One cigarette will push a bar over clean air limits, and ventilation can decrease that impact but another cigarette will redouble it. Your argument is pretty similar to someone saying “there should be a law requiring unicorns to wear corks on the end of their horns!” — sure, conceptually it’d be lovely to allow smoking as long as the air stayed clean, but that’s physically impossible. What is the point in legislating for physically impossible contingencies?

Seriously, you’ve just dodged the question: if I smuggled a load of cigarettes into your bar, say in my coat pocket, and lit them all, thus rendering your air filthy, is it right that you would be liable for any damages I cause in doing so solely because I am on your property? What if I stabbed someone? What if I slipped rohypnol into someone’s drink? Nobody would ever dare open a bar under those conditions! Nobody would even open a shop. Whatever minor short-term damage a smoking ban does to business, rendering the owners liable for patrons’ actions will put them out of business much, much more effectively.

I say that the landlord has a duty to stop his own emissions polluting the bar, and any emissions produced by the patrons are their own responsibility and they should be punished for it. Not least because they’re more likely to follow the rules if they are punished instead of publicans.

Smoking bans are being justified on grounds of public health. Second hand smoke is considered a health hazard to non smokers. Fine.What if it were possible to prevent the smoke from ever reaching a non smoker?Wouldn`t that,from a public health perspective, be acceptable? As it stands right now, people can`t even make the attempt.

And creating laws based on ease of enforcement may sound lazy, but it gets better results and it saves massive, massive amounts of money. That money can pay for hospitals and schools and police and all kinds of wonderful things. Government is about priorities, not ideals.

And frankly your conspiracy theory about smokers is as laughable as your punctuation, and in any case irrelevant. Whatever the government thinks about smokers has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the ban is justified.

Any time a new law is introduced that prohibits
previously accepted behavior, violence can sometimes result. I remember when seatbelts and motorcycle helmets were first made mandatory. Most people were pissed off by the law, many ignored it and there were a few cases where people became violent when charged with the new offence.The current ban has produced similar effects.A bouncer was recently shot and killed for kicking some smokers outside and a deaf man in Wales was severely beaten for smoking in a bus shelter.
Some people, when they don`t get their way,turn violent.Worrying about the behavior, of the idiotic fringe when crafting laws, strikes me as a poor way to do things.

Similarily, creating laws based on ease of enforcement, as apposed to acertainment of
specific goals, strikes me as short sighted and downright lazy.If easy enforcement is desired, I would expect all cars to be equiped with a breathalizer and a governer.This would stop all drinking and driving and most speeding. No one , however, seems to be in favour of this.

Finally( and on this point I assume we`ll never agree) I don`t believe that clean air is the goal. It seems to me that smokers are being relentlessly hounded, in a slow and delibrate manner,in the hope that smoking will become so socially unacceptable,and, logisticly
impossible, that people will eventually just give up the habit. If , however, clean air truly is the goal, I don`t believe smoking bans achieve said goal.The company that I work for, gets steel plated and galvenized, and aluminum powder coated. The places that supply these services for us do not allow smoking yet still have the most vile air you can imagine. Smoking bans do nothing for these types of workplaces.

What about the local air quality immediately around that person — that’s going to be high above the limit, no matter where you set it.

What about the sheer simplicity of enforcing a smoking ban compared to the nigh-on impossibility of enforcing a clean air standard in any kind of a reasonable timeframe?

Clean air is the goal, yes, but you can achieve that goal with a smoking ban and achieve it much faster and more easily. That’s why we need a smoking ban even though clean-air guidelines already exist. You just can’t enforce them on this kind of scale.

The guest house thing is an interesting point: when you, say, take an object to a till in a shop they can refuse to sell it to you quite legally. That is their right. But discrimination law says they can’t refuse on certain grounds — arguably forcing them to sell their own property against their, albeit stupid, wishes. There’s an interesting and difficult moral question over whether it’s acceptable to force such principles upon people who might genuinely think than homosexuality is wrong and their guesthouse would be better off without it.

I agree that if you’re charging people for something you have a moral duty to do so in a fair way (even if this does mean charging different amounts for different people, say for insurance), but (having never considered this question until now) I don’t think that it’s always right to make this a legal obligation. (Honestly, I think if a company decided not to trade with homosexuals, the market would bankrupt that company in a matter of weeks.) I think it definitely should be a legal problem, though, if you advertise at all: if there’s a sign saying “Food, Real Ale, Sky Sports” and when you get there you discover that you can’t use it because you’re gay or don’t smoke or something, then that’s at best false advertising. Also I think that sometimes you have to bend strict absolutist morality for the greater good, and society still hasn’t reached the point where discrimination rules can be safely done away with (although we’re far better at it than, say, the Yanks).

Luckily, though, in real life the people who hate all gays are, almost by definition, morons, and as such they try to argue that any attempt to stop them refusing service based upon sexuality is discrimination (usually religious), thus signalling their support for discrimination rules and therefore undermining their whole case. Which amuses me greatly.

The other big problem with the guesthouse exemption case is that virtually all businesses are private property. If you exempt one you have to exempt them all, and a rule from which everyone is exempt would seem slightly pointless. They should have simply argued against the rule as a whole. Then they might have had a point.

As far as I’m concerned, though, in real life the trump card against this argument is the employees: their rights are paramount because they don’t have the option of leaving.

This, however, can not be said for one of my collegues. I arrvied five minutes before my shift was due to start, and she immediately put me on the bar because she “hadn’t had a fag in over an hour”. Poor girl.