Column

Passive smoking is for passive people

Eric the Heretic is fuming at news that a council worker has won £15,000 from her employer in a passive smoking claim

There are few pleasures in life greater than the sight of the tobacco industry squirming. So why did the recent success of a trades union in getting an employer to cough up cash for an employee’s bronchitis caused by passive smoking leave a nasty taste in the mouth?

Because it was such a passive way to do it. The filthy smoking proles who caused the bronchitis have been made into villains by a trade union supposedly representing workers’ interests. The employers have been made to police their employees’ health, with full trade union encouragement. The tobacco industry, as it happens, loses nothing. Dumb citizens who smoke remain ‘free to choose’ in this game of delayed-action Russian roulette, egged on by endless and all-pervasive publicity, and nobody dares touch the industry that aims to kill them. But an assortment of health conscious bullies who act in the best interests of us all, no doubt, can create no smoking zones here, there and everywhere. Nobody dares touch them, either.

Somebody has to do something, it seems, as long as it is not me. I am too weak to stop my workmates from chain-smoking all around me, and I cannot find anywhere else to sit or work. Somebody must look after me, because I am a victim of people more powerful than me. Enter the strong state, the strong union, the strong boss. And the strong legal profession, of course, looking for victims to protect.

Talk about an external locus of control! What a way to promote a powerful populace, ready to rise against injustice and the evil scheming of the rich and powerful. Spurred on by the fine examples of active citizenship now emerging before us, sponsored by their unions, we can sue those who make our trains late or fail to flatten the kerbstones over which we trip. Our to-ing an fro-ing in the courts, and all the hot air and declamations of lawyers in silly wigs, must make a fine cabaret, a side-show for those who carry on pushing tobacco, grinding down public transport and squeezing local government. I bet they are grinning from ear to ear.