How to bring back smoking in pubs?

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Shant and a smokeAn article in the register the other day has given me an idea as to how one might bring back smoking in pubs without any need for a change in the law.

The article reports that an American bar has gone self service by use of RFID cards (contactless payment cards) and flow control pumps. So tap the pump with your card and it will let you dispense so much beer. Now sadly this won’t work for real ale but what I can’t help but wondering is this.

If no one is in the pub working because it’s entirely self service, then it’s not someone’s place of employment so surely they’d be nothing to stop people smoking there. The barrels etc. could be in a separate building so that wouldn’t be a problem, if the pub wanted to use it’s own cards then they could sell them and top them up in a separate building as well.

So the only person who’d ever need to work in the pub would be who ever cleans the place up, which would be done when it was shut and no one was smoking there, so again surely not a problem?

Of course the legislation does cover “all public places” which could be a snag but if it were a private club? It wouldn’t fall under the auspices of people working there, it’d be interesting to argue that you’re “seeking or receiving goods or services from the person or persons working there” as no one works there.

It would sadly be prohibitively expensive to test just how farcical this law is. I suspect ASH would probably claim that the 60 a day cleaner was still at risk of second hand smoke.

Of course it’s worth noting that:
“The appropriate national authority may make regulations providing for specified descriptions of premises, or specified areas of them, not to be smoke-free despite section 2.”
So under current laws it would actually be trivial to allow smoking in all sorts of places without any need to change anything at all.

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Danegeld and riots for all reasons

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So almost a week since the looting and huge swathes of forest has been sacrificed to discuss the cause of the unrest and more importantly who was to blame. I am of course going to add to the sound and fury being generated, mainly because some of the commentary has rather tickled my sense of the absurd.

One of the early “causes” of the looting proffered by the punditry, was that youth centres had been shut down and more people had said if the youth centres shut down they’d be trouble/riots/the end of civilisation as we know it. Now to me that seems rather like a protection racket at least as old as the Vikings.
“nice village you’ve got there, hand over the danegeld and it won’t get burnt down”
“nice shops you’ve got there, now how about some youth centres to make sure they don’t get looted”*
Now the closure of these vital youth centres without which apparently the youth turn into a rampaging mob was down to evil Tory cuts, despite the fact that government spending is still increasing. The thing I can’t help but wonder though is how many youth clubs, scout groups and who knows what else have shut down or reduced in scale due to the cost and hassle of the all pervasive CRB check? As many people have observed children used to entertain themselves, then health and safety came along so adults had to be invovled, then the CRB check came along and it became difficult for the adults to be involved. Community provision for the young no longer involves a few sticking plasters and a large amount of orange squash, but instead paying the government to make suitable provision – pricing it out of the range of many communities. The idea of people providing for themselves has been quite thoroughly drummed out of us.

Meanwhile the looting had something for everyone, helped by the rapid charging of large numbers of people including teachers, millionaires daughters, Olympic ambassadors and the whole gamut of society. Proving as previously observed that the take what you want attitude really is quite pervasive. Which means the pundits can blame the welfare state, the cuts to the welfare state, greedy bankers, greedy youth anyone. You want to blame a group they were there. Even amongst the communities responding to the looting you could pick and choose there were brave Sikhs, Turks defending temples and shops and “racist thugs” out looking for trouble. So they were about race but we mustn’t bring race into it**.

If that wasn’t enough to keep everyone happy it was also an underclass uprising ‘Showing the rich we do what we want’, the rich apparently being anyone with a business or job like 89 yeard old barbers. Ignoring the fact that even the worst off of them are better off than 90% of the planet so it was perhaps a mollycoddled mob. The police who days before were murderous thugs were now not going in hard enough, and people were calling for the army to be called in.

Sadly the collective blaming amusing as it in many ways is, has led to a typical statist reaction from almost(?) all quarters of the Government. The way to prevent these things recurring, isn’t for courts to give meaningful sentences that might restore the connection between action and consequence, instead we’re all to be punished – or at least those of us who care about obeying the law in the first place. face coverings may be banned, the Government wants to be able to shut down social networks when there’s unrest, and there are calls for the law to change retrospectively to remove looters benefits and of course the old favourite of re-introducing some form of national service. The fall out from these riots for all seasons are going to take some watching.

* Yes I know it’s not that simple, and that not all youth are like that or even all youth centres state funded etc.
** Why is it frowned upon to describe areas as “white working class” but not say “chinese”, “muslim” or “black”?

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A fish rots from the head

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Following on from The Snowolf‘s excellent article, the telegraph today also has an excellent piece comparing the self serving (though often strictly legal) behaviour at the top of society with the behaviour of the looters in the recent kerfuffle. Whilst those at the top may be found not guilty (often on technicalities and one suspects due to better lawyers) they are people expected to set a better example – and yet often get away with “having made a mistake” or “technical breach of the rules” and then just pay back the relevant sum – with no interest paid and no other penalty. So if we apply the same logic applied to MPs expenses to the looters as long as they didn’t cause damage but just stole stuff it’ll be fine as long as they return it right?

If our great and good set such poor examples, all across the political spectrum and beyond, why should we expect any better from any other part of society? Though one thing which may be a glimmer of light is the way communities have remembered themselves and gone out to protect and clean up their neighbourhoods not to mention numerous reports I’ve seen on facebook and in the Metro of people standing up to antisocial and thuggish behaviour in public and getting support either from the Police or those around then. This I suspect would have been unthinkable before the looting, but perhaps now we’ve been reminded that we are all responsible for maintaining the sort of society we want to live in. I’d hazard the suggestion that if our courts could remember this and apply serious sentences to those that committed wrong doing and didn’t penalise those trying to defend themselves or assist others then maybe things could well improve without the imposition of yet more laws to be randomly enforced.

update I must agree though with Samizdata that whilst the parallels with the politicians make sense, and some of the other celebrity “role models” also don’t help. Business people trying to keep what they’ve earned doesn’t really fit, and as a friend observed US style tax breaks for the rich to support charities really might not be a bad plan.

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