensioners for chucking away cigarette butts! It’s a f—ing liberty,’ he said, the emphasis heavily on the swear-word.
The alley suddenly filled with cheerful, chatty, swearing, smoke-breathing women high on bingo. They were on a fag break between cards. So many of us were now crammed in the dingy alley, the last few to arrive had to barge their way in and one of these accidentally kicked my pint over. Lighter flames flared in the darkness. Could I detect a comically conspiratorial undertow, as if word had quickly got round that there was a bloke on the premises that no one had seen before asking questions about the smoking ban and so they’d better do things by the book until he left? A quick survey revealed that these dedicated bingo-playing smokers thought, like Keith, that the smoking ban was ‘a right f—ing liberty.’
When they’d finished their fags and gone back inside for the next eyes down, Keith said, ‘You won’t catch me sitting out here in winter, oh no. I look at it this way. In here ten quid gets me four drinks. At the supermarket ten quid gets me ten cans that I can drink at home in the warm. No contest really, is it?’ ‘Not when you put it like that,’ I agreed.
But is the smoking ban yet another infringement of our personal liberty? Well actually not according to that great apostle of English liberty John Stuart Mill. His clarion call for the freedom of the individual, the influential essay On Liberty (1859), was Mill’s response to what he saw as a creeping ‘tyranny of the majority’ in the wake of the widening franchise. This tyranny, claimed Mill, was as oppressive to the individual as naked despotism. It ‘dictates its will by means of popular opinion; presumes to tell men what to read and think, how to dress and behave ...it is fatal, in short, to the individual’. Mill’s subsequently celebrated fundamental libertarian principle was that ‘the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection’. It could well be argued, therefore, that Mill would have been in favour of legislation to ban smoking in public enclosed places such as working men’s clubs on the grounds that non-smokers ought to be protected from the danger of passive smoking. Moreover, if addiction to nicotine is a kind of self-imposed servitude, then Mill’s secondary principle, that ‘freedom cannot require that [the person] be free to be un-free’, would also come into play. So by a sheer accident, a lucky fluke, the philosophes of the new (Labour) Enlightenment have managed to add, for once, to our rapidly dwindling store personal liberty — by John Stuart Mill’s fastidious lights, at any rate.
The first working men’s clubs were set up in 1862, three years after Mill’s essay was published, by a philanthropic teetotal former Unitarian minister called Henry Solly. Curious, isn’t it, how working men’s clubs, and those principles of English liberty so carefully and cogently articulated by Mill, have risen together and are now falling headlong together towards extinction, as though the two are somehow connected. Individual liberty! Working men’s clubs! How quaint these will seem to future students of British political history. How quaint they must seem already to those who say they know what’s best for us.
On the other side of the room the ladies’ heads were bent once more over their bingo cards and the priestly caller was intoning numbers softly, liturgically, through a microphone. ‘Thanks. I’m off now,’ I said to the young barman as I went by. ‘Thank f— for that,’ said the cheeky blighter.
